snpmurray's Full Review: Philip K. Dick - Flow My Tears, the Policeman Said
Winner of the John W. Campbell Award for Best Science Fiction Novel of the Year, “Flow My Tears” is a voyage through one mans bizarre madness in a strange near future.
Set in the period immediately following a second civil war in the Untied States, Jason Taverner is a successful television celebrity. He awakes one morning in a dingy hotel room still wearing his own clothes and carrying plenty of money, but otherwise stripped of all forms of identity.
To be without identity in what is now a totalitarian police state is a ticket to a concentration camp. Naturally, Taverner is most distressed.
Where most people would panic and go to pieces, Taverner has special resources to fall back on. He is a genetically superior human, made not born. As such, his brain and body rise to any challenge, even such a devastating loss as he has just faced. Taverner picks himself up and promptly goes about acquiring all the false identity papers he will need to start discovering who took his identity away.
Alas, it is rather worse than he supposed. No mere theft of contents of billfold is this. Taverner calls friends and colleagues, none of whom recall his existence at all. Jason Taverner it seems has been thrust into a world where he has never even existed.
As the police begin to become aware of Taverner and his case, they are no less intrigued than he as to how this occurred…how could someone exist outside of the rigid ties of the totalitarian big brother state? Secretly tagging Taverner, his movements are tracked traced and pondered as he explores the world in which he finds himself, in search of self and soul.
How can it be that Jason Taverner’s past has been erased?
Why do none of his friends remember his existence?
Can Taverner find the answers before the Police throw him in a forced labor camp?
The answers lie in the wild ride that is reading “Flow my Tears, The Policeman Said”
This novel, a quick read, is blessed with a lot of positives and just a few little glitches as far as my personal opinion goes. Whilst it provides the usual array of bizarre warpings of selfhood, reality and substratum of sanity so common to Dick’s work, the plot does not quite pull together at the end, leaving one feel a little cheated in the reading. Perhaps he rushed it. Who knows, or in Dick’s case, dares to dream!
From the very beginning of this story it was clear that we were going to be treated to a vision of a society dramatically different to our own. As is the case with the very best science fiction, the author completely refuses to explain the details of this other society, only litters the entire novel with shadowy evidence of its differences. The common means of transport are flip-flaps and quibbles. No description of these vessels is further entertained, but from the fact that a journey from Vegas to L.A. takes twenty minutes, we learn they are at least rather fast!
Likewise it is not until the last portion of the novel that any explanation is given as to why the police and National Guard (who now control society) surround all university campuses with armed guards. They just do, that is just part of this other world.
I have always thought this to be a superior style of writing for science fiction, permitting the reader to fill in the blanks with their own imagination, instead of hundreds of tedious pages of “fat book” science fiction where the author feels it necessary to provide us with verbose technical descriptions of every item.
It is further testament to Dick’s quality as a writer that one may observe his judicious use of detail elsewhere in this book. Dick puts the details where they add the most color to the book, spattering them in a Pollock-esque illusion of randomness, with an eye to colorful saturation of the reader’s mental faculties. Minor characters, mentioned almost in passing have vivid descriptions. This lends weight to the major characters making the passing descriptions. Such deep background as the smell and color of the money, the turbidity of the smog…all these little drops of color create a very four-dimensional piece of writing, and this made the book a real pleasure to read.
The title of this book quotes a sad piece by one of the western worlds first “singer songwriters,” John Dowland (1563-1626.) Dick has a character hail Dowland as the first man ever to write a piece of innovative music. High praise indeed, and perhaps a little over the top, but this serves to introduce us to a major and minor chord in the themes of this book…grief and innovation.
This book concerns itself continually with the subject of grief. Examined from many angles through every major character, the issues involved with all the stages of grief are explored. Obviously, Taverner has to deal with loss of selfhood; also with loss of status and social position.
Kathy Nelson, a young insane forger who makes papers for Taverner is locked in an insanity state resulting from denial of the death of her spouse. Kathy created for herself a complex delusion that her husband was imprisoned in a camp, and would be released if she snitched on enough students seeking forged papers to the police. Kathy only snitches on the clients she takes a dislike to. Unable to touch her grief, she compensates for the loss of its work of grace.
Felix Buckman, Police General must eventually deal with the loss of his sister, who is also his incestuous spouse, through her drug addictions. A hardened analytical left-brained detective, Buckman is amazed at himself in experiencing tears of grief at all, and does not know what to do with the emotion. In his otherwise granite castle of mind, grief comes to Buckman as a strange visitor, to create a fugue which will effect all his decisions and reasoning. The effects of this grief will have enormous implications for Jason Taverner.
Ruth Rae, ex-lover of Jason Taverner must grieve the loss of her youth. The re-appearance of Taverner in her life in his time of need, remarkably preserved by his genetic code, only serves to heighten for her the losses she is being forced to endure by the passage of time. Ruth Rae is clearly failing to survive her grief, without the protection of denial or the catharsis of acceptance, she is being killed by it.
All of this Philip K. Dick manages with an interesting balance of perspective. Dick gives a left brain analysis of a process perhaps best understood through right brain interpretation. Indeed, his characters provide him with outlets for his evident ability to experience both faculties with equal depth. In this novel the female characters describe their grief through parables, analogies and other modes of open communication. The male characters all lock up their responses, and analyze them, experiencing them in the left brain mode. It all works well; this is a most memorable feature of the book, this grief-work.
Having stated that John Dowland was the first innovator in music, I was amused to see Dick describe Karl Stockhausen as the next person to breathe originality into music. I have always enjoyed Stockhausen, a truly baffling musician, and it is unsurprising to learn that Philip Dick was a fan of his style. Innovation runs as a minor chord of commentary throughout the book…..for example the genetic cohort from which Taverner springs, known as the “sixes” are renowned for their ability to innovate, both physically emotionally and mentally.
Philip Dick is clearly of the opinion that innovation is a bohemian business. Whilst such persons as he can create some interesting new ideas, bohemians seem slow to recognize the equally innovative lives of mothers, fathers, bricklayers, and other more pedestrian creators in our society. An observation, nothing more.
Whilst I enjoyed reading this book for all the reasons listed above, I have to say that I found the resolution at the ending of the book to be somewhat stupid. When one considers that this novel is essentially a mystery, and as such, one reads it in part for the thrill of figuring out what might be the resolution of said mystery (what has happened to Taverner’s past, in this case) it has to be said that the ending cheats the reader of any sense of synthesis.
What has actually happened to Taverner I will not reveal, but enough to say, when I found out, I sniffed in disgust that I had been led up the path I had, only to reach a summit with so crappy a view at the end.
>On October 11 the television star Jason Taverner is so famous that 30 million viewers eagerly watch his prime-time show. On October 12 Jason Taverner...More at Buy.com Marketplaces
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