Ok, here goes.
I have a strange and powerful relationship with clothes. It?s visceral, carnal; real love, equally real loathing. [nice turn of phrase] I could browse the whole spectrum of human emotions, just rifling through the reels [uncommon word, can be jarring (as in, I had to look it up!)] in a dressmakers? shop. Clothes are intoxicating. Close your eyes and breathe slowly. Listen. A swirling bell-shaped skirt, peppermint satin, cool, light, fluid, rippling over your legs in the summer sunshine. A chocolate velvet party dress, shirred bronze in candlelight, brushing your face like the wings of a moth for an instant before falling into place about your body with the warm weight of luxury. [good, very concrete] A smoky grey felt glove lying on a polished oak floor, slim-fingered, reposing in a gesture of languid assent. [maybe a bit much ...]
Architecture lends us [builds us, surely? gives us?] a man-made world, a skilful illusion borne out of our innate fear of abandonment. Our minds are dwarfed and derailed by the complexity of Nature?s own constructive genius, we struggle like a child in an 11+ exam required to ?continue the pattern 98723436287678891467?. Our intuition tells us that randomness is a falsehood and that there must be a formula, a logic, and tells us also that our brains are simply too rudimentary to perceive it yet ? millions of years lie between us and the truth. To second-guess evolution is a dangerous game ? would you hand a four year old a butcher knife? Our deepest fears, dramatised most eloquently in the Book of Genesis, revolve around the fear of human beings acquiring and inevitably misusing the mathematical language of Nature. [really? or is our narrator a bit unreliable here?] When God threw that apple at Newton, he [God, or Newton?] should have picked it up and examined it ? he might have seen the marks of Adam?s teeth. [nice]
So we inhabit a crudely pixellated landscape of flat colours and right angles, a world chopped up like a toddler?s dinner into bite-sized blocks, smoothly interacting before our eyes like a perfect game of Tetris. [nice, but I'm not sure about the interacting] Our urban super-reality is designed to support and enclose us in an illusion of safety ? buildings define our limits, they mark out our territory and direct our movements. They are the unblinking stewards on the periphery of our vision, shouting out instructions; dress codes, appropriate noise levels, a visual autocue of the expectations which lie within. Buildings can hold us dear in an unending embrace, keep us warm and dry, shield us from the terrifying complexity and sheer scale of ?outside?, or they can grip, punish and isolate us when we transgress. And when they crumble, our instinctive selves coil and leap with fear and fascination.
[Overall. Ok, you've got some good ideas here. Your writing style is interesting, your sentences are well-formed, and their length and shape varies. The first paragraph has lots of concrete detail, despite being an internal monologue.
But - I'm not sure this works as the opening of a novel. If our narrator is autistic, would she start a conversation this way? This seems more like a (well-written, interesting) opinion piece, than the start of a novel.
Also, what's with the jump from clothes to architecture? I assume you come back to clothes? If not, the leap is weird.
I know, by doing 1st person, you get around show-don't-tell a bit, but it's still kinda a rule. I don't think I'd open with this - I'd open with action, let us get to know our narrator a bit, before she starts talking this way. And, if this pov is stuff you're going to be showing us in the novel (which I think is a good idea, I think you have some good thoughts here, why not show us this stuff, rather than tell us?]
[second part]
At 9.23 on the morning of 17th April 2008 officers of the Environmental Health Team at Exeter City Council rang the doorbell of the property known as ?Cherry Trees?, 16 Fortescue Road, Pennsylvania, Exeter. They rang the prescribed three times and left a decent interval before backing up and barging the door open with a single practised shove. [really? they just shoved the door open?] The sight that greeted the three men resembled nothing any of them had ever encountered in a combined total of 47 years? service. These men had cleared countless wrecked and abandoned homes, had overseen the removal of a multitude of dead and dying human bodies in various stages of decrepitude and decay. They had shovelled out hundreds of dead rats and shooed away enough stray cats to populate a cats? home twice over. They had taken responsibility for the tasteful and swift disposal of skip-loads of detritus of every possible description ? beer cans, war medals, baby dolls, oven trays caked in sausage fat, postcards, leather brogues, hamster cages, dentures, pizza boxes, armchairs with their innards spilling out, newspapers old and new, kipper ties, crutches, jewellery boxes - every imaginable by-product of a human life suddenly derailed. [maybe too much? I'd rather keep just the last one.] They were, as any one of them would have confirmed with a laconic roll of his eyes, not easily shocked.
Behind this particular front door, however, there awaited none of the standard horrors for which the seasoned EHO automatically braces himself. There were no saucepans of rotting food, no kitchen bin over-running with maggots, no swollen corpse, no bemused [bemused? really? not frantic? ah, right, it can also mean puzzled, not just wry or tolerant amusement ... hmmm.] and underfed pet cowering in a corner. Instead the team?s eyes were met with a blazing cacophony of psychedelic colours and textures [their eyes were met with textures? ouch!] that made them stop and blink in momentary confusion. The room wasn?t dirty or neglected, far from it. The door opened into a generous square sitting room with a deep bay window and high Victorian ceiling. Every inch of the walls, floor and ceiling of this room was covered with fabric of every possible hue [every inch can't be covered with fabric of every possible hue - you mean all the hues are here, right?] -?there was jewel-green velvet, plum damask satin, burnt orange, magenta, sunflower, ashes of roses. As the eye began to acclimatise, it was possible to discern the familiar shapes of furniture ? a three-piece suite, a coffee table, all swathed in layer upon layer of assorted material. Here and there about the room were tall piles of clothing, not the drab heaps of greying laundry the men were accustomed to seeing in the houses they worked in ? one of the certain hallmarks of an inhabitant ?not coping? -but seemingly brand-new, colourful and varied. These weren?t tossed randomly, they were sculptural[ly arranged?].
?Some sort of fucking fruit cake? one of the men muttered, clearly rattled. This sort of thing wasn?t normal. You knew where you were with dead rats and mouldy kebab boxes. You clean up, you get on the blower, you pack up your kit and move on to the next one. [nice]
His colleague looked up to reply in kind, then gave a strangulated half-scream as his eyes snagged on something behind the man, in the hall leading off the room they stood in. A perpendicular line -?knotted, like a rope ? and a humped shape hanging from it, ominously still.
?Jesus! I think it?s a woman. Stanley knife, quick,? said Ron, the man who?d seen her.
They cut the woman down and laid her down, Ron?s fingers jabbing into the pressure point on her neck before her back hit the velvet-cushioned floor.
?She?s alive, but only just. Get an ambulance. And ring the boss. Now! Stupid bloody woman..? To men who spent their professional lives up against the seamy underbelly of life, and witnessing the astonishing resilience of those who survive it, an attempted suicide in an environment devoid of the usual signs of poverty and failure seemed an obscene, impossibly self-indulgent. [too much. this is concrete, don't distract us with theory. suicide is surely always stupid? Oh, also, 'an obscene, impossibly self-indulgent' what? Or don't you want the 'an'?]
Ron gazed at the rope the woman had used. It was an attractive thing, carefully constructed out of at least a hundred small strips of cloth ? there was ruched chocolate shot silk, red polka dotted satin, pink corduroy, the recognisable half of a child?s dressy lace collar. It crossed his mind that it wouldn?t look out of place in a circus routine or a magic show, being hauled out of a top hat to the gasps of delighted children. The scraps of cloth had been neatly knotted together by small and agile hands. Ron stared down at his own blunt fingers.
?It must have taken ages,? he said, hopelessly. ?Why would anyone do this??
[Ok, I really like this bit - this makes me want to read more. Your dialogue is good. Other than the one theoretical bit, this really grabs. As before, your writing is clear and readable and interesting. This would work as an opening scene - I'm sure you've got other bits that would work, too, but you could open here, and then go back or whatever? But yeah, this voice is good, you're writing well and concretely.
I'd be happy to see more of your stuff - you have my email address, if you want to do it that way? If you are comfortable critiquing stuff, I might well ask the same of you, I'm starting to produce more these days, although I have a few people from my writing class and so on that I can do stuff with.]
I'll read and comment on other people's opinions (didn't want mine shaped by theirs), but I'm being kicked off the 'puter by an impatient 7-year-old right now ... hope this helps ...