Pollen by Jeff Noon
Pollen returns us to the future Manchester of Noon’s remarkable first novel, Vurt. This time the city is threatened by an outbreak of murderous flora and a dangerous alliance between creatures of the Vurt dream world and power-hungry individuals in Manchester.
Its central character, Sibyl Jones, is a Shadow cop, and, at least initially, this reads like a police procedural story. Coyote, a dog-man black cab driver, collects a mysterious fare from the zombie-filled wastelands beyond the city and in bringing his passenger, the plant child Persephone, back into Manchester, he becomes the means by which she can unleash her botanical assault. This marks an opening battle in the Looking Glass War, a struggle between dream and reality. Coyote’s death sets in motion investigations by both Jones and the cab driver’s would-be girlfriend, rival cab driver Boda.
The plot’s steady increase in tension is reflected in the ever rising pollen count which chokes the city’s air and gradually transforms Manchester into a flora-filled dreamscape. Boda is eventually revealed to be Jones’ daughter, and in their attempt to stop the attack they venture into the Vurt to confront John Barleycorn, a Vurt entity seeking entrance into reality.
Pollen reinforces Noon’s reputation as a powerful storyteller with a talent for the surreal. Characters are nuanced and well-drawn. The plot is filled with intrigues and twists until the end, and beneath the surface there are powerful allusions to numerous mythologies, folklores, and quest narratives. The novel shares the inventive and almost hallucinogenic imagery of Vurt whilst fleshing out Noon’s strange future world. We learn about the origin of the species blending that made the first novel so original, and the nature of those who possess shadow abilities. Yet, oddly, Noon’s explanations tend to diminish the power of his fantasy world even as he expands upon it. Vurt had the courage to cast its readers into a strange world and the confidence to know that they would just accept its’ weirdness. By contrast, Pollen explicitly spells out a relationship between the Vurt and reality that had remained intriguingly ambiguous in the first novel. Rather than a realm marked by strange exchanges, the Vurt now becomes a conventionally intrusive threat to reality from the forces of dream and collective storytelling. The idea of a conflict between imagination and reality, and the desire of story characters like the demonic Barleycorn to have control over their own existence, are both (overly) familiar fantasy genre motifs. At times, Noon’s surrealism also tips over from the wonderfully weird (Coyote is resurrected as a dog-man-plant hybrid) to the just plain silly (the detonation of a snot bomb).
As such, whilst it is an inventive novel in its own right, Pollen does not quite equal the power of its predecessor. Whereas Vurt took readers to a place they had not been before, Pollen goes some way to returning them to a sense of the familiar, not so much in terms of revisiting Noon’s reimagined Manchester as through the novel’s underlying conventional conceit of fantasy’s war upon reality.
Pollen by Jeff Noon
(Tor, 2013)
This Pollen book review was written by Karl Bell
Have you read Pollen?
We've found that while readers like to know what we think of a book they find additional reader reviews a massive help in deciding if it is the right book for them. So if you have a spare moment, please tell us your thoughts by writing a reader's review. Thank you.
Pollen reader reviews
8/10 from 1 reviews
There are currently no reader reviews for this book. Why not be the first?
Write a reader review
Thank you for taking the time to write a review on this book, it really makes a difference and helps readers to find their perfect book.
More recommended reading in this genre

The Dark Tower series
Stephen King
Roland of Gilead, the Last Gunslinger. He is a haunting figure, a loner, on a spellbinding journey into good and evil, in a desolate world which frighteningly echoes our ow...

Nightfall
Will Elliott
Aden awakens naked in a bath tub, knowing only that he is dead. His new world is Nightfall, a place filled with characters bizarre, grotesque and magical: Julius the duke, ...

Chronicles of Thomas Covenant the Unbeliever
Stephen Donaldson
He called himself Thomas Covenant, the Unbeliever, because he dared not believe in the strange alternative world on which he suddenly found himself - the Land. But the Land...

City of Stairs
Robert Jackson Bennett
You've got to be careful when you're chasing a murderer through Bulikov, for the world is not as it should be in that city. When the gods were destroyed and all wor...

One Word Kill
Mark Lawrence
In January 1986, fifteen-year-old boy-genius Nick Hayes discovers he’s dying. And it isn’t even the strangest thing to happen to him that week.Nick ...

11.22.63
Stephen King
WHAT IF you could go back in time and change the course of history? WHAT IF the watershed moment you could change was the JFK assassination? 11/22/63, the date that Kennedy...

Babylon Steel
Gaie Sebold
Babylon Steel, ex-sword-for-hire, ex-other things, runs the best brothel in Scalentine; city of many portals, two moons, and a wide variety of races, were-creatures, and re...

The Four Realms
Adrian Faulkner
Half-vampire Darwin stumbles across a corpse on the streets of London, and in a pocket discovers a notebook in a mysterious language. Divided between human ethics and vampi...

Weaveworld
Clive Barker
Weaveworld is an epic adventure of the imagination. It begins with a carpet in which a world of rapture and enchantment is hiding; a world which comes to life, alerting the...
Looking for more suggestions? Try these pages: