Book Review 13: "A Scanner Darkly"

A Scanner Darkly
Phillip K Dick
278 Pages
Vintage Books

OK....so I have been trying to follow through on reading Phillip K. Dicks whole catalogue but it is challenging to do so. The nice thing is that every Borders carries 7-10 of his paperbacks and so there is always a selection since he has about 30 or so books in print. This time I grabbed “A Scanner Darkly” which I knew had been made into a movie but the only thing I remembered was an exploding head. Which showed when i did my research that I did not know anything as i was thinking of the movie “Scanners”. This book was made into a movie in 2006 and evidently it flopped. I will, however go out and rent it now after reading the book.

I did not know what to expect of the book and it was some dense reading. 50 pages into it I had been introduced to 6 or 7 characters but without realizing it I had only really been introduced to 5 or 6 since one guy was the two main characters. The main guy was a drug dealer and was also a drug officer working on behalf of the government.

The drug in question is Substance D or “Death” and it appears a lot of our nation is hooked on it as the government battles its sale, distribution and consumption. Our hero lives in a house with two or three other people (one gets carted away early) and they have strung out conversations covering numerous aspects of life and they all have strong opinions. Anyone who has ever been in a room with several stoned people discussing anything can relate and the dialogue rings true and hard. The America portrayed is frayed and disoriented itself and you are never sure whether the government is the enemy or a protector. The book through it’s characters makes a lot of societal statements including one of the guys remembering a girl who told him, ““If I would have known it was harmless, I would have killed it myself”. This kind of becomes their summary for all that is wrong in society and in the Bush/Cheney era it resonates.

This substance D over time causes the lobes of the brain to stop seeing things in the same way and so presenting distorted reality to the person on the drugs. This lobe separation appears to be irreperable and the main character who becomes an addict in order to bust the bad guys ends up a destroyed husk. There is no question that this is a bad thing. Everyone seems to know the drug gorks you out but everyone keeps taking it.

In the middle of the book I thought paranoia was the main theme as the main characters were always thinking that pople were watching them, coming to get them, manipulating them, using them for some grand ineffable purpose. The paranoia is as well written as anything I have ever read. It resonated and even reading it kind of made you uneasy as you contemplated the filter that you view everything through and the spector of being controlled or victimized. By the end of the book you realize that is was not paranoia. The scenes where the drug officer part of his personality are watching videos of the drug dealer are creepy.

Equally creepy is the place they take him away for “rehab” which is not really rehab at all...just some place to store bodies until they die and then you find out that maybe...they have a more sinister purpose, You also find out that what happened to our main character was no accident but part of some bigger government plan including his addiction and including his relationship to his girlfriend. They take hinm to a “rehab” center run by the people who are dealing the stuff, hoping he will recover and gain information for them. His girlfriend Donna is the most striking character as you start to see her as this pathetic strung out whore...morphing to physically remote girlfriend... morphing to drug agent/actor and person full of self knowledge and self loathing.

I am normally not all that big on authors notes but this book intruiged me so much that I had to read them and after all, they were not that long. The notes are a homage to his friends who he based the book on who had all been killed or badly gorked out do to drug use and and exhortation that drug use is a “choice”. It was kind of touching and kind of sad...but most of all kind of scary that his experiences could lead to this book.

The book was one of the best things I have read in a long time and is much better then his other work I have read to date. Troubling and disturbing with sweeping themes and stark conclusions Dick contemplates the world where the technology allows us all to be watched...and sometimes used. No happy endings here. Just a lot of questions.
9 Slingers on the 10 scale!