I read a book!
This Christmas instead of gorging on my mothers latest wannabe Georgette Heyers I had a literary nostalgia-fest and read a bunch of 70’s sf books including the Phillip K. Dick novel A Scanner Darkly. Like all of Dick’s work much concerned with identity and reality and which is which. Scanner draws very explicitly on a time in Dick’s life when he’d stopped writing or pretty much anything but downing huge quantities of amphetamines and hanging out with other users.
The world of the novel is surprisingly realistic in its depth of throwaway detail, these people live and breath even though the whole point of the book seems to be to throw doubt on whether their reality can ever be known. The POV of its protagonist, Bob Arctor, disintegrates further with every passing paragraph, an undercover narcotics agent spying on himself in a suit of many faces, mind slowly split asunder by a future drug, the mysterious substance D. The ending has a POV shift from narrow third person (multiple) to seemingly omniscient as the last few chapters describe Bob (now effectively brain dead and renamed Bruce) going through a rehab programme. In the final pages it’s revealed that Bob and his addiction were all part of a plan to infiltrate the rehbilitation clinics, which have been manufacturing substance D. Bruce follows a suggestion, apparently given as casual dating advice in one of his early debriefing sessions, and hides a flower of the plant from which D is extracted to give to the friend Bob had known as Donna.
It seems a bleak tale posing the classic moral dilemma of whether using people as pawns to be sacrificed in the war against drugs, or in any war is justified. But as with Normal Again there’s a coda, an afterword in which Dick dedicates the novel to his drug user friends 'who were punished entirely too much for what they did' and lists the forms of their destruction. This epilogue could be read as completely independent from the main story but if not (and given that story’s constant concern with its own unreliability it probably isn’t) the novel for all its bleakness begins to read as an attempt to invest those broken lives and minds with some kind of meaning, a dark kind of solace. I think the DVD of the movie comes out in February, I’d like to see it.
The world of the novel is surprisingly realistic in its depth of throwaway detail, these people live and breath even though the whole point of the book seems to be to throw doubt on whether their reality can ever be known. The POV of its protagonist, Bob Arctor, disintegrates further with every passing paragraph, an undercover narcotics agent spying on himself in a suit of many faces, mind slowly split asunder by a future drug, the mysterious substance D. The ending has a POV shift from narrow third person (multiple) to seemingly omniscient as the last few chapters describe Bob (now effectively brain dead and renamed Bruce) going through a rehab programme. In the final pages it’s revealed that Bob and his addiction were all part of a plan to infiltrate the rehbilitation clinics, which have been manufacturing substance D. Bruce follows a suggestion, apparently given as casual dating advice in one of his early debriefing sessions, and hides a flower of the plant from which D is extracted to give to the friend Bob had known as Donna.
It seems a bleak tale posing the classic moral dilemma of whether using people as pawns to be sacrificed in the war against drugs, or in any war is justified. But as with Normal Again there’s a coda, an afterword in which Dick dedicates the novel to his drug user friends 'who were punished entirely too much for what they did' and lists the forms of their destruction. This epilogue could be read as completely independent from the main story but if not (and given that story’s constant concern with its own unreliability it probably isn’t) the novel for all its bleakness begins to read as an attempt to invest those broken lives and minds with some kind of meaning, a dark kind of solace. I think the DVD of the movie comes out in February, I’d like to see it.