A Review of Jeff Noon’s “Creeping Jenny”
An Existential Mystery
I have always wondered what happened to Jeff Noon. Back in the ’90s, this UK writer was one of my favourites, turning out one of the best books ever written about virtual reality, Vurt, and a crackling sequel to Alice in Wonderland called Automated Alice. Then, he seemingly disappeared. His books started getting removed from the shelves of the local library. It was as though he had vanished into thin air. Well, it turns out that Noon is back, and this time he’s writing sci-fi mysteries as part of a series that centres around private eye protagonist John Nyquist. His third book in the series is the recently published Creeping Jenny. The great thing about this book is that you can dive right in — no need to read the preceding two novels. It’s a genuinely thrilling book that answers the question, “How would The Wicker Man have turned out if it had been written by Franz Kafka?”
Set in the winter of 1959 in an alternate reality of the UK, Creeping Jenny takes place in a small town on the moors called Hoxley-on-the-Hale. John Nyquist has been pulled to this burg thanks to a package of mysterious pictures that have been mailed to him, suggesting that his long-lost father is now residing in the village. The thing is, once he arrives, he discovered that a Saint rules each day in the village, giving the day a strange sort of nightmarish power — one Saint’s Day prevents people from speaking, while another forces villagers to spend the entire day in bed. It’s against this strange backdrop of religious ritual — one that includes a town resident dressing up as resident boogeyman the Tolly Man, a kind of collection of twigs and branches strung together into human form — that Nyquist must solve the mystery of what’s happened to his dad.
Just like the works of Kafka, Creeping Jenny is full of absurdities. It’s a weird book that gets weirder and weirder as it progresses, though without sacrificing its readability. However, Noon does paint himself into a corner with all the weirdness, and the final reveal — when it comes — is lacklustre and a disappointment. The novel ends with a whimper instead of a bang. At its best, the book is most successful in portraying small-town life as being bizarre, which — as someone who grew up in a small town can appreciate — is its most satisfying aspect. There’s a kind of running commentary about small towns being tough to escape from, which, again, is something that resonated with me based on my upbringing.
However, Creeping Jenny — so named after a child’s nursery rhyme of unknown origin — is also a skilled retelling of classic British horror fiction. There’s plenty in this novel that recalls The Wicker Man, right down to the stranger looking for a missing person angle. This is just filtered through an absurdist lens, with the religious holidays serving as a backdrop to the comings and goings of the villagers of Hoxley. If you took away this element of the book, you wouldn’t have too much to go on — because the bulk of the book is simply Nyquist (in very entertaining fashion) trying to navigate the customs of each Saint’s Day to varying degrees of success. For instance, one day sees the villagers impossibly trying to finish their own sentences, which, as a detective trying to get down to serious business, hinders the job that needs to be done.
There’s a colourful cast of characters in Creeping Jenny — a couple of which get bumped off in strange fashion, which, again, threatens to take over the main mystery of the book in the potential father-son reunification. How did these characters die? Was it murder or did they die by their own hand? And what do they have to do with the visiting Nyquist? As you can tell, Creeping Jenny is stuffed to the gills with stories within stories, creating a sort of narrative maze, padding out the page count of this novel to a length that would take it beyond the simple “looking for an absent father” mystery angle. That’s one of the joys of the book — this is a tome that you can quite easily get lost in, but it also means that the book lacks a bit of focus. You really don’t know where Creeping Jenny is going to take you next, which will either be a blessing to readers who like to be surprised, or a curse to those who wish that Noon would get to the point and hurry up and solve his mystery.
All in all, I enjoyed Creeping Jenny despite being torn in two about it. Noon is a rich writer, and his absurdist ideas are a joy to discover. However, as a pure mystery story, there isn’t much here to go on simply because the clues don’t really point to anything that’s logical or allow the reader to make deductions as to how the story will resolve itself. Creeping Jenny is fun, and I appreciate the fact that you don’t need to read the other books in the series to make sense of it, but it does go on far too long and the ending is quite a bit of a let-down. Still, I’m glad to have rediscovered Jeff Noon and determine that he’s still at it, writing demented and original fiction that nobody else can really hold a candle to. Noon is a special writer, one deserving of the highest accolades, and even if his stories sometimes miss the mark, he is clearly gifted with ideas — which the whole sci-fi universe that Noon’s protagonists inhabit render to good use. Noon at his ’90s peak ran hot and cold with me — there was the odd forgettable novel in his run of daring and inventive fiction, and Creeping Jenny bears the hallmarks of this. Still, it’s a good read for the curious and those who want to know what Jeff Noon is up to and that he didn’t disappear at all. There you have it in a nutshell. Mystery solved.
Jeff Noon’s Creeping Jenny was published by Angry Robot on March 23, 2020.
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Get in touch: zacharyhoule@rogers.com
