A nice detail.

I know it's a little detail, something without much importance. However, I did like the sentence that appears right before the first page of the story with the following sentence:

A young boy puts a feather into his mouth...

The last sentence of the book is:

...a young boy takes a feather out of his mouth.

It provides for some consistency and sense of closure. As I said, I know it's not important at all. It's a little detail but... I liked it.

Feathers?

I find it quite strange that Jeff Noon resorted to such a low-tech mechanism as feathers to allow the access to a virtual world. It just feels weird. It's difficult to visualize that in a future where humans can immerse themselves in an alternate reality, the tool used to do is just color-coded feathers (?!). Wouldn't it make more sense to "jack into" the virtual world, literally, by using a plug inserted into our bodies? Heck, if one chooses to go the low-tech route, even pills would have been a better choice, I think.

Vurt

A science fiction novel written by British author Jeff Noon that won the Arthur C. Clarke Award in 1994. The book tells the story of Scribble and his gang, the Stash Riders, as they search for his missing sister (and lover), Desdemona. Set in an imaginary version of Manchester, in a society that revolves around Vurt, a hallucinogenic shared reality that can be accessed by sucking on color-coded feathers.

It has been somehow compared to William Gibson's famous Neuromancer novel, which popularized the science fiction genre known as cyberpunk. Nevertheless, other reviews chose to emphasize its implausible science and "wild and kaleidoscopic" yet unsatisfying plot.

Technical description:
Title: Vurt.
Author: Jeff Noon.
Publisher: St. Martin's Griffin.
Edition: New York (USA), 1993.
Pages: 342 pages.
ISBN: 978-0-312-14144-8