Land of bilk and money

Sideswipe, by Charles Willeford, St. Martin's, 1987.

I wanted to try a Charles Willeford novel so I grabbed this one at random. It's part of a series featuring police detective Hoke Moseley, and Miami is his beat. Boy, does Willeford make this locale his own. Willeford's Florida is a sun-drenched paradise with a very shady underbelly. The overlit detritus of modern life is celebrated by an obsessive attention to detail, the author layering his paragraphs with enough brand names and references to the trashy texture of subdivision life in all its glorious mundanity to litter a parallel universe. For long stretches, the story inches forward while tension builds slowly, then explodes with unanticipated violence.

Reading a novel like this is like attending a master class in professional fiction writing. Plot is subservient to delicious character and atmospheric details; the reader is not dependent upon the engine of events to generate pleasure in reading. The dialogue rings of authenticity. The writing seems effortless. Laconically, Willeford beguiles us through his short narrative and dares us not to steam-open his next missive from that peninsular desert of strip malls, motels, and fast food.

Back to the soft-drink stand

Time Out of Joint, by Philip K. Dick, 1959.  I have read this novel several times before, but I enjoyed it more than ever. It may be Dick's best work of the early phase (1950s), with only Eye in the Sky coming close. Time Out of Joint reflects both the realist and science-fiction novels he was writing at the time. It starts out in a very humdrum contemporary small town in California, but gradually we become aware that things are not what they seem, and that in fact the whole world of the main character, a newspaper puzzle whiz called Ragle Gumm, may be a complete hallucination. We discover that the year is actually 1998 and that the real puzzle that Gumm is to solve is that of the ontological status of his own perceptual reality.

The famous scene where a soft-drink stand simply vanishes to be replaced by a slip of paper that says "soft-drink stand" is a great metaphor for the insubstantiality of the false time layer. People are basically hypnotized to believe they are living in the simple, peaceful, mindless small-town world of the 50s when actually they are living in a war zone forty years later. It's a metaphor for how people superimpose a reductive shrunken timeline on their realtime circumstances.

There is a dreamlike quality to Dick's 1950s and a certain slow, unreal texture to time itself. We see this in most of Dick's 50s mainstream novels. It may be that we can start reading them as sf, recognizing them as alternate reality stories about a world that only seemed to be--much like the illusory reality of Time Out of Joint or the alternate history of The Man in the High Castle.

Time Out of Joint begins very, very slowly but once Ragle Gumm wakes up to the full extent of the fake reality that has been constructed to keep his mind on the business of solving the newspaper puzzle, "Where is the little green man?", which holds the key to where the lunar colonists' missiles will land, the story quickly races to what some feel is a preemptory conclusion. I don't see this shift as an artistic flaw at all. What better way in fact to show that time has really changed and the nature of reality itself has shifted?

On one level it's a relativistic time shift, in the Einsteinian sense. The perspective of the protagonist Ragle Gumm changes, detaching itself from the collective, and in so doing assumes its own inertial frame with its own altered spatiotemporal coordinates.

Incidents like the disappearance of the soft-drink stand represent a kind of temporal breakdown, in which the character exits the consensual temporal matrix and falls through it orthogonally into an uncharted zone rife with new possibilities and new modes of perception.

But the new frame of reference is not just equivocal or different, it is of a higher order ontologically speaking. When Ragle goes off by himself, alone, at the end, out of the sphere of earth's collective consciousness, Dick is showing us someone who is waking up, experiencing an anamnesis, as he puts it in his Exegesis, or recollection of an original condition that is of a higher order reality. As Dick puts it:

Anamnesis is nothing less than realizing what and where you really are: you perceive the brain and its traffic, you hear the voice of its noös, and you understand the irreality of psyche, world, causality and time.

Understanding the irreality of time becomes the preface for understanding the reality of time: how to reveal its truth, not simply transcend it. For there is something in the nature of time--orthogonal, multidimensional time, not false, linear time--that holds the key to higher knowledge, to gnosis.

To boldly go where?

Transition, by Iain M. Banks, 2009. The main character of this novel, the "Transitioner," is an assassin who is able to jump between parallel worlds through use of a drug called septus. Two beautiful women contend for power over the linked labyrinth of universes, competing for the Transitioner's loyalties through sensuous luxuries, sexual delicacies, and torture. This is a book where characters jump into different bodies, have violent sex with strangers, fling themselves into other dimensions, and dispatch their enemies grotesquely in such picturesque locales as Tibet or Venice.

By the way, this is a science fiction novel. You can tell by the "M" in the author's name. (No M, it's mainstream.)

I enjoyed this as much as any of the dozen or so of Banks' books I have read. It is conceptually thought-provoking as well as being massively good entertainment. Banks is so keenly intelligent, if we can keep up with him it makes us feel very clever. But there is another factor that makes this book worthwhile: it breaks all sorts of boundaries of imagination. You cannot see what is coming or how it is coming or who is who or what is what. It's a wild ride.

Happy traveling. Hang on to your septus.

With opened mind

Eye in the Sky, by Philip K. Dick. Ace Books, 1957.
The provisional tile of this novel was "With Opened Mind." I have read the book many times and confess to preferring the published title. The subject is the varieties of paranoia 1950s-style; there are no opened minds here really, just subsets of a bastardized collective reality that the characters inhabit--that we all inhabited back then, if we were around in 1957.

The plot concerns a group of people who together are acting out a kind of waking dream while lying unconscious following an accident. This image of the eye, as so memorably shown here, might represent an individual ego run amok. But it's actually more like an id, a destructive force that dominates others just because it can.
What intrigued me about the book when I first read it at age 12 is the scene where two men clutching an umbrella are pulled up into the heavens. There they behold a giant, disembodied, cyclopean spying eye, which at that point in the story represents the lord of the universe of a fanatical war veteran. His petty god is one of wrath, and downright dangerous.
Control of the group consciousness passes from person to person, each displaying a different form of insanity, until finally normalcy is restored...or is it? For the world into which the characters finally awake, familiar as it is, looks like just another version of the craziness. Which of course it is.
Despite appearances, this novel is not a fantasy; it is pure science fiction. It takes place in the "real" world (I use the term advisedly) and the fantastic events are generated from explicable circumstances, not magic. It requires a bit of understanding of the mechanics of consciousness, however.
Eye in the Sky is a little less complex than some of Dick's subsequent works on the same theme--The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch (1964) and Ubik (1968) for example--but this is the one where I first learned to love PKD, with opened mind.

Shock jock mocks hawks

Dead Air, by Iain Banks. London: Little, Brown, 2002.
In the large novelistic oeuvre of Iain Banks, this book resembles The Business (2001), another topical novel with a somewhat slapdash style, fun to read, fast moving, full of satire, political rants, and intrigue. I don't believe that this novel, alone among all of Banks' books, was ever published in the U.S., perhaps because it adopts an anti-American tone in the wake of the post-9/11 Twin Towers Bush atrocities. Intemperate invective against conservatives, anyone? Why not! You can now pick up used copies of this insufficiently published book very cheaply online.
The main character makes me think of a latter-day Lucky Jim, hilariously inept. A controversial radio talk-show host, he falls in love with the wife of a gangster and proceeds to get both himself and her into mortal danger due to a drunken phone call. This allows the author to indulge in a major nerve-wracking set piece involving a burglary of the gangster's headquarters.
I like Banks, would read anything by him, but don't particularly recommend this title before reading quite a number, really, of his other books which have a little more substance to them. Start with The Crow Road if you haven't read it and then try one of his science-fiction novels about The Culture.
Actually, read whatever you want in whatever order you want, whether it be by Iain Banks or anybody else, okay?

No worm left unturned

The Ganymede Takeover, by Philip K. Dick and Ray Nelson, Ace, 1967. I recently reread this novel although it ranks somewhere in the lower echelons of Philip K. Dick's 45 novels in terms of literary quality. A friend had mentioned it as his favorite PKD work and took me to task for having underrated it in my 1988 study Philip K. Dick. I can't say it impressed me very much this time either, though my friend is right, the book is quite funny, and in that respect it does recall some of the more humorous Dick titles such as Clans of the Alphane Moon. That said, Clans is a much better book, but the point is that all of PKD's novels of the 1960s do in a way constitute one meganovel, which includes everything from The Man in the High Castle (1962) through Flow My Tears, The Policeman Said (1974). See this link for the complete list of PKD books published between those dates; they can be read in any order. (Lies, Inc. sits toward the bottom of this listing but should be included as part of the meganovel.)
In The Ganymede Takeover the Earth has been taken over by giant intelligent worms from Ganymede who share a group mind. One of the rulers, called Mekkis, is given Tennessee to govern, which is considered a pretty terrible assignment. He has to deal with an internal war between the racists and a black power group. Mekkis cannot focus much on politics, however, because he becomes so obsessed with the topic of human psychiatry that he eventually causes the whole Ganymedan race to self-destruct by infecting its group mind with his visions of an existential hell.
There is also a telepathic radical, Percy X, who is leading a revolution but becomes so unbalanced that he almost destroys the world with a "hell weapon." This is an apocalyptic scenario that the human race ends up narrowly avoiding in the end. It's a real 60s novel; one could imagine a version directed by Stanley Kubrick, with maybe Godfrey Cambridge as Percy X?
This book was a collaboration with Ray Nelson, who was also a cartoonist and inventor of the propeller beanie. Again, it does not represent Dick's best work when considered in isolation, but if you're reading the other PKD novels of the 60s, which are extremely addictive, by all means add it to your list. These books sometimes tend more towards the sociopolitical, as in the case of The Penultimate Truth, The Game Players of Titan, and this one, while others like Ubik are more ontological, or gnostic like A Maze of Death, or concerned with the relationship of empathy to human consciousness as in Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? To me, this meganovel ( consisting of 22 novels in all) is Dick's greatest work, and one of the landmarks of twentieth century literature.

Holy warrior of writing

Crusader's Cross, by James Lee Burke, 2005.

I keep returning to James Lee Burke, whose many novels overflow one of my bookshelves, and whose genius for resonant titles entice me to pick up yet another unread volume. His prose is carved out of compassion, disillusion, and a longing for manifestation of true spirit in an evil world. Particularly the world of his most famous character, police detective Dave Robicheaux. This is a typical Robicheaux tale: the seedy and splendid rural Louisiana setting, the conscienceless low-lifes and ordinary saints, the hero flawed to a fault, battling his demons while trying to put down the depraved bad guys. Burke weaves his skein of vivid descriptions and terse dialogue to portray a world, not merely deliver a plot. The narrative is not airless. There are moments of peace, of beauty, where Robichaux is able to lift his head out of the swampy soupy miasma of criminal undergrowth and look at the sunrise. I think we all can identify with Dave, whether or not we share his alcoholism or penchant for violence. And so I call Jim Burke, Dave's emissary and apologist, a holy warrior for good writing, preserving the integrity of American literature amidst the general degradation of language, as well as hoisting the standard for the neglected human values that Dave defends at no little cost to his own safety. The past, in the form of crimes against blacks, women, and the disenfranchised, is constantly casting its shadows across the bayou in this series of books. It is these shadows that form the real opposition, and menace and theaten to drag down the good man. Thus memory does make martyrs of us all.