A Scanner Darkly (Paperback)

It tells two parallel stories, yet both are drawn from the same person; on one hand is Arctor, the undercover cop drawn into the world of Substance D (see all the other reviews) and Fred, the same undercover cop watching Arctor. Within these parallel lines are intense bouts of humour (to match Fear & Loathing) and even more intense bouts of paranoia (to match Ubik...well, not quite, but that would be a feat). As the book draws to its satisfying and yet ambiguous ending, it gathers pace and energy, and loses many of the musings of Dick on drugs and consumerism...

Well, in reality it doesn't, it just places these concepts in an altogether more subtle way. I will not endeavor to tell you how, since the joy of Dick is unravelling his plots, sub-plots, underlying themes and underlying-underlying themes. So, by the end of the book, you are simply boogled at what is presented: a typically Dickian dystopian near-reality.

However, just as this book is a parallel of itself, it is also a book of two halves, from start to finish. Unfortunately, the start reduces much of the impact of the book, in my eyes. Whilst amusing and hip, the first half is Dick the Polemic. Despite what he concludes in his epilogue/footnote, he is making radical assumptions with far reaching implications. For example, the notion of the junkie, which he was himself, and yet completly strips bear of humanity. When reading this, I was amazed that this was written by a drug addict, since the pedestal feel was so degrading to drug abusers. Much is the same for his blatant consumerist critique, which he has SUBTELY portrayed in other books with much more vehemance and power.

Ironically, all of the problems of the initial third of the book are swept away under the torrent of pure Dickian amazement; from the point on which Fred begins to watch Arctor, the book shifts into more classic Dick territory and leaves you bewildered an amazed and confused within his typical claustrophobic and hallucinatory power.

So, what is to be said? Well, I have tried to forget the polemics of this book, and take it with a pinch of salt. With this in mind, again Philip K Dick proved himself to be one of the greatest talents in literature. Nevertheless, I have forever been hounded by the fact that I read Ubik before this. Ubik is his opus, and all other SF pales in comparison.

So, there you go...read this first and then read the sublime Ubik...thats my little piece of advice!

There is a lot of humour in this book, mostly in the dialogue between Bob and his doper buddies, but the humor becomes more and more bittersweet as the reality of their collective dilemma becomes apparent to the reader. This book can serve as a warning of the dangers of drug abuse; it serves equally well as a warning of the dangers of certain types of "rehabilitation." In fact the true demon in the novel is not Substance D (fictional future drug) at all, but something much more sinister.

There are enough of Dick's patented plot-twists here to keep you guessing, and his unique descriptive talents and dead-on doper-loopy dialogue accurately recreate the surreality of the characters' world in the mind of the reader.

While the term is overused, in this case it fits: this book is a true classic. Dick was a great writer and this is one of his best.