"Coyote looks at the young girl. Her face is very beautiful. He feels like a bee, drawn to that sight, that perfume. So tempting. He doesn't know where to look. He looks over to the trees of Alexandra Park. Does no good. He has to look back. Those sparkling eyes of green, they look just like two flowers staring deep into him. The girl's young and full lips, like two trembling petals. 'Kiss me,' she says. This girl must be eleven years old at the most, but Coyote's lips cannot help but descend to hers, tasting the pollen. He can feel her tongue pushing deep into his throat..."
Coyote, Black Cab driver, renegade, and unknowing carrier of the plague into a future Manchester which becomes a battleground between dreams and reality.
In Pollen, Jeff Noon weaves a complex enchantment of past and future, myth and gritty detail, that plays on the most insidious of our present fears. Are we losing ourselves to the escapist charms of Virtual Reality? Will Nature rebel against our kind and reclaim her domain? Will we become monstrous victims of our own science and technology?
Many of the techniques of future zone writing are employed here. Strange half-humans become emblematic of the less palatable sides of our nature, and inhabit a wired city where the price of convenience is Big Brother control. But Noon handles it with humour - a hippy DJ called Gumbo YaYa with just as scary omniscience, battles Columbus, a cab controller, and his cop sidekick Kracker.
And all to a background of sneezing, as the pollen count soars to unimaginable levels...
In 1995 Jeff Noon read from Pollen on Radio One in the UK from Monday 30th October, and also at bookshops around the country.
Jeff Noon was also online with state51 to answer questions live on Friday 3rd November at 16.00 GMT. You can read the questions and answers.
We have details of this and other works by Jeff Noon
from Ringpull, the publishers of Pollen. And you can buy Pollen from Amazon.co.uk.
