ihavebeenfloated

I’m a big fan of Philip K. Dick. I say this even though I have technically only read one of his books up this point. The man intrigues me, really, as he was so full of creativity and deep thoughts that the idea of containing so much imagination within myself actually makes me feel like I may explode. The one book of his I’ve already read before A Scanner Darkly would be Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? which is one of the two books I’ve ever managed to re-read. I’ve also attempted to read VALIS, but I got lost halfway through, which is not something many can blame me for.

So, it was with trepidation that I approached A Scanner Darkly. I picked it up mostly because I heard about the fact that it would soon be a film, and I wanted to be able to read it so that I could more harshly criticize the movie when it bastardizes the book just like Blade Runner did to DADOES.

The storyline intrigued me, the main character, Fred Arctor, a undercover officer, acting as a junkie named Bob Arctor while trying to bust big time dealers, is eventually reassigned by the agency he works for to spy on a suspected big time drug dealer named Bob Arctor. The large doses of the drug he’s addicted to, Substance D (or “Death”), has a particularly nasty side-effect of causing the user’s left and right hemispheres of the brain to compete with each other, more or less splitting the user’s brain in half, into two potentially distinct personalities.

The novel contains many extremely interesting concepts, such as the agency Fred works for not even knowing what Fred really looks like due to the “scramble suits” that all the undercover officers wear. The novel’s depiction of drugged out conversations is not only eerily accurate in it’s mundaneness, but also hilarious and entertaining. Like many of Dick’s work, everything occurs in a distant but oddly realistic future. Philip had a talent for setting his novels in the future, but not in a typical sci-fi future. With the exception of a very few things, the future of A Scanner Darkly is practically exactly the world of today (or of when the novel was written) with a few technical innovations.

At its heart, A Scanner Darkly is a novel mostly about the unrelenting tragedy that occurs within the drug culture, and secondly about the suspicious nature of the war on drugs. But, really, the novel doesn’t beat you over the head with either of these two things. It doesn’t feel like a novel about drugs, and it doesn’t feel like a cry against the government. What it does feel like, however, is a slightly paranoid but loving portrait of a man who gives up far too much, not for the government that he works for, but for a woman and society that doesn’t want him until it’s far too late.