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Falling Out of Cars [Hardcover]

Jeff Noon
3.4 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (9 customer reviews)

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Book Description

4 Nov 2002
In a world overflowing with images, how can you tell who you really are? Marlene Moore wasn't even sure why she accepted the job, except that it gave her the chance to just get in her car and drive. To escape, to keep moving, to maybe find a destination for herself. Now she is journeying around England, a land that turns stranger and more dreamlike, the further she travels. Slowly, day by day, Marlene is falling prey to a sickness, a disease that seems to change the world around her. And the job itself turns out to be far weirder, and more dangerous, than she ever imagined. A road novel like no other, FALLING OUT OF CARS explores a country, and a psyche, falling off the edge of reality.

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Product details

  • Hardcover: 352 pages
  • Publisher: Doubleday (4 Nov 2002)
  • Language: English
  • ISBN-10: 0385602960
  • ISBN-13: 978-0385602969
  • Product Dimensions: 21.8 x 16 x 3.8 cm
  • Average Customer Review: 3.4 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (9 customer reviews)
  • Amazon Bestsellers Rank: 621,760 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Review

Praise for "Automated Alice":
" Borges crossed with Philip Larkin on acid." -- "Arena"
" Captures Carroll's style effortlessly... . A weird Alice with a contemporary edge." -- "Mail on Sunday"

From the Back Cover

Marlene Moore wasn't even sure why she accepted the job, except that it gave her the chance to just get in her car and drive. To escape, to keep moving, to maybe find a destination for herself. Now she's journeying around England, a land that turns stranger and more dreamlike, the further she travels. Slowly, day by day, Marlene is falling prey to a sickness, a disease that seems to change the world around her. And the job itself turns out to be far weirder, and more dangerous, than she ever imagined.

A road novel like no other, Falling Out of Cars explores a country, and a psyche, falling off the edge of reality.


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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews
9 of 9 people found the following review helpful
4.0 out of 5 stars Noon's dreamscape falls prety to its own disease 26 Mar 2003
By A Customer
Format:Hardcover
My love for certain Brit writers brings me to Amazon's UK site, as I don't care to wait for Americanized versions, which are often released many months later, if at all. (Gotta love the Internet for these things!) Anyway...

Being a huge fan of Noon, I had some high hopes for this book, his first apparently 'real' novel in a while. And indeed, as I kept reading, I was drawn deeply into it. The lead players in the story are united in a quest to retrieve pieces of a mirror that possesses some type of power, related in some way to a sickness that has befallen humanity. I won't even try to describe it, but to put it simply, the disease affects peoples' ability to process 'reality' - the world around them - in many ways, and to varying degrees. The disease is held in check, but only somewhat, by a drug called Lucidity.

Falling Out of Cars is, I suppose, a 'road novel' as much as any, a succession of destinations, scenes, and locales, each progressively more bizarre than the last. Some of the scenes portrayed within will remain forever etched in my mind, especially one in which the protagonist enters a theater to retrieve a piece of a mirror (the driving moitvation for the group's ongoing quest and the reason for the road trip). As any reader of his past work would expect, Noon's put some truly brilliant, original ideas to paper here, as always. I could rip out a couple of my favourite chapters and feel I'd gotten my money's worth.

Falling Out of Cars succeeds in many ways, but for this reader, it lacked the one thing that a book of this nature so desperately needs after such a long, strange quest: closure. A 'journey's end.' I understand that not all novels require a Hollywood ending, and that's fine. But this one seems to lack any at all. It seems about 4 chapters shy of being complete. Were it made into a screenplay, and what a film it could be, the ending would definitely be altered.

That being said, I'd give this book a very strong 5 stars for the ideas, dreamscapes, and wonderful prose. Noon's writing here is as terse as ever, but he still manages to paint scenes as vividly as any modern writer. He doesn't waste a word. But I just felt deeply dissatisfied and saddened by the conclusion. Along the quest, we're often treated to glimpses of a path with an ending to it. But instead, the novel itself seems to fall prey to the sickness endured by our travelers, and I, for one, was deeply disappointed by any sense of closure. Which is all that much more saddening, as it's just inches away of having 'blockbuster' status. For the story/narrative aspect, it's 3 stars, and I'm being generous.

In a scholarly sense, the book's a backlash to the information overload in modern culture and its effect on the human psyche. Someday, perhaps, it'll be cited in, or required reading, for college coursework as commentary for the era we live in....

If you're already a Noon fan, get it, and enjoy the scenery while it lasts. If you're new to Noon, opt instead for Vurt (then Pollen and Nymphomation) and don't miss Pixel Juice, a fantastic collection of Noon's shorter works.

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5 of 5 people found the following review helpful
3.0 out of 5 stars Spaced 8 May 2003
Format:Hardcover
If you thought that Jeff Noon couldn't possibly delve deeper into a psychological environment, think again.

I found FOOC to be the darkest of all of his novels, but unfortunately not as bold. There is a lack of concrete plot, which although is understandable given the nature of what the book is meant to bring across, it ultimately leaves the reader wandering around a little uncomfortably by themselves to make what they will of the events.

Intrigue is kept very high for the first half of the novel, but slowly fades, smililarly to the way in which the lead character undegoes her gradual psychological destruction. The book begins more or less in the physical, but blurrs and progresses into the mental, unfortunately without looking back. I ultimately felt this disconnected me with the narrative - again mirroring the downward spiral of the protagonist all too frighteningly well. This turns FOOC into one of those dark works of art that doesn't necessarily try to appeal to an audience by compromising itself for the benefit of the reader's desire for positive eventualities.

The book's more obvious strength lies in the writing itself - Jeff Noon has surpassed himself with the style and flare that is presented here. There isn't a passage in the book that doesn't make you marvel at the extraordinary wording chained together to make up something so unique. The appreciation of the book as a whole however, (to its fullest extent), will likely be limited to a smaller audience who have the capacity to willingly accept melancholy and the absence of closure.

I doubt I will every realistically put any Jeff Noon books on as high a pedastal as Vurt, Pollen, and Pixel Juice. But that isn't to say Falling Out Of Cars doesn't have it's place somewhere amongst the darkness where my intrigue of self-destruction is hidden.
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9 of 11 people found the following review helpful
3.0 out of 5 stars Falling out of cars 2 Dec 2002
Format:Hardcover
Jeff Noon is back with a novel after a period of mixing words in "Cobralingus" and mixing ideas with Pete Beard online.
There is no shortage of the dreamlike imagery and of course the totally fluid way of writing we have come to expect from Noon.

However, the book lacks direction and it is difficult to become involved with the characters. The Wacky ideas in the "Vurt" world of Noon's previous novels were made believable by the supporting theory Noon gave both in the novels and in his short collection "pixeljuice". However he affords the reader no such luxury and we are left to try and work out for ourselves the nature of the "illness" which dominates this world.

In Noon's "Cobralingus" there is a caption stating that the cobralingus engine exists only in the strange and twisted pathways inside Jeff Noon's head. If Noon goes any deeper down those pathways he is in danger of losing his reader.

However, the book gives enough plot to keep you going until the end and Jeff Noon's delightful use of language make this worth the read.

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