We know what we are to expect of Mr Noisy when we are greeted on its opening pages by the central character reading aloud the very work of which he is part. For indeed, this is no simple parable about a person who makes too much noise – the racket Hargreaves rails against here is that of the piece itself. And so begins this cautionary tale on what he sees as the excesses and frivolity of metafiction.
Of course, in order to tackle the supposed indiscipline he wishes to decry, Hargreaves must likewise make the text itself the object of our contemplation. The voice of Mr Noisy therefore booms across its landscape, just as did playful postmodernism across the literarylandscape of the time.
For the people of nearby Wobbletown, it is a voice both deafening and oppressive – a wearingly unrelenting bombardment which makes it nigh on impossible for them to experience day-to-day life as a stable and consistent unproblematised reality. Grown tired of this constant bellowed reference to the ultimate status of their world as fiction – and, we might add,compelled by the genre of the piece to act - the townsfolk agree that something must be done.
Hargreaves obliges with a fitting resolution, and in a deft appropriation of Pirandello’s Six Characters, he employs this supporting cast of locals to march the author out of the text and restore the reliable narrator. Or, as the story puts it, to make Mr Noisy more quiet.
Hargreaves’ aim here is, of course, to turn the tools and techniques of metafiction upon itself, hoping that in doing so he will banish forever from storytelling what he regards as its smug and artless horseplay. However, such is his mastery of the very antics he so despises that they never seem more at home in fiction than when it is he who employs them.
Despite his own hankering for a return to a more simple, more refined moral and literary universe, Hargreaves cannot silence his gift.