Great Books for Teenage Boys: No. 4 & No. 5 - The Man In The High Castle / A Scanner Darkly

 

OK Ariel, I know this is long overdue, but at least you get two recommendations this time...

The Man In The High Castle, by Philip K. Dick.

And...

A Scanner Darkly, by Philip K. Dick. I couldn’t decide between them, so… read them both.

Philip K. Dick is the North American Borges (and if that doesn’t mean anything to you Ariel, don’t worry, Jorge Luis Borges is coming up soon…) Philip K. Dick (like Borges) is obsessed with the nature of reality. Dick tries to look behind the surface of things (behind the cars and jobs and furniture, behind politics and status, jokes and gravity, faces and skin) - behind the assumptions we make without even noticing we’re making them. Dick thinks that when we think we’re looking at the world, we’re merely looking into a mirror that reflects our own beliefs and prejudices. Dick, like Borges, believed there was a world behind that mirror, hidden from us, that was infinite and strange. That contained patterns which connected the points of chaos we perceive as life.

And their main vices are, appropriately, mirror images of each other. Borges wrote too little (his collected fiction makes a single fat book). Dick wrote too much (over seventy titles).

Philip K. Dick couldn’t get his early attempts at “normal” novels published, so he ended up, almost accidentally, writing science fiction. (To fail at being normal is to succeed at being weird.) Science fiction was the only publishing genre that saw the deep peculiarity of his worldview as a virtue rather than a vice, but SF didn’t pay well. (Its word-rates assumed you were pumping out disposable industrial product, as many SF writers were.) And so Philip K. Dick wrote fast, on speed, for money. At his speediest, he wrote eleven books in two years. As a result, many of his books have wonderful philosophical ideas, undermined by clunky, first-draft prose.

The Man In The High Castle is one of the few books he had time to rewrite and polish, so it reads better than most of his work. (And it won him his only award, a Hugo). It’s an alternate-history novel, where the Allies have lost World War Two. It’s set in a Japanese-occupied America. There are rumours that a reclusive novelist has written a book which describes the real universe, in which the Allies won the war… The hero tries to track down the writer, and the book. You slowly realise that perhaps neither of these universes is our own…

His other best book, from later in his career, is A Scanner Darkly, but you’d want to be in the whole of your health to read it. A book about paranoia that’s so powerful it can induce paranoia, it stars a man who goes so far undercover to investigate a drugs ring that he ends up ordered to spy on himself. It may be the best book about drugs ever written.

The Man In The High Castle strips off layers of physical reality to see what lies behind. A Scanner Darkly does the same with our psychological reality.

Good luck out there.

Good luck in there. 

 

Memories Of A Small Tribe In Galway

Along with a few other writers (DBC Pierre, Howard Marks, Sebastian Horsley etc) I was asked to contribute some of my few surviving tattered memories to the current issue of Hot Press. The issue is a wonderfully exploitative and tacky DRUGS!!! special, with a coke-smeared model on the cover who happens to look a bit like the young Irish lingerie model, Katie French, who died recently after her coke-fueled 24th birthday party.

As the memories I contributed were from the same place and time as the Toasted Heretic gigs we've been discussing in the forum, I thought I'd repeat them here...

My earliest experience of drugs was as a member of a small tribe in Galway.

We would collect magic mushrooms in the traditional manner, on the sacred golf-course of Knocknacarra. Every season, Joe Seal, a priest of the tribe, would make magic mushroom wine. My first trip, the young men of the tribe gathered in a holy place in Salthill and drank deeply of mushroom tea. A heck of a lot of mushroom tea. Then we went to the Warwick. The night lasted several years, and I sank into the floor several inches whenever I lay down, which was often. Then it started raining in the Warwick. Then tribes of pygmies wandered across the dance floor.

It was unnerving, and many of our tribe fled. (Days later, we discovered that a busload of dwarves on holiday were staying in the Warwick: and that the place was so packed the condensation had been pouring from the ceiling.)

Some of us ended up in Spar, where one of our number demanded that the shopkeeper slice his Mars Bar into many slices with the bacon slicer. However, his urgent request was not understood, and our tribesman fled. Soon many of the tribesmen were in flight, through space and time. Several walked a number of miles out of town. One slept in a field. Another was found at dawn, still walking, past Spiddal, and was brought home by the forces of law and order.

They were the best days of our lives, and they destroyed many of us. Over the next few years, some of us achieved enlightenment. Some of us died. Joe Seal died in India. A girl I liked killed herself. A girl I loved lost her mind and never found it again, and is still lost. Quite a few of us ended up in psychiatric hospitals, or with terrible depressions… We didn't know what we were doing, we didn't take it seriously enough. As Philip K. Dick said of his friends, and of mine,

"They wanted to have a good time, but they were like children playing in the street; they could see one after another of them being killed - run over, maimed, destroyed - but they continued to play anyhow."

I have two very strong opinions on drugs. Those who are against drugs should take more of them: those who are for drugs should take less of them.  Most societies make sure that their young people take dangerous drugs in controlled circumstances, very rarely, and with an experienced guide to make sure they come back with new knowledge of themselves, and of their relationship to the universe. We neck anything that's going, head down to Abrakebabra, and fight. Few achieve enlightenment in Abrakebabra.

 

A note on the images in this post:

The first is a fabulous fractal freakout called "This Is Your Brain On Drugs", by the artist Sven Geier, who also works in the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California.

The second image is of Yapa, Joel, JJ, Posen and Albi, visiting London from the island of Tanna, at the southern tip of the island nation of Vanuatu. It is from the acclaimed Channel 4 documentary, Meet The Natives.

The third image is a crop of a digital landscape called "Enlightenment", created using Terragen by the Arizona artist Pat Goltz.