Murk outside; murk inside

The plot of the science fiction novel A Scanner Darkly incorporates drugs, undercover policing, surveillance, paranoia and betrayal. But it's the novel's humanity and melancholy that make it the masterpiece it is.

The novel is based on author Philip K Dick's experiences of the effects that drug use had on his circle of friends in 60's America. A list of the real-life dead and damaged in the novel's epilogue is the final nail in the coffin for drug use as escapism.

But the novel is also suffused with pessimism about life even for "straights" who haven't suffered the effects of drug misuse. Dick says in the epilogue that drug misuse is "a speeding up, an intensifying, of the ordinary human existence". So the novel also speaks about that ordinary human existence, and what it says isn't pretty.

Those people burned out by drug misuse in the novel become like "an insect that clacks and vibrates about in a closed circle forever. A reflex machine, like an ant. Repeating his last instruction." Burned out "heads" endlessly throw balls up in the air in futile attempts to juggle them, or forever fail to figure out how to wax a floor.

But how different is this from ordinary human existence? We straights also repeat the same actions over and over in futile hope of miraculously achieving a desired outcome that we never attain. We get shitfaced in the pub on Friday night. We go clothes shopping. We ditch our partner and find someone new. We read the next book. We visit the next country. Does any of it help?

The novel's main character, undercover cop Bob Arctor, hopes that surveillance equipment installed to monitor the people he's living with will do a better job of understanding them than they themselves can manage:

What does a scanner see? he asked himself. Into the head? Down into the heart? [...] I hope it does, he thought, see clearly, because I can't any longer these days see into myself. I see only murk.

How clearly do any of us see ourselves? Aren't we all always searching for someone to explain us to ourselves, in the form of self-help books and tutorials and TED talks? And novels?

In this novel, dealers prey on or co-opt users for their own ends, and users similarly prey on each other. But capitalism more broadly is also implicated in the same process: Arctor muses that "Someday it'll be mandatory that we all sell the McDonald's hamburger as well as buy it; we'll sell it back and forth to each other forever from our living rooms."

How far removed is this from modern capitalism, in which person A convinces person B that they really need the sofa person A is selling, so that person A can afford to buy the new suit they really need that person B is selling? Or person C's cocktail, or person D's holiday.

The novel isn't proscriptive or prescriptive about any of this. As Dick says in the epilogue: "it does not say they were wrong to play when they should have toiled; it just tells what the consequences were". Nor does it offer an alternative coping mechanism to drug misuse or consumerism more generally. It doesn't pretend to have better answers. It's too honest for that.

Book Review: Pour Me, AA Gill, 2015

Pour Me is short as memoirs go: just 241 pages. In part that's because, as Gill says early on in it, the alcoholism from which he suffered in his twenties meant that "there was no film in the camera" for those years, and that earlier memories were also dissolved: "childhood, school, holidays, friends ... all seemed to be faded and incomplete".

Incomplete, but not erased entirely: Pour Me does cover some of Gill's childhood, as well as the time between when he managed to stop drinking, aged 30, and when he wrote the book, 30 years later.

Stopping drinking saved Gill's life, and after "thousands of hours of learning the wrong thing" - art, cooking, gardening, bartending - he finally "failed into journalism", becoming one of the best-known food and TV critics in the country.

So I'll borrow a description of journalism that Gill says he liked - "journalism is what will be grasped at once" - and come to the point: Gill was a fantastic and endearing writer, and he had an interesting life. What more can you ask from a memoir?

He could be brilliant, as perhaps best demonstrated by the section on the speech he gave to a room full of dyslexic schoolchildren (he himself was dyslexic), telling them that the English language was theirs to manipulate no matter what their school might tell them about their abilities. This echoed two transformative elements in his own life: the moment when he came upon his English teacher literally tearing apart books to show them who was boss, and a crucifixion painting that particularly moved him with its depiction of human suffering, which was made in the period of the Lutheran reformation.

He was also enviably insightful - something he attributed to his artistic training ("It made me look, as opposed to merely see"). Consider for example this, from page 2: "I wonder what the rest of nature makes of a lawn? Arrogant, snobbish, entitled, needy, effortfully polite, sober." Or this, on famine (he wasn't just a critic), a subject that sadly is timely again: "It isn't staring into the face of starvation that thuds like a blow to your heart, it is having starvation stare back at you".

His turns of phrase were up there with the best of them, and he was funny, and he was empathetic, having experienced loneliness and sickness and desperation by the gallon.

I'm using the past tense, because Gill died in December 2016, a year or two after Pour Me was published. Could that be another reason why the book is so short? I'm not sure: it wasn't clear to me whether he'd received his diagnosis of terminal cancer before the book was finished.

I suspect not, because I suspect he'd have carried on writing it until the end if he'd known it was coming, just as he did with his articles, the last of which was about his experience of dying on the NHS. But then the book is so dense with insight and tales told only in snatches that it could easily have been four times the size, and the final paragraphs are filled with finality: "I misused a life for 30 years and I had 30 more of a second chance that I used better, though not as well as I might."

Perhaps those tales are told only in snatches here because they have already been told elsewhere - in Gill's journalism, a compendium of which is due to be published this year. I'll certainly be buying that too, so maybe I'll let you know.