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Falling Out of Cars
 
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Falling Out of Cars (Paperback)

by Jeff Noon (Author)
3.2 out of 5 stars See all reviews (8 customer reviews)

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Product details

  • Paperback: 384 pages
  • Publisher: Black Swan; New edition edition (3 Nov 2003)
  • Language English
  • ISBN-10: 0552999709
  • ISBN-13: 978-0552999700
  • Product Dimensions: 19.4 x 12.8 x 2.6 cm
  • Average Customer Review: 3.2 out of 5 stars See all reviews (8 customer reviews)
  • Amazon.co.uk Sales Rank: 299,041 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

    Popular in this category:

    #12 in  Books > Fiction > Cult Authors > Noon, Jeff

Product Description

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 Hardcover edition."

Product Description
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. -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's journeying around England, a land that becomes 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.

See all Product Description


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Customer Reviews

8 Reviews
5 star:    (0)
4 star:
 (4)
3 star:
 (3)
2 star:    (0)
1 star:
 (1)
 
 
 
 
 
Average Customer Review
3.2 out of 5 stars (8 customer reviews)
 
 
 
 
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Most Helpful Customer Reviews

 
8 of 8 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars Noon's dreamscape falls prety to its own disease, 27 Mar 2003
By A Customer
This review is from: Falling Out of Cars (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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4 of 4 people found the following review helpful:
3.0 out of 5 stars Spaced, 8 May 2003
This review is from: Falling Out of Cars (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, unfortunatley without looking back. I felt this to be disconnecting.

The book's strength however 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.

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9 of 11 people found the following review helpful:
3.0 out of 5 stars Falling out of cars, 3 Dec 2002
By J. Eydmann "poetjude" (London UK) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   
This review is from: Falling Out of Cars (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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Most Recent Customer Reviews

4.0 out of 5 stars Love / Hate
The haphazard approach to writing that made all of Noon's previous books such excellent reading material is taken even further. The story is vague, the meaning unclear. Read more
Published on 8 Nov 2004 by LegendaryMrDude

4.0 out of 5 stars Hmmmm
I've read a couple of Noon's other works (Nymphomation, Vurt etc) and loved them, especially the way in which they work together. Read more
Published on 10 Oct 2004

1.0 out of 5 stars hmm
i liked pollen and vurt, they were quite interesting. FOOCk is barely coheerant, like my spelling -- but nothing happens at all, the dialogue is truely terrible. Read more
Published on 30 Aug 2004 by Mr. L. A. Nicholson

4.0 out of 5 stars Getting back into his stride
Britain is in the grip of a sickness that interferes with people's ability to make sense of the information they are bombarded with: even their own reflections become anathema... Read more
Published on 15 May 2004 by P. Western

3.0 out of 5 stars New to Noon...
This is the first time I have read anything by this author - and although it is just the sort of book I usually enjoy.. I found that it was slightly weak. Read more
Published on 22 Dec 2003 by christina_garrett

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