Five Novels of the 1960s & 70s by Philip K. Dick: Martian Time-Slip / Dr. Bloodmoney / Now Wait for Last Year / Flow My Tears, the Policeman Said / A Scanner Darkly
edited by Jonathan Lethem
The second half of the second volume of the Philip K. Dick Library of America editions takes us out of Dick's shockingly prolific 1960s period into the 1970s, with Flow My Tears, the Policeman Said (1974) and A Scanner Darkly (1977). (As this is part of my series about books that won the Hugo, and books related to books that won the Hugo, I should note that Flow My Tears was a finalist for Best Novel in 1975, Dick's third and final Hugo nomination.* It lost to The Dispossessed.) Both of these books are about drugs. Not that Dick hadn't tackled drug use before (drugs that alter reality played key roles in The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch, Martian Time-Slip, and Now Wait for Last Year), but A Scanner Darkly in particular represents his deepest engagement with the reality of drug use.
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Collection published: 2008 Novels originally published: 1974-77 Acquired: August 2014 Read: June 2022 |
Flow My Tears is good, solid, minor Dick. It's a lot like, say, Ubik, in that it starts great but ends up petering out once the explanations arrive. A television celebrity (there are a lot of variety show hosts in Dick's novels; their continued cultural relevance is one of his predictions that did not really pan out) wakes up one day to find that he doesn't exist and never has. How does he navigate such a world? Especially considering that the United States has become a police state where being without papers is a crime. Jason Taverner moves from encounter to encounter with people who don't know who he is... and as he goes on, it seems that his original reality is breaking through. It's a great idea, but I didn't find the ultimate "explanation" of what had happened very interesting or convincing. It might have been better to just not explain it!
The paratext here indicates Dick's goal was to write a novel about different kinds of love, inspired by a drug trip Dick had where he experienced pure love. To be honest, I would not have picked up on this theme myself, but upon being told about it, it's a fascinating one: we see selfish love, sexual love, self-less love, animal love, incestual love, delusional love. What doesn't quite work, for the theme or the novel as a whole, is that I didn't really find that Taverner had a meaningful revelation about love himself. The revelation in Now Wait for Last Year, for example, was better handled.
A Scanner Darkly, on the other hand, was a very different treatment of drugs. (I actually have read it before, back in 2007. Like all of the Dick I read before this year, I read it because of the movie... but I never actually got around to watching the movie!) While most of Dick's drug novels focus on an idea that drugs can literally alter reality, even sending you through time, A Scanner Darkly focuses on perceptual reality. Maybe that should be a comedown, since that's the things drugs actually can do, but Dick handles it well here. So well you maybe don't even need the drugs, actually!
A Scanner Darkly is about an undercover drug cop who becomes an absolute master at segregating his two identities: Fred the cop and Bob Arctor the dealer. This is because one of the drugs he's own is separating the two hemispheres of his brain... but it also feels like a riff on the idea that we are different things to different people, and you don't need any drugs to be that. Those are the best parts of the book, Fred hearing about Bob and having to pretend he's not Bob, and in a sense, not pretending he's not Bob, because Bob is someone else, and Fred's reality slowly begins to crack. But overall there's a lot to like here; as usual for Dick, the characters maybe are types, but they feel like real people, and the imagery is vivid. There's a lot of dialogue here, and it's excellent stuff, it feels like real people talking. I have no way of knowing how accurate the glimpse into 1970s drug culture is—or, indeed, drug culture of any era—but it feels real to me. The twists and turns are good, there are good jokes (the one about the Planet of the Apes films is hilarious), the ending for Donna is haunting, the author's note at the end is very well put. A lot of Dick novels start well but don't really stick the landing. This one does.
So, as I continue to enjoy them, I am on to the third and final LOA Dick, which collects his infamous VALIS trilogy plus one other volume, though I'll take a bit of a pause to read some other stuff first...
I read an old winner of the Hugo Award for Best Novel every year, plus other Hugo-related books that interest me. Next up in sequence: A Maze of Death by Philip K. Dick
* In addition to winning Best Novel for The Man in the High Castle, Dick was a finalist for "Faith of Our Fathers" in Best Novelette in 1968.
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