A Scanner Darkly - Philip K. Dick > Reviews > Delight in madness

Author's product rating:   

Would you listen to it again?	Absolutely
Story	Outstanding
Characters	Outstanding
Listenability	Once you start it, you won't be able to switch it off!
How does it compare to audio works by the same author?	Excellent

Advantages:	BRILLIANT BRILLIANT BRILLIANT BRILLIANT BRILLIANT BRILLIANT BRILLIANT BRILLIANT  -  Did i also say it was BRILLIANT
Disadvantages:	Yeah, right

Recommend to potential buyers:

yes

Full review

This book is brilliant! Let me say that at the beginning. Ok, ok, I love Philip K Dick (though I should like to announce I loved his stuff before he became fashionable – just had to be said, sorry). Someone in reply to an earlier opinion of mine that I should include more about the story (in regards Alien) well I’m not sure that I can bring myself to do so. It’s nothing personal and it’s wonderful that someone takes the time to make an observation but it’s this simple: I don’t want to ruin it for you. Admittedly as with all PKD’s work there’s an element of superfluity as to the story but it’s still important (to me anyway, I’m an amateur novelist hence a storyteller).

But I shall get back on track! [do I hear great sighs of relief?] PKD always writes about places that are eerily familiar and yet entirely alien. He is seems (or was being dead - alas) obsessed with insanely totalitarian regimes and here there is another one. The story exists in a world of madness, where drug enforcement officers are the same as drug addicts (they work anonymously so the authorities don’t even know who they are) and left to die in the same manner. Saying this I realise that I may be giving you an unfair picture of the novel. It is a hilarious novel. It is rare that I find myself in hysterics (and I was, and am when I re-read it). It revels in the gloriously insane world of drugs; though it morphs into something else; that something else is intensely, heartbreakingly poignant. It is hard to explain. Somewhere the novel moves into more realistic ground though the tone is almost exactly the same. PKD was himself a drug-taker and at the end of the novel there is a list of all the friends that he lost to drugs and the damage it did to those that survived. PKD survived best and he had permanent pancreatic damage, and so here is a man who knew what he was writing about.

But as I said: as the novel moves on there enters a sense of pervading inequity. The lives of the characters are at first sight nearly whimsical; some characters are built up and mytholised then slowly broken down. We see behind the facades. There is a peeling away of layers so that we find something new and shocking in what is happening. What we first laugh at so uncontrollably at becomes melancholy. At the very beginning we laugh at the delusions of a minor character but as our protagonist breaks down and descends into madness, he is sent away to be cured and yet there is no cure, it is all circular… it is heartrending…

It is also a strange novel because it is not some conventional drug book that either abhors drugs or seems to find them cool and fashionable. PKD reaches a place that other books don’t seem to reach. Here he touches upon truths that are almost too ethereal to grasp and yet he teases them out. Ultimately that there is fun and illusion in the use of drugs, and the two are entirely intertwined. The spiralling sadness towards the end becomes more poignant because these characters are real and all of them are human. Though some are insane, some are delusional, some are dangerous, each and every character exists so totally in the novel-world. We are seduced and our emotions are manipulated with such consummate skill that by the end you want to cry; cry for the insanity of the world; cry for the terrible way people are treated; cry because there is no more novel left to read.

Finally though there is a slight ray of hope. In amongst the madness there is the hint of change, though PKD doesn’t go in for any sentimental ending; if anything the reader is given the option to make up their own mind and take away from the novel what they put in, which depends upon how they feel about the subject and the characters.

Personally I took everything I could from the novel; I let myself wring out every drop of emotion whether it was mirth, horror or sadness. I feel enriched by having come into contact with PKD and how few authors can truly admit to that?