228 pages, Kindle Edition
Review by Marc Nash
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.
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