VIRTUAL ORANGE

By John Skow

JEFF NOON'S FLUORESCENT AND PHANTASMAGORICAL novel Vurt (Crown; 342 pages; $22) isn't quite the equal of Anthony Burgess's A Clockwork Orange, with which it is being compared, but in some ways it comes close. It's good enough in its first 50 or 60 pages of atmosphere setting, all smoke machines and flashing strobes, that the reader blinks, shakes his head and wonders whether Noon can sustain the weirdness. The answer, as shapes become familiar in the fog, lies somewhere between "no," "sort of" and "too mad to matter."

The scene is an unspecified English city, far gone in decay, at some point in what may be the 21st century. The city's inhabitants are a grotesque stew of humans; robots; human-robot-animal crosses; living protoplasmic blobs whose flesh, capable of regeneration, has the effect of drugs when sliced off and eaten; and deadly beings that seem to be sentient holograms.

Scribble, the narrator, and his gang of no-goods are seriously messing with "vurt," or virtual reality. Hallucinatory interactive dramas are encoded in synthetic feathers, and a person can waft away from everyday life by brushing the back of his throat with a feather tip. Fantasies range from harmless, biff-bam adventures through warm-and-fuzzy childhood memories, to varieties of porn, and on to malign alternate worlds that appear to be not just virtual but actual, and that permanently suck in vurt addicts.

This much and a good deal more is brilliant. Too bad such books need a plot, because mood and murk are what they're about. But they do, and what Noon comes up with, no surprise, is a Quest. Worked with Orpheus and Eurydice-why not? Scribble tries to retrieve his incestuously beloved kid sister Desdemona from one of those alternate worlds, with scenic but otherwise dim results. Vurt is a good try at great nonsense, and if someone doesn't use it as the basis for Son of Blade Runner, Hollywood isn't paying attention.