Noir (Mass Market Paperback)

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Editorial Reviews

Amazon.com Review

Imagine a fast-moving computer game set in the black-and-white environment of a 1940s detective movie and you'll begin to get some idea of the mixed metaphors that fill the air in K.W. Jeter's difficult but ultimately rewarding new futuristic thriller.

Jeter, who also writes a series of novels based on the popular Blade Runner film about apocalyptic Los Angeles, centers Noir in that same city, now a dark jewel of the dominant Pacific Rim. A detective named McNihil (yes, you got it) has had his eyes surgically altered so that everything looks like an early Bogart movie to him. "Gray newspapers with significant headlines--'Dewey Defeats Truman,''Pearl Harbor Bombed'--moldered in the gutters, or were nudged along the broken sidewalks by the same night wind that cut through McNihil's jacket," Jeter writes about the scene of a plane crash where the detective has been summoned by a corporate villain. A top young executive has been murdered, and McNihil is arm-twisted into tracking down the dead man's missing "prowler"--a computer simulation that roams the world like an electronic ghost.

Aided by a young woman called November, whose fingertips are alive with lethal magnetic currents, McNihil brings his--and Jeter's--unique noir vision to bear on a world that for all its weirdness is the ultimately believable extension of our present-day nightmares. --Dick Adler --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

From Publishers Weekly

A master of dark visions, Jeter (Blade Runner: Replicant Night) delivers his most difficult and intellectually ambitious novel to date. In a near-future world where the poor are entirely disenfranchised and white-collar employees live and work themselves to death in tiny, randomly assigned cubicles, the super-wealthy seek vicarious, perverse, cybernetically enhanced thrills on the streets of Los Angeles. Repulsed by the era he's forced to live in, McNihil, a retired cop with a violent past, has had his eyes surgically altered so that he sees everything through a computer-generated overlay that simulates the black-and-white world of the hard-boiled detective films of the 1930s. When Harrisch, an executive with a powerful multinational corporation, tries to hire him to solve a murder and track down the deceased's missing "prowler," a computerized simulation of the dead man, McNihil refuses, only to find himself blackmailed into compliance. Aided by a gutsy young operative named November, McNihil uncovers a complex web of lies and violence, a world where nothing is what it seems and even the dead have power. Jeter is a fine prose stylist, but some will find his knotted, intensely metaphoric language slow going. Equally problematic is his tendency to assume in his reader a sophisticated knowledge of the conventions of both the noir thrillers of the 1930s and contemporary cyberpunk SF. Frequently, his characters seem to operate in an evocative semi-vacuum, the facts needed to explain the plot having been mysteriously elided from the narrative. This is a difficult, eccentric and rewarding novel, an SF equivalent, perhaps, of The Name of the Rose.
Copyright 1998 Reed Business Information, Inc. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

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Product Details

• Mass Market Paperback: 496 pages
• Publisher: Spectra; Bantam Spectra Pbk. Ed edition (September 1, 1999)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0553576380
• ISBN-13: 978-0553576382
• Product Dimensions: 6.8 x 4.2 x 1.2 inches
• Shipping Weight: 4 ounces
• Average Customer Review: 3.3 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (38 customer reviews)
• Amazon.com Sales Rank: #564,296 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

8 of 9 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars Dystopia effectively, grimly mixing noir with cyberpunk., September 29, 1999

By	R. B. Bernstein "R. B. Bernstein, Adjunct Pro... (Brooklyn, New York USA) - See all my reviews (REAL NAME)

For fans of Hammett and Chandler, NOIR will sound comfortingly -- and discomfortingly -- familiar, for Jeter respects the genre of noir fiction and has handled its conventions with skill and panache. For fans of cyberpunk, NOIR will revisit familiar themes in effective and disturbing ways; Philip K. Dick would have admired this book. For those who believed that the two genres could not be crossbred, NOIR will be a revelation.

And yet...

I wanted to like this book (and had I liked this book I would have given it four stars), but I only ended up admiring it (hence three stars). For the central character in NOIR acts with a brutality that at one or two points goes far beyond the boundaries of noir and well into the territory of sadism. It would give too much away to those who want to read the book to go into specifics. Suffice it to say that NOIR is emphatically NOT a book for the tender-hearted or the squeamish.

15 of 19 people found the following review helpful:

2.0 out of 5 stars One of the blackest futures ever conceived is aptly titled., January 6, 2000

By	Count Zero (Ottawa, Canada) - See all my reviews

Visiting the book store some time ago, I noticed that the author of this novel has busied himself converting Phil Dick's masterpiece into a franchise. Having read Noir, I am not too tempted to see how Jeter may have twisted Bladerunner's already dark milieu.

Action in this novel starts out right away, but I had to read the first chapter over, because I could not picture Jeter's scene.

Noir is brutal. It is the sickest and most perverse future vision I have ever read. Not that that is necessarily bad, but.. Imagine a world were even death is no escape from your creditors; where mysterious machines shoot down every aircraft that ever leaves the ground; where copyright infringement is punishable by means far, far worse than death... and it goes on and on.

On the post-apocalyptic Earth human life is a worthless commodity. Sexuality is explored in many forms, but invariably they are sickly perverse and closely linked to death and mutilation. This did more to demonstrate the author's own inclinations than to present anything remotely plausible. The penalty for selling someone else's intellectual property in Jeter's world is to have one's brain and spinal chord forcefully removed and placed on life support. The offender's still-living, still-aware neural tissue is then used to make stereo cables or to control small household appliances for the personal amusement of the artist or author that was wronged. Doesn't take much analysis to see the author's own personal agendas being manifested here.

The protaganist is an 'asp-head', and agent of the Collection Agency, the company that performs the torturous executions as described above. He is a non-dimensional character who is, of course, very darkly motivated. There is nothing good at all in McNihil's life, he has made sure of that. The hero has taken the steps to have his vision altered so that the world appears to be a darkened version of the world of 1930's cinema. There is no daytime in McNihil's world, a condition that suits well the otherwise flat character.

All of Jeter's frequent cultural references, and his occasional use of German quotes are both totally incomprehensible. This may not be entirely bad though, as it does seem to add something, though certainly not authenticity. One thing is clear: Jeter's southern California is much different from any that anyone will ever see.

Finally, Jeter calls into question his own knowledge of the use of the English language, using the word 'connect' as a direct replacement for our beloved 'f' word. I.e. You are such a connecting loser, and so on. That, sadly is his only attempt at modifying dialog to appear authentically futuristic, and it doesn't work at all.

I finished Jeter's Noir, and found to my surprise that he managed to salvage a decent ending from this rather unredeemably twisted work.

5 of 6 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars "Noir" is really something..., October 15, 1999

By A Customer

I immediately checked the reviews posted here after finishing "Noir," Jeter's latest, indepedent novel and found moments of agreement is practically all of them. Stylistically, "Noir" is a much darker, more Burroughsian version of William Gibson's seminal "Neuromancer"; the prose is wonderful, the characters interesting (if flat), and the plot is appealingly strange.

The most intriguing idea at work in this novel is the main character's (a sometimes unbearably tough detective named McNihil...) cybernetically enhanced eyes, which allow him to see the world as if it were a product of the _noir_ aesthetic of the '40s. Unfortunately, Jeter uses this brilliant and wacky notion as a more or less throwaway plot device, when I would have liked to have seen it explored in depth (the existential implications warrant a novel of their own).

Summing up, I loved large portions of this gloomy, satiric book and found others borderline tedious (see the distinctly out-of-place rumination on intellectual copyright law). Nevertheless, I admire Jeter's sheer funkiness and his commitment to his nihilistic future.