Channel Skin [Kindle Edition]

"THE BLISS MACHINE LIVES ON."

CHANNEL SK1N. By JEFF NOON 2012

I've waited ten long years for this...

When my preview copy arrived in my inbox this very Monday I was inundated with messages of jealousy and congratulations. You must be so excited. You must be so happy.
You must be on cloud nine...

Nope...what I felt was trepidation and not a little fear.

We all have heroes, be they musical, artistic or sporting.
We have all felt that momentary doubt...is this a fight, an album, a book too much?
Ten long years have passed since I last held a Noon book in my hands.
Was this a bout too far?
To reach the heights you once set...to meet expectations is one thing.
To smash them is another.

Rest easy dear reader...the wait has been worth it.

Let me first say, this review will contain only the barest of plot information. I have never been a fan of spoilers. What you get will be just enough.
Here we are more interested in the style and the quality of this work.

Please...read on...

The KLEIN-ZECKER BROADCASTING signal is being wheeled out in your area soon. Utilising Fractal Wave Technology it promises to bring you an experience like never before....

Noon, like all artists of any worth, has always reinvented himself with every new work. Like Bowie he has worn many masks. The core remains but the delivery system mutates and changes.
First we had the Cyber-punk drug laced hyper reality of VURT et al...then we entered the dub-remixing period (Wordplay at it's most fluid and exciting) this was followed by the criminally underrated FALLING OUT OF CARS.
Then we had silence.
What lies within these electronic pages is the culmination of what Falling out of Cars only hinted at.

It is only a matter of months since I sat with the good man himself. Coffee was consumed. Cake may have been eaten. Outside, the weather treated us to a downpour worthy of our shared Manchester heritage.
What I found was a man reinvigorated. Alive. Excited by the future.
A man enamoured by the complexities of script writing.

I mention this because this love is pertinent to CHANNEL SK1N.

This is Noon's fourth face...a new phase and at it's heart lies the lessons learnt from ten years of trimming and re-writing. As he explained, sometimes less is more.

Let the words do the talking.

Here then is a new style. Noticeably Noon and yet stripped and clean like never before. Hardly a single word is superfluous.
What is left paints the pictures you expect.
The surreal imagery you demand.

Nola Blue is a Music Star. A sensation. An icon in a thoroughly modern world. Come with us and follow her tale.
Her transformation...

All fiction of worth is simply an explanation of a character's ultimate transformation. Be it mental, emotional or in some cases physical.
With Noon it has often been all three.
Here again, we follow the steady and inescapable progress of change.
From Beetle's fate in Vurt to the slow dissolution of Falling out of Cars, change and morphication bleed through his back catalogue like colours from a feather.

It's all here. Falling apart. Futures not yet dreamed. Imagery so sharp it will cut your mind. Hints and clues to a universe wider than the one you currently inhabit.
A cheeky nod or two to the past.
(Hobart Projections anyone?)

With Noon novels I have a well worn routine:
Read once for the experience.
Twice for the story.
Three times for the simple joy of words.

CHANNEL SK1N delivered all three in one sitting.

We can not leave without mentioning the superb and unsettling artwork by Curtis Leon Fee. Drafted in to provide covers for all of Jeff's eBooks he provides a thematic template for all Ten books.

Yes reader...TEN books...seems like we won't have such a long wait this time...

Welcome back Mr Noon.
We missed you.

There's been a ten year hiatus since Jeff Noon's previous novel. And Noon, always on the cutting edge of the interface of literature and technology, seems to have been revivified by the digital revolution in literature (see his "Microspores" on his own blog), so that "Channel Skin" is available only on Kindle. And it is indeed a book about technologies, media, delivery systems and data flow. "We have flooded ourselves with the media in all its many forms. Our minds are now open to signals. We have become aerials".

The book is swathed in genius, wonderful linguistic and imagistic set-pieces, yet doesn't quite hold together in a satisfying whole. Its world is a media saturated one, where pop singing sensations are created by George Gold, a Simon Cowell figure, but have a very limited shelf-life and live hopelessly isolated lives to protect them from the public's insatiable demand to paw at them. But Gold himself has lost his flesh and blood daughter to the most popular reality show of the day, "The Pleasure Dome", a sort of Spandau Prison in which its sole prisoner alternates between shucking the toxic inheritance of her father and trying to reach out towards him, through the public prism of 24-hour TV surveillance. Every thought is broadcast and contestants rarely emerge with their sanity intact.

One of Gold's superannuated creations Nola Blue, develops a condition whereby her skin displays every televisual output as if it were a channel hopping screen itself. She develops an imagistic symbiosis with Gold's daughter Melissa. She shows her broadcasts from within "The Pleasure Dome", but she also channels her. There is a wonderful scene with the bereft George Gold when Nola alternates between herself and projecting the missing Melissa. But the strange thing is that although the novel ostensibly has Nola as its main character, Melissa is far more interesting, while Nola remains far more nebulous. Nola does much random travelling with no clear purpose in mind, which I found a bit frustrating. It seemed a part of the plotting that was underdeveloped.

But then Noon takes your breath away with the audacity of his creative and linguistic capabilities. "Words were written there (her forearm), blood words. They dripped red but could not be touched. George tried to: he put his fingers into the blood, feeling it to be dry, an image alone. It was the broadcast of a wound". Also the other two Noon novels I've read both have rather trite 'girl died/gone missing, search for that lost love' plots. I'm happy to report the two key relationships here are much fuller and more maturely handled; that of father-daughter with the Golds and also the Svengali to his acolyte with Gold and Nola. And then there's the fascinating relationship between Nola and Melissa who of course never meet in the flesh, yet resonate off one another's mental wavelengths.

Ultimately one's experience of the book will come down to the reader's expectations and demands for plot. Nola as I say wanders around to not much effect, except when she passes through interactions of interest.. Then she almost fades out like the white dot on old televisions when you switched them off. The engrossment comes from the language, the imagery and the envisioning of our media saturated society. For me that was enticing enough, but it may not be to everyone's taste. For fans of "Videodrome", "The Illustrated Man", "Channel Skin" represents a twenty-first century updating of these visions, while it perhaps has most in common with the subplot of Jonathan Lethem's "Chronic City" in which one half of a celebrity couple is stuck in outer space, being broadcast on a round the clock reality TV show as they creep towards inevitable death. On balance, I prefer the Lethem, but this is still definitely worth the read.

Jeff Noon's Channel SK1N posits an oddly believable future, one that's heavily rooted in our own media-saturated present. The author's first new novel for a decade, SK1N is a stylish post-modern gospel, depicting the transcendence of celebrities into something even more ubiquitous.

The concept (and creation) of celebrity is one of the underlying assumptions in SK1N. Manufactured icons battle for their fifteen minutes on the top of the social standings (which are carefully measured and audited). Blandly attractive talent is recruited, trained and blurred to the point where they all become interchangeable, commercial pap; each star flaring up and then fading into its successor.

The center of the noise - or at least the focal point - is the ultimate reality show: the Pleasure Dome. The Dome holds a single person (carefully selected from a host of competitors). That person - or prisoner - then lives in total isolation, with their every thought amplified and reflected in the surface of the Dome itself. They're not just living in their own head - they're broadcasting it. As a result, the Dome has fans (cults, even) ranging from the analytical to the shamanic, looking for meaning in the Dome's every flickering move.

In Channel SK1N, the Dome's resident is Melissa Gold. She's a frustrated young artist and, after three weeks, one of the Dome's longest inhabitants. People have survived the Dome, but none have ever left completely sane. Given the length of her stay, interest in Melissa has reached a fever pitch: half the crowd has deified her, the other half waits for a bloody suicide. Although Melissa is not, ostensibly, the hero of Channel SK1N, she is its fulcrum. Despite being the ultimate victim - the martyr of a billion televisions - (and completely bonkers) Melissa ultimately has authority over her own actions. Everyone is watching her; she only watches herself. As SK1N flows from start to finish, Melissa quietly/publicly wrestles with her demons, fighting a battle that everyone can see, but only she can understand.

While Melissa is perpetually in the background, SK1N follows Nola Blue, a manufactured pop star - so heavily 'digitised' that she can no longer recognise her own image. Her Geppetto is George Gold, Melissa's father and a cut-throat music mogul in the best tradition of Simon Cowell. George finds, moulds and discards pop stars with frightening regularity - Nola is, at last count, at least the tenth of his disciples.

The beginning of the book finds Nola undergoing two terrifying changes. The first is as a celebrity: her last single, a painfully generic anthem, is a disappointment. Nola can already see - first in her mind's eye, later on television - the "where is she now?" commentary that marks the passing of her ephemeral career. She's understandably panicked. She has no connections besides George (who isn't answering the phone), an assistant (hired by George), a car (a gift from George), fans (who barely recognise her) and lovers (carefully recruited for one night stands). Nola - after spending her entire life becoming a carefully-crafted demigod - is about to be cast back down with the plebeians.

Except there's the second change. A mysterious bruise on Nola's stomach keeps growing. And interfering with her television signal. And, as it grows, showing the television. The latest digital switchover is to 'fractal waves' and it seems that Nola's picked up a virus as a result. This is, to Mr. Noon's credit, not just complete gobbledegook, but complete gobbledegook that's chucked out and then never mentioned again. The why, at least, in the non-ontological sense, is meaningless. Nola is becoming television.

With the exception of the "fractal wave" goofiness, there's very little in Channel SK1N that doesn't already exist in our own world - making the book a wonderfully flexible metaphor. The constant monitoring and ranking of Nola Blue's 'social status', the ubiquity of cameras (professional and amateur), the conspiracy theorists and mystics on sad searches to find higher truths in reality television, the fleeting nature of celebrity and the tension between artist and institutional structure.

Equal parts poetry and hard SF, this book proves why a Jeff Noon novel is well worth waiting for. One of 2012's must-reads. (And 2013, and beyond...)