Customer Reviews

Noise: A Novel

5 star:		(8)
4 star:		(1)
3 star:		(0)
2 star:		(1)
1 star:		(2)

 

 

If you're looking for an end-of-the-world thriller, better pass on Noise and pick up a copy of The Passage or The Stand. But if you're looking for a thoughtful meditation on what might happen if the social systems that provide a sense of meaning and security were to disappear, then by all means read Darin Bradley's Noise.

My reaction to the story went from intrigued to annoyed to baffled and finally to amazed. All that in less than 250 pages. The story begins with two college friends in Texas tuning in to Salvage, a sort of pirate broadcasting system that has taken over the old, unused analog television channels. It seems as though the channel draws conspiracy theorists of all stripes as both 'casters and viewers. But one day the dire predictions made on Salvage begin to come true. The details are scant (something many readers will find irksome) but soon there are runs on banks, riots, looting, civil disorder and the general breakdown of the slim threads that bind society together.

Forewarned by Salvage and armed with homemade swords and the Book (OK, a second point of annoyance: the Book tends to capitalize concepts like Narrative and Place through the story) Hiram and Levi and a handful of others prepare to set out for their Group's Place ... Amaranth, named for the Underworld's eternal flower of forgetfulness. Along the way the Group encounters violence and death in many forms. Following the teachings of the Book, when that violence and death is dealt by members of the Group, it's reinforced with a phrase that becomes a desperate post-apocalyptic mantra: "What you did was right."

The Book itself makes up a big part of Noise. Just about every chapter ends with a list of instructions from the Book. At first the Book seems to be little more than random thoughts from right-wing survivalist manuals and left-wing primers on revolution. But as the story progresses and the Group struggles toward its Place, thoughtful readers will find themselves carrying on interior dialogues with themselves over the real meaning of the Book within the book.

By the time the story is over, most readers will find themselves wondering "what if ..." That is likely the end result Bradley was aiming for. Just about any book can entertain a reader, but it takes a special one to make that reader think.

Let me tell you what Darin Bradley has achieved with Noise.

He's taken an Event, perhaps socio-political, definitely economic, in its scope and placed a pair of friends, Hiram and Levi, in medias res in their small Texas town. See, they've seen the writing on the walls--the wildstyle tagging along with the hacked analog transmission from the nebulous collective known as Salvage Country--and realized this is the End, friends. With a small band armed with information, weapons, and new names, they know it's time to make it to Amaranth, their quasi-mythical retreat.

See, it's all about your Group having a Place. So says the Book. Darin has managed to weave the get-out-of-Dodge narrative for Hiram et. al an with apropos sections of the Book, the bible at the beginning of the end. Bradley has waxed meta with Book in situ, giving the audience a chance to following along with Hiram's Group as they leave their apartments, cross town, and find their Place in a world in breakdown mode--all with the Book as artifact. The narrative is further interspersed with flashbacks of Hiram's childhood, and the particularly resonant ones were of the Boy Scouting days, the leadership skills acquired and, perhaps, taken for granted until the young adult Hiram falls back on those selfsame skills and more.

No one is who they seem, either, among the major players. They've taken new names, new identities forged as they create a new Place in this new and broken world. Anyone's skills belong to the Group; the person becomes the new economy. The old world is dying, and no one--no one--speaks their old names or of their old lives.

The pacing is quick, maybe quicker than one might expect in a multilayered narrative such as Noise presents. However, Darin has more than made up for it with an understanding that clean prose and lyrical prose need not be padded prose. As far as characterization is concerned, you might have known a Hiram or a Levi. You might have played D& D and rolled some D20's with them.

But you probably never had to see them roll the hard six and run someone through with a sword or shoot them in the face.

Noise isn't about a ragtag band of survivors holing up and waiting it out. It's about the exodus, the egress from Eden and the concomitant Fall. It's about the subsuming of personal identity into the usefulness and forward progress of the group's identity. It's about letting your past drown in a pond. Your Orphean descent into the Underworld. Your Amaranth where you will put down new roots in a faraway place.

Darin gives the reader plenty of explode-y action and up-close-and-personal scenes one might expect of an apocalyptic novel, but one thing's for certain: the characters are the heart of this book, and after reading Noise, don't be surprised to find yourself echoing a mantra of the Group in Noise:

"You did the right thing."

Here's hoping this is the first of many sharp, smart, resonant novels from Darin Bradley.

When the country converts from analog to digital, Salvage broadcasts underground stations in the lower frequency airwaves. It tells the populace what to do to survive in the face of the collapsing society and the words are bound in the Book. In the college town of Slade, Texas, best friends Hiram and Adam collect the wisdom of the Salvage so they can be ready when the collapse of American civilization occurs.

The predicted Event happens leaving America rudderless as the country declares bankruptcy and the government loses all control. The Narrator calls himself Hiram and Adam renames himself Levi. They gather other people amongst the homeless of the dead society to go to Amaranth. It is an isolated place where they will be safe. Other groups join them on the bloody journey to the Promised Land.

Reminiscent of the Lord of the Flies merged with Deliverance, Noise is a deep look at civilization spinning out of control into anarchy before leading to a rebirth. The cast is solid with plenty of violence and gore. This makes the aftermath effort to get to Amaranth feel plausible. Darin Bradley writes an entertaining futuristic cautionary thriller as out of the death of America rises the Phoenix of a new order.

Harriet Klausner

This is one of the most timely and brilliantly conceived novels that I've read in a long time.

Timely because it doesn't take a great deal of imagination to know that there are big changes coming. Whether our society is elastic enough or will break under the pressure is an open question.

Brilliant from a writers perspective because the author uses his words like an artist uses a dry brush to get just the right color.

Given the shape of the world today, Noise is like the nightmares that we all have and don't talk about.

Everyone wants more. Civility is a quaint, old fashioned idea. People have a dangerous, feral quality about them.

Yes- I can see this happening. I can see the thrill killers and the cowardly sadist; liberated as society collapses.

Maybe it is time. Maybe it is their time. Maybe it has already started.

Some people like their fiction smooth and polished. Slick and stylish. That's not Noise. Noise flows like the crunch of broken glass under your boots or the sting of smoke in your eyes. It takes you into a violent dark landscape that is all the more terrifying because it evolves from home into hell so quickly.

I like fiction that has the ring of truth about it. Noise has that. It makes the hairs on your arms stand up because deep down inside: today, tomorrow, next year or next week- you know that it could happen. We will laugh nervously, shake our heads and carry on but in our nightmares we will still hear the Noise.

This book is disturbing yet great. It is rare that a novel makes me question myself but Noise really did - what would I do if society collapsed? Would I be prepared to do what I needed to do, could I fight for myself or my family, would I have survival skills?

Hiram and Levi have had a plan since they started listening to and studying the Salvage broadcasts, in the form of The Book. Is that enough?

I would also read the author interview/comments at the end, as I thought they added an interesting perspective and increasing relevance to the novel.

This is a damn fine novel. But it's not an easy novel to enjoy. Regardless your politics, your morality, your sense of community or self, you will find something to feel uncomfortable about in this book. The main characters are very hard to like, making decisions that at times seem appallingly inhuman. There are no heroes in this book. But even though we encounter plenty of antagonists, there are no real villains either. And that, ultimately, is both the most unsettling and the most brilliant aspect of this novel: In the apocalypse, there is no right or wrong but what we make, the only morality is what we construct in order to survive, and where other apocalyptic fiction often likes to present a false-anarchic free-for-all of amorality, Bradley is smart enough to show us human beings desperately trying to forge their necessary new morality. And the hardest part of reading this book, for me, was not that new morality -- a conflicted hodge-podge of anarchy and fascism, of utilitarianism and nihilism -- but how carefully, how seemingly sensibly, these characters present and live by their new morality. Some readers have complained that the main characters are heartless, one-note machines, flat stereotypes of the apocalyptic worldview present in this book, but I disagree: the background of Hiram is subtle, and of the other main characters is subtler, but it's there and it's plenty strong enough to explain the path these characters take, and Bradley, ingeniously, never judges them for it, never endorses or condemns their actions or their choices. He forces us, really, to forge our own morality as we read the book, in ways I don't see nearly often enough.

Some of the last third moves a bit fast for me (or perhaps the front third doesn't move fast enough?), so while the ending itself is excellent, I still wished there'd been another 30 or 40 pages, not because I felt like there is story missing here, but simply because Bradley had raised so many difficult questions for me and I wanted a little more time to deal with them while I read. But maybe that's the point: Hiram and Levi, for all their careful preparation, wind up necessarily facing questions they don't have time to answer, either.

Overall, a fantastic first novel, and I'm very much looking forward to Bradley's second.

I read this novel in a single sitting, drawn in at once by the narrator and his story of the immediate aftermath of the collapse of society and how "ordinary" citizens such as this small group of college kids attempt to survive. The story is told in first person, by "Hiram", a name the narrator takes as part of the plan to survive, a plan written out by he and his friend "Levi" (nee Adam) in The Book, a Bible of sorts of survival narrative, spelling out what they need to do before, during, and after The Collapse, written largely from instructions by Salvage, an underground radio and video network using analog signals after the U.S. went fully digital, which has been loudly advocating anarchy and is prepared for The Collapse -- an economic collapse in which the U.S. government was forced to declare bankruptcy, a run on the banks ensues, and then -- basically, according to Salvage, it's every man for himself. And Hiram and Levi are ready. A fascinating and thrilling novel I highly recommend.

Hiram is quite an appealing narrator, written in an imaginative style that flips between the chaotic present-day events and flashbacks to key moments of a suburban adolescence near Dallas, Texas, that included the Boy Scouts and T-ball and lots and lots of Dungeons & Dragons but which oddly prepared him for the conspiracy theories and the end-of the-world survival instincts that kick in the moment they hear from Salvage that the Collapse has begun. The details of the story are told in delicate, yet adrenaline-pumping style, and although the transformation of some characters from mild-mannered citizens to cold-blooded killers is probably unrealistic, there is no excess violence for violence's sake and there are consequences to all of their actions. Through it all, in fact, the author spends time to focus on the characters and what they are going through -- particularly Hiram, without any introspective crap you'd find in more mainstream tales because - well, these kids don't have time for that. The world is coming to an end.

This is the best novel about societal collapse I've ever read. Realistic, frightening yet endearing all the same. A must read for anyone who finds the subject of the apocalypse and/or dystopian fiction.

...that is what the book brought up in me. What would I do if society collapsed? What would I do to ensure I would stay alive? Why do I concentrate more on 'knowing things' instead of 'doing things'. So read this book. Learn a skill. Pick a Place. Get the jump.

I have been able to read and enjoy many "difficult reads", but this one takes the cake. The author not only jumps around too much in time and memories within a chapter, but within a single paragraph. I find the only redeeming part is "The Book" within this book. It has many interesting, albeit impractical, ideas and is intriguing to read.

The characters within these pages are very 2-D and unrealistic for a book that attempts to be realistic in an apocalyptical society. Lack of descriptors and cohesion make this book hard to enjoy.

Easy to read, hard to comprehend and enjoy.