The last time I read a novel by Jeff Noon, I was living at home, attending University (an MA in Philosophy, thanks) and a good nine years away from meeting my wife. It was so long ago that an Ericsson flip phone and a Pentium PC were the height of cool. As much as I loved Noon’s Vurt-verse, his early 21st Century novels didn’t appeal – they came off as literary rather than speculative, and in those ancient days, young Ian viewed literary fiction as deeply dull. How times have changed.

So, picking up Gogmagog by Jeff Noon and his co-author Steve Beard (the first novel in the Ludwich Chronicles) was nostalgic, even thrilling. Thankfully, Jeff Noon—older and possibly wiser—didn’t let me down. This isn’t a Vurt novel, but in many ways, it’s as innovative.

Gogmagog, on the surface, is the sort of epic quest fantasy we’ve all read before. A cranky ex-sailor, Cady Meade, now in her late 70s, reluctantly decides to take a robotic butler and his ward – a 10-year-old girl about to sprout antennas – on a treacherous trip to Ludwich, where they will traverse the ghostly corpse of a dead dragon. Along the way, they will confront phantasms, sea monsters, demons, aristocrats, and resurrected souls encased in clay.

On the level of pure plot and storytelling, this is a blast to read. Shit happens at regular intervals; set-pieces are dramatic, exciting and dangerous. Cady Meade is what you get if you mix Jackson Lamb (a heavy drinker, foul-mouthed and poor hygiene) with someone who gives a shit. She’s wonderful. But so are all the characters. Like Cady, none of them are as they seem.

The world-building is delightfully chaotic, not in a slapdash, nonsensical way, but in a fascinating, crunchy, and clearly deliberate manner. As the title suggests, Cady’s reality draws from Medieval literature, but there are also splashes of Jewish and Arabic mythology. It goes beyond influences, though. The Kethran Isles has the hallmarks of a secondary world… but one where Doctor John Dee pops up and plays a pivotal role in the development of the society. In other words, it’s never clear whether this is a secondary world, an altered version of our world, or both. There’s a wrinkle late in the novel – an origin story for the Kindred, the tribes that comprise the Kethran Isles – that, rather than resolve things, only complicates matters. It’s the sort of world-building that subverts the typical Tolkien-inflected approach in the mould of M. John Harrison, China Meiville or, more recently, Alex Pheby.

It might have taken close to three decades, but I’ve fallen back in love with the work of Jeff Noon.