Moon Over Brendle by Jeff Noon
I would like to thank Angry Robots for an advance copy of this book in exchange for a fair and honest review
Publisher – Angry Robot
Published – Out Now
Price – £9:99 paperback £6.43 ebook
The Dust tells the story…
1968, Lancashire: It is Joe Sutter’s last summer before going to secondary school. His world is like ours but beyond and beside what we know is Greot; a vast swirling rainbow of many-coloured dust. It settles on the dead, it swathes cities and fields. Joe is one of the few who have the gift of always being able to see it. But no one knows what Greot is. Is it the trillion-eyed god? The history of everything told grain-by-grain? Prophecy? The magic of creativity?
Joe can’t know; all he wants to do is draw comics and listen to music. Then one day, after climbing up to the ancient tower on Brendle hill, he meets an old writer of pulp SF books who is determined to pass on the power and joy of telling stories. And everything changes.
Decades later Joe is a successful SF novelist, and the time has come to tell his story, not only of how he became a writer but also how the secrets of the dust were revealed to him, one grain at a time.
You have probably seen the old joke that reading is the thoughts of another person turned into ink blots on a page on puled wood which a reader uses to make images in their mind. The act of storytelling if you read book blogs I suspect you will agree with me is a kind of magic. The practise of creating stories is dramatically….less so? Watching an author in a room (or sometimes coffee shop) use a pen, typewriter or laptop to create words for hours is well not giving us the whole picture. But reading Moon Over Brendle by Jeff Noon was a transformative experience of learning to see the magic of the world, understand the power of stories and its definitely one of my reads of the year to date.
Joe Sutter has been writing science fiction novels for a long time but now in their latest work Moon Over Brendle he s is going to tell the story of what started his life as a writer. The strange events of 1969 when 11- year-old Joe met two incredibly strange and compelling figures who changed his life forever, which in a world already with the magic of the strange force that is an ever-moving multi-coloured dust known as Greot makes life suddenly seem even more incredible, heart-breaking and complex than Joe ever expected.
Firstly, Noon beautifully creates a small Northern community in the 1960s and while I’m more a child of the 1980s I very much recognise the times this book comes from. A pre-digital age where families had rooms in the house for special occasion, tended to share generations in houses, comics and magazines were as much the culture as all watching the same TV shows and the wider world is hard to reach. The world is beautiful textured and then into this Noon weaves Greot. A strange force that has been around as long as people. It is not a secret it’s a well-known fact that one even Newton and others worked on. It is for most people invisible but those who can see it like Joe and his grandmother are sometimes able to use it for visions. I really liked this subtle changing of the world and Noon carefully explains the differences in the worlds but makes it all feel very organic and leads neatly into the main story.
Older Joe is our narrator while young Joe is our main character and there is a impressive way the writing puts us in the young child’s worldview rather than simply an adult looking back most of the time but with the occasional foreshadowing. Joe is very recognisable. A kid with their own friendship group, typical topics, games and at the start of the novel very much that’s all he sees beyond Greot at work. For him the biggest joy is making up superhero comic panels with his best friend Denny. But Denny has found a young girl Eileen to talk to and that throws Joe’s world out of balance. The reader may recognise these scenes of oncoming adolescence painfully well but it’s the first sign that life is changing around Joe fast.
All of which sounds fairly normal but then the strangeness starts to creep in. Denny and Joe see Greot settling on the body of a homeless man they knew, an unusual strand of Gerot catches Joe’s attention and then he follows it into the house of a strange man wearing a sinister face mask. Joe finds out this man is Mr Holbrook a writer of many stories and many names and with his young assistant Margery they are working in the town. Mr Holbrook sees Greot too but also seems fascinated with Joe, and so Joe receives a series of tasks for an unknown purpose that change how Joe will see the world and potentially Greot forever.
Tbis is often a refreshingly small but no less impactful story. Greot is not some force to battle or one that changes the world instantly. Instead, what we have is a stranger series of events that each more importantly change Joe and hint at bigger changes to come for the world. What I think works beautifully is how Noon allows the reader to glimpse the world as a writer does and the power of creation. For me Greot is very key to this – a force most people can’t see (unless usually at 3am every morning) but those who can have tended for centuries been mystics and oracles to divine the future of the world. That Holbrook is an author as well makes us see a connection between the original world of the storyteller to its more commercial counterpart but still making us the audience see the world as it really is underneath the ordinary veneer that for many is all it is.
The tasks that Joe are set then feed into this. They are all built around finding and telling a story moving away from the simple good versus evil of superheroes and bad guys most children tell into stranger worlds and events. Noon makes these interludes tease, puzzling and finally offers the solutions and while Joe is still very much an 11-year-old they help show how a writer starts to learn structure and importantly learn to use and develop an idea to create a very different effect. A simple tale of a magician’s assistant becomes something much darker in just a few pages and its one of those stories you know you’d wish to read. While this goes on though Joe notes changes in Greot and links it to stories that he is learning from his family that sometimes Greot is known to copy people, objects and sometimes even creates its own forms. Mr Holbroook’s tasks with Joe get connected more and more to this and there is a beautiful session where Joe has to learn to write purely out of the dust of Greot itself. It is an astonishing piece of writing where Noon allows us to feel the power of someone learning their first true story as an art of creation akin to casting a spell. Magic mixed with thinking creating something special as it pulls all the threads of his life to date together.
The writing in this is gorgeous and the finale where we see what happened next to our host of characters is a sweeping and beautiful trip through decades including the changes to families and relationships and yet pulls everything back to these moments in 1968 that started that journey. The power of the writing (by Joe or perhaps Jeff!) to be so bittersweet, capture aging, love and loss is done in just a few pages is a delight of a read on its own but the story to bring us to this point makes it a fine coda and farewell to this world we have visited..
This was a stunning read that for me that is a love letter to the power and act of creating stories but also eloquently explores growing up. Learning that adults are not gods and that you can be more than you ever thought you could be. Storytellers are important to the wider world as they show us what we cannot see ourselves and this is perhaps the first story I’ve read to really make the reader feel that power and effort themselves. I very strongly recommend this!
