I think this book should be proud to sit atop the "New Weird" label.

It is like Dark City, a potboiler Noir with a very timey-wimey worldbuilding twist.

For the early part of the novel, it's all hardboiled detective stuff and it's familiar and fun, but I for one was clicking my teeth for the moment it started showing me the good stuff. And it did... in time zones.

A city all in man-made darkness, stars that never moved, where time is a relative thing, where industry collapses when certain pieces of reality can slip into different time streams.

Like, cool, right? Chaos. And industry leaders, working stiffs, government officials, everyone does their very best to keep the peace and the time in place.

I can't tell you how much I love this idea.

The detective noir stuff is polished, too. From a missing kid to a freaky wild family mystery to lots of cool spoilery things happening. :)

I can easily say I'm going to be reading a LOT more of Jeff Noon. Mixed genres may be a kind of specialty thing for intrepid and courageous readers, but it's so damn rewarding. Let your imaginative hair down! :) ( )

This odd, fascinating novel has a lot of the standard setup of a noirish detective story: a burned-out private eye takes on the case of a missing young woman and becomes entirely too invested in her for his own good. But nothing else about this story is standard. It's set in a bizarre city in a version of the 1950s that never was, a city half of which is constantly illuminated by a sky made of glaring light bulbs and half perpetually covered in artificial night. A city that is a jumble of shifting, fragmented time zones, where time itself behaves strangely.

None of this makes any real sense, even internal sense, except in a dreamlike sort of way that just gets more and more dreamlike as the novel progresses. But I'm amazed by how well it works. Jeff Noon does a great job of bringing this impossible world vividly to life, despite suffering from an annoying stylistic quirk that kept threatening to throw me out of the story. (Seriously, man, there is a reason why your English teachers tried to warn you about overusing the passive voice!)

Mind you, it's entirely possible that the reason it worked so well for me, and why I enjoyed it as much as I did, has a lot to do with my own relationship to time. I've worked rotating shifts for many, many years, and I know all too well the feeling of shifting constantly between time zones without really going anywhere, the feeling of living on a clock time different from that of those around you, the feeling of not being tied to the cycles of the sun. I also know the feeling -- the deeply surreal, disconnected, timeless feeling -- that comes when the clock inside your brain finally just gives up and stops completely. And this... Well, I think this basically is that feeling translated into book form.

Rating: 4/5, although I'm tempted to rate it half a star higher just for how powerful that sense of recognition was for me. ( )

I started to review this book a couple of times and really struggled. The writing and language was incredibly evocative and immersed me in the bizarre gritty world where time is arbitrary and there is a city half in perpetual daylight, half in perpetual night, and divided by an unruly dangerously wild, fog-shrouded world of Dusk.

At the same time, since it so clearly existed in some fantastic offshoot of "the real world" my mind kept struggling to make any kind of sense of how the whole thing worked. There was no science fiction unobtanium device powering individual times. There was no fantasy wizards did it explanation. It just was. It might even be simply a collective belief system, as arbitrary and illusory as hours and time zones, except that each person picks their own, and switches between them at the whims of capitalism and hedonism.

I finally just had to accept the world on its own terms, exactly the way the residents of the city do. Somewhere outside "normality" exists, but not here and no one is forced to be here and not there. The answer to "why" is "because". Once I did that the story just worked. It probably helped that Nyquist, the protagonist, isn't really at home in a world of arbitrary timelines either.

John Nyquist is easily recognizable as the stereotype noir detective (pun probably entirely deliberate by the author). He's a misfit outsider struggling with his own problems, grasping for any kind of solid answer to give himself purpose and stability. He's given a case to close, but definitely not to solve, and of course he can't not solve it. The need for some truth takes him through alcohol, kidnapping, murder, greed, politics and suppressed family secrets to end up more-or-less right back where he started.

If you like Phillip Marlowe, Sam Spade, Miguel Vargas, and you can accept the world of Nocturna/Dayzone on its own terms this is the book for you. ( )

Ugh, Jeff Noon. Dammit. He's never lived up to his first two novels. I loved Vurt, one of the earliest cyberpunk novels, and Pollen, a tripped out cyber-environmental apocalypse. But I was meh on Automated Alice and Nymphomation. I actively disliked A Man of Shadows.

Ostensibly, a science-fictional/fantasy noir detective story, it falls down on all accounts. The main character, the detective, is a sad sack. A rather pathetic failure who gets beat up a lot and only succeeds by accident. At times, his actions are also kind of creepy toward the female lead he is attempting to rescue, a teenager, and that makes him even less appealing and less sympathetic. He is all-around unlikable.

The physical environment and tone of the story is excessively gloomy. Dark is one thing. But gloomy and mopey is boooo-ring. The story takes place between two cities and the border between them. One of them is called Dayzone, with artificial lights of all kinds hung from some kind of overhead electrical lines entirely blocking out the sky. And Nocturna, where everything is dark. And the dusk zone between them, which is filled with fog and smoke and is intended to be spooky. There is also this commercialization and commoditization of "timelines" within these cities, where various corporations or individuals can buy and establish different timezones for themselves, and you have to adjust your watch constantly as you go from one place to another. Residents can develop a sort of mental time-sickness if they become too confused and thrown off-balance by constantly changing time-zones.

All of this is interesting from a creative perspective, but from a science fiction perspective it made very little sense. It's more of a gimmicky way for society to evolve than one with coherence. The quirkiness of this construct makes very little sense from an economic perspective. Obviously, a city with a sky of artificial light would be burning tremendous amounts of money on energy versus one that had none. Particularly illogical is the proliferation of individual and branded (for sale) timelines. Dividing the day up into hours, minutes and seconds and universalizing it is an aspect of economic conformity and commoditization. Slaves of course did not need time, they were always on call. Farmers and hunters follow the rhythm of the sun and nature. Once you have "employees" you need them to show up at specific times for specific periods to use their labor for profit. Allowing people to run on their own individual timelines would utterly destroy this capitalistic system. Who would hire an employee that interprets 9am as being his noon? Or who adjusts her hours to run twice as long when she is at home?

The characters were mostly cardboard, with tormented pasts, and awkward interactions generating little attachment to them. The dusk zone didn't conjure up much spookiness. And the blending of the magical elements of fantasy into the storyline didn't even support pseudo-justification. Nothing in the story held together for me. ( )

A MAN OF SHADOWS by Jeff Noon is an alternate world story about John Nyquist, an alcoholic private eye, who is struggling through life when a missing persons case falls in his lap that the deeper Nyquist investigates, the more the truth reveals itself.
A fascinating world of two lands, a permanent daytime, called Dayzone, (created by more light bulbs that can be counted) and a permanent nighttime, called Nocturna, (completely with artificially created constellations) and the world in between, the dangerous Dusk space. Time is also fabricated, with people living within different times each day, as if time is a commodity, not just a reality. Nyquist floats through everyone else's time and pays for it by constantly forcing his way through his own confusion and dodging insanity. Mind-bending by nature, A MAN OF SHADOWS is told through Nyquist's eyes, so the reader's grasp of this world is like how one interprets an expressionist or even an abstract painting; our perception fills in the blanks of information that don't exist in the painting to inform us of our understanding. A MAN OF SHADOWS takes Nyquist's thoughts and perceptions to introduce the unique world of the book, but the reader must complete their understanding on their own. Noon's ability to create a scene's mood and emotion is a delight to read, all the while making Nyquist and all of his alcohol induced haziness a likable hero that the reader roots for.
Unlike anything I've read before, A MAN OF SHADOWS is a thought provoking tale layered with some wonderful and mysterious scifi imagery that really comes to power, perception, and family and what's most important.
Thank you to Angry Robot, Jeff Noon, and Netgalley for a copy of this book in exchange for an honest review! ( )