We Haven’t Met But You’re a Great Fan of Mine: Iain M Banks’s Culture Series

 (spoilers and trigger warnings apply)

The eight, nine, or ten books of Iain M Banks Culture series (depending on how you count them – see below) are some of the most important science fiction novels published in the last forty years. Variously called space opera, utopian futurism or anarcho-techno-syndicalism, the Culture goes beyond the standard sci-fi typified by Isaac Asimov and Arthur C Clarke and their contemporaries. Here there are big ideas, even if some of those ideas are not explored in any great depth, but they are the backdrop to each stand-alone novel. Character, rather than science, takes centre stage in the Culture.

The Culture refers to an utopian, post-human society in which biological life and general AI (‘Minds’) exist and work together. Not that this is a human society. Although the Culture is located in the Milky Way, the novels take place as much as fifteen hundred years apart. The titular story of The State of the Art collection does take place on Earth, but humanity is otherwise not featured. That said, the majority of the main characters in the Culture books are humanoid in appearance. Banks, after all, is writing for other humans.

Post-human in this sense refers to the various genetic and technological advancements that augment the people of the Culture. They live for hundreds of years, with many using a ‘neural lace’ grown around the brain to protect them against unexpected death, uploading the consciousness to a lab-grown replacement body. Many in the Culture switch between genders and raise children as both men and women. They also employ various glands in the body to secrete drugs for sleep, alertness, time dilation or enhanced memory, to name but a few examples.

The majority of Culture inhabitants no longer live on planets. Instead, the Culture has constructed great rings (‘Orbitals’), millions of miles in diameter, on which cities are built on plates on the inner ring. Each of the billions of inhabitants are in communication with the central Mind that controls every aspect of their environment. Humanoid Avatars act as the Minds’ representatives on the surface.

The other main population density are found on the various spacecraft of the Culture that whip around the galaxy at speeds many times faster than light. The larger General Systems Vehicles (GSVs) can be home to billions of people, although the average GSV is about the size (or volume) of a large city and house millions rather than billions. These ships are also managed and operated by a central Mind and its Avatars.

The ships of the Culture are perhaps the most well known element of the series, due to the comical names the Minds choose for themselves. Just Read the Instructions, No More Mr Nice Guy, The Anticipation of a New Lover’s Arrival, Poke it With a Stick, Just The Washing Instruction Chip In Life's Rich Tapestry, the list is extensive¹.

There are also ships named in honour to other sci-fi and cultural items. The Someone Else’s Problem seems to be named after the SEP field from Douglas Adams’s Life, the Universe and Everything²: Minority Report after the Philip K Dick short story (and the schmaltzy Hollywood adaptation): Clear Air Turbulence after the Ian Gillan Band album, which bears a resemblance to the yellow striped ship on the LP cover.

Many people know the names of Culture ships thanks to Elon Musk. In an act of typical small-mindedness, Musk named a number of Space X rocket platforms after GSV ships, including Of Course I Still Love You and A Shortfall of Gravitas. Which is a bit like naming a paddle boat after the Titanic. It’s further evidence that Musk might have read a lot of science fiction, but he doesn’t seem to have understood much of it.

The other main occupants of the Culture are Drones. Anything from the size of a fingernail to as large as a dustbin, drones are robotic life. Like R2D2 hovering in the air. The electrical field around them, which presumably allows them to hover, glows in different colours depending on mood. Although entities in their own right, Drones usually accompany a main character on their journey or mission (just like R2D2 in fact). A subset of Drones are Knife Missiles, which are a more overtly weapons-grade Drone. For the most part, Knife Missiles are to Drones what Avatars are to Minds.

The controversy over how many Culture novels there are and what constitutes a Culture novel is complicated by two entries in the series. The aforementioned The State of the Art is a collection of short stories that features two, possibly three, stories set in the Culture universe, including the title story. However, the book also includes a number of non-sci-fi, Earth based stories. Banks published science fiction as Iain M Banks and regular fiction as just Iain Banks. While The State of the Art is a hundred pages long, more than half the book’s length, five of the eight stories included are normal fiction.

Moreover, the novel Inversions is set entirely on a world equivalent to Earth’s medieval era. While there are two moments of Deus Ex Machina that seem to be caused by Culture-esque technology, possibly a Knife Missile, the narrator, Oelph, is a native of the planet, where electricity has yet to be invented, The incidents in question are not witnessed by him directly and he speaks about them as miraculous events (any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic). Alternating chapters focus on The Doctor and The Bodyguard³, who both seem to be Culture citizens in disguise, but the book is routed in medievalism. It’s more The Name of the Rose than The State of the Art.

As such, I will focus mainly on the remaining eight books that make up the Culture series. Luckily there is more than enough material to consider.

Preference is subjective and comes down to personal choice, but I think most people will agree that The Player of Games is the first great Culture novel. The first book in the series, Consider Phlebas, is good, but its follow up is on another level and is arguably the best of the first four Culture books (five, if you include The State of the Art).

All of the Culture novels feature Special Circumstances, the Culture’s equivalent to the CIA or MI6. Many main characters are officers of Special Circumstances, but in The Player of Games, Jernau Morat Gurgeh is a master board game player recruited by Special Circumstances to travel to a civilisation in the Small Magellanic Cloud. The journey takes years, during which time Gurgeh learns to play a game so complex that no one, not even Special Circumstances, expect him to last beyond the opening rounds of the tournament he is about to enter.

The Azad, to whose homeworld Gurgeh is travelling, are a species that base their entire society on this one game. The most skilled players become generals and professors. Even emperor. The Azad spend their entire lives learning the game in order to rise through the ranks of their society. Gurgeh has only a few years to learn the game during his journey out of the galaxy, but hides and underplays his understanding of the game, even from Flere-Imsaho, the Special Circumstances Drone sent to accompany him.

The Player of Games has some similarities with Herman Hesse’s The Glass Bead Game. In both books, the central game is complex and neither is described in any great detail. The Glass Bead Game requires expert knowledge of music, mathematics and philosophy. The Azad game involves mini games played using cards or dice, but the main game is played on a board large enough for players to walk around it and interact with the pieces.

Both the Azad and the fictional European country of Castalia are authoritarian in nature. The Glass Bead Game takes place at some unspecified time in the future. The Player of Games takes place a century after The State of the Art, which is set on Earth in the 1970s. Mastery of the game in both The Player of Games and The Glass Bead Game allows for social advancement in their respective societies. How much, if any, knowledge Banks had of Hesse’s novel is unclear, but the books are at least connected in spirit to one another.

Indeed, The Player of Games is the most unique of the Culture novels. There are more accomplished books later in the series, but The Player of Games is a true stand-alone novel in the sense that it has a tone and a style that Banks’s didn’t really use again. Consider Phlebas is similar in the way it follows one POV character for the majority of the narrative, but Bora Horza Gobuchul is a more self-possessed character than Gurgeh. Gobuchul is a mercenary and a survivor. Gurgeh is a civilian and a pawn in the Culture’s plan to destabilise Azad society.

Consider Phlebas is in its way also unique, in that it is the only book that focuses solely on a character from outside the Culture. In this first entry in the series, most of what we know about the Culture is gleaned from what their enemies in the Idrian War think of them. Though, to be fair, they are not exactly wrong. The Culture might be a utopian society, but its dealings with rival empires are Machiavellian in the extreme. Their treatment of the Azad, who live in a dwarf galaxy and lack the capability to cross into the Milky May, demonstrates this. It’s safe to say the Culture do not abide by any equivalent of Star Trek’s Prime Directive.

Consider Phlebas takes place about seven hundred years before the events of The Player of Games and five hundred years before any other book in the series (although there are flashbacks in Excession that take place more than a thousand years earlier). Rather like Asimov’s Foundation and its connecting series, events in The Idrian War become the subject of rumour and folklore in later Culture novels.

After The Player of Games, Banks never again concentrated entirely on one character. Each subsequent book is either a duet of dueling narratives, like Inversions and Use of Weapons, or we find a true space opera of competing stories, all focused on one event or plotline. Excession, Matter, Surface Detail, in fact most of the later novels, are all examples of this second kind of storytelling.

Again, preference is subjective, but for me the best of the Culture novels is Look to Windward. More of a dueling kind of narrative with some elements of space opera, Look to Windward swirls around its main protagonist. Major Quilan is another character from a species external to the Culture, the Chelgrian. Quilan’s wife, also a soldier, is killed during a civil war the Culture instigated (part Machiavelli, part CIA). He is offered the chance to take revenge on the Culture, although the true nature of his mission is kept from him until the end of the book.

Look to Windward is a kind of sequel to Consider Phlebas, in that they both take their titles from lines in TS Eliot’s The Waste Land (although there is little else to connect them). I think what elevates Looks to Windward is its treatment of grief and PTST and survivor’s guilt. Quilan’s motivation, ultimately, isn’t about revenge but death-wish and an inability to carry on without his wife. He is vulnerable and, like Gurgeh, used as a pawn by more powerful forces manipulating his grief.

The resolution is bleak but it is honest and not muddied with high-minded rhetoric about the human condition. The best novels offer no resolution because life itself is unresolved. Every life ends in tragedy of one sort or another, if only for the people left behind. Science fiction, it is worth repeating, is about taking contemporary human concerns and placing them at some sufficient remove in time or space in order to examine them with greater objectively. In that sense, Look to Windward is the most human of all the Culture novels. It is melancholic and dark, but it is also the book to which most people should be able to relate.

Banks wrote the Culture novels as a riposte to the dystopian science fiction of the day⁴. Yet for supposedly utopian science fiction, the Culture series is shot through with all of the most extreme forms of violence, including rape, cannibalism and dismembered bodies fashioned into household furniture. True, most of this violence is committed by non Culture species, but the eponymous society has just as much blood on its hands. The Culture is a model of the western world, where opulence and comfort have been achieved at the expense of colonialism, slavery and bloodshed.

Nowhere is the violence more evident than in the penultimate Culture novel, Surface Detail. Here the two main female characters, Lededje Y'breq and Chay, are both victims of sexual violence. Lededje is killed by her abuser as she tries to stab him to death and is resurrected tens of light years away by a neural lace grown in her skull without her knowledge or consent. Chay is an operative in a digital hell, created to control the native population, who becomes trapped and is repeatedly tortured, raped and tricked with visions of escape, before being made into an angel of death, able to kill one person a day and release their souls from hell.

In the meantime, the Culture are going about their usual machinations. They seem to be trying to protect Veppers, the operator of the various digitals hells, who also happens to be Lededje’s abuser. The Culture, though,  are plotting against him. A rouge Culture Mind, Falling Outside The Normal Moral Constraints, helps Lededje return to her homeworld, but prevents her from exacting revenge on Veppers when confronted with him. It is another act of duplicity by the Culture and with the servers destroyed that maintain digital hell, Veppers is ripped to pieces by tech implanted in Lededje’s regrown body.

A fitting end perhaps, but it once again shows the darker side of utopia. In a future where we could upload and resurrect ourselves at the flick of a switch, what value would we place on life itself? Like being able to download a book or an album in an instant and then leaving it unheard or unread because it has no physical presence or intrinsic value. To a species obsessed with ownership, would life become equally worthless when it is so easy to download and retain? Another throwaway commodity, like single use plastic. And what protection would we afford peoples lacking similar means to save and download themselves? The history of colonialism and globalisation give hints of a worrying conclusion.

What most utopian science fiction writers quickly learn is that perfection is boring⁵. The original Star Trek series (TOS) from the 1960s was an optimistic, utopian vision of the future, produced against the backdrop of the Summer of Love and the civil rights movement. By the time The Next Generation aired in 1987 (coincidentally the year Consider Phlebas was published), the cynicism of the 70s and 80s Reganomics had made that vision seem as naïve as it ultimately was. The imperfect world of Deep Space 9 (1993-1999) was both a more honest view of the world and an accurate prediction for many of the issues still facing us to this day. The narrative limitations of utopia had given way to boundless imperfection and dystopia, creating one of the best science fiction shows in TV history, as well as leading to the Battlestar Gallactica reboot, which plumbed the depths of dystopian science fiction in the years following 9/11.

There was an attempt to return to utopia in later Star Trek series, but Voyager needed the introduction of Seven of Nine to create conflict and as good as Enterprise became, it’s main human characters often come off as arrogant and self-serving evangelists for the American way of life above all other ideologies. People denounce modern Trek for being a betrayal of Gene Rodenberry’s vision but that vision turned out to be kind of bunk. It was of its time and has not aged well. The idea that no-one in the future would use slang or idiom or more than the most mild of swearwords is a white, educated, middle class view of the world. Every indication is that these things will increase as society becomes more tolerant of colourful language and embraces language outside of the ‘norm’. English in particular has always appropriated words from other languages. The English of the 23rd and 24th centuries will probably sound nothing like 21st century English. If English survives at all.

Science Fiction reflects the time in which it was written. TOS is a reflection of the 60s and second generation Trek a reflection of the concerns of the 80s and 90s. Modern Trek is a reflection of today. People swear in new Trek because characters are allowed to swear on mainstream TV today in a way they couldn’t in 1966 or 1987. In the same way that same sex couples exist in modern Trek in a way TV executives were intolerant (and openly homophobic) towards in the past.

Much of this is also true for the Culture series. It might be a utopian society, but watching normal people going about their ordinary, comfortable lives isn’t very interesting. Hence the main characters of the Culture novels are soldiers and mercenaries and sex slaves and exiled war criminals. Banks argued that the Culture has lived in relative peace for thousands of years and the few episodes depicted in his novels are the exception rather than the rule. The Culture, he said, only interfere in the development of other societies when they absolutely have to, or when a threat to the Culture is identified.

This seems like a conceit. All the evidence from the Culture books indicates they interfere more frequently than either they or their creator would like to admit. Special Circumstances has a lot in common with Star Trek’s Section 31, the covert organisation introduced in Deep Space 9. As we see with their treatment of the Azad and the Chelgrian, Special Circumstances often interfere in the affairs of other planets and societies not because they must but because they can. Section 31 are prepared to commit genocide against the Changelings in order to win the Dominion War. Like all science fiction tropes, these are reflections of our own covert organisations overthrowing democratic governments (or bombing civilians in revenge for crimes of which they are not guilty and had no power to prevent) in order to maintain western global hegemony. We do it not because we have to, but because we want to. After five hundred years of colonialism and empire building, it has become a destructive habit. We just can’t help ourselves.

The Culture novels show that all the technological advancements we can imagine won’t save us from ourselves. People still suffer from boredom and depression and post traumatic trauma. People still cheat and lie, especially to themselves. People still die, despite their best efforts at preservation, and people still grieve for those they have lost. Despite the most advanced general AI working in concert with one another, the Culture is still deceived and bested by individuals and other societies alike. We can’t solve all of life’s little problems and the more we do, the more new problems will blink into existence in unpredicted ways. Which isn’t to say we shouldn’t try.

Maybe this is why Banks became more and more interested in medieval societies in the later Culture novels. As well as Inversions, Matter and Surface Detail feature worlds with societal levels roughly equal to the Middle Ages. Amusingly, Banks at one time became so obsessed with the game, Civilisation, he hadn’t done any writing in three months and had to delete the game from his computer and smash the CD to avoid missing another deadline. Although Inversions predates this incident by several years, Matter appears to be the book he was working on at the time.

The main focus of Matter is a feudal society on the eighth level of the Shellworld, Sursamen. The plot centres on palace intrigue. The king is murdered by his adjunct under the cloak of a battlefield injury. His son, Prince Ferbin, witnesses his father’s slaying and flees through the various levels that make up the Shellworld, each an environment in itself, as he attempts to reach the planet’s surface and recruit mercenaries to help him defeat his father’s killer. His younger brother is declared heir to the throne until such time as the regent can arrange the boy king’s death. Meanwhile their sister, Djan Seriy Anaplian, who left the planet fifteen years earlier to became a Special Circumstances agent, hears of her father’s death and makes the journey home. 

Despite the usual elements of space opera, Matter has as much in common with Game of Thrones as it does Foundation or The Expanse. How much of the plot developed from Banks’s addiction to Civilisation and how much he played the game as ‘research’ for the book is unclear⁶. Yet it clearly affected the structure of the book, albeit containing some good science fiction world building. The denouement is as violent and incident packed as any Culture novel, relying on every iota of Culture technology. Yet the final scene of the book returns to the simple life of feudal Sursamen.

War is a common feature of the Culture novels. The Idrian War. The civil war of the Chelgrian. The medieval conflict in Matter. The War of Heaven being waged in Surface Detail. The various internal wars in which Cheradenine Zakalwe is embroiled in Use of Weapons (another non-Culture citizen recruited by Special Circumstances who conceals the true nature of his origins).

Indeed, the lion’s share of the Culture series is about military engagement and covert operations. Other than the first act of The Player of Games, it is not until we get to Look to Windward that we spend any extended period of time in the Culture itself, where much of the main narrative takes place on the Orbital, Masaq’. More time is given over to travel on one GSV or another, but these seem to be the hedonistic, pleasure cruise, party bus division of the Culture and more atypical than life on the Orbitals.

Again, utopia is boring, narratively speaking, and little focus is placed on the sedate regions of the Culture, except as a force pulling at the hero as they the resist the Call to Adventure. In Joseph Campbell’s hero cycle, the Culture might be viewed as the immature state we are destined to reject in setting out to become adults. The majority of the Culture’s unseen citizens are in a state of arrested development as a result of extreme luxury and the guiding hand of the Minds and Special Circumstances. Eden, like all utopias, is stultifyingly boring, which is why Adam and Eve couldn’t wait to get the hell out of there.  Yet the Culture has not one omnipotent being watching over it, but countless numbers of them, patrolling Eden’s gates and sending angels down to issue their proclamations (and avenging angels to defeat their enemies). This perhaps explains why the Culture is involved in so much war and conflict on and beyond its borders. Sheer, unmitigated boredom.

Curiously, for a gender fluid utopia, relationships depicted within the Culture are for the most part hetero-normative. There is the relationship between Genar-Hofoen and Dajeil in Excession, in which they both pass through a number of sex changes and impregnate each other, as well as living for a time as a same sex couple. But even this ends in infidelity and infanticide. Yet in a gender fluid society, wouldn’t this be the most interesting kind of romance? One that places no limit or importance on gender or sexuality, but only the love of one sentient being for another over the centuries as they navigate the interpersonal dynamics with each change in gender that seeks to keep things fresh. There is of course the conversation about sexuality as genetics rather than a choice, but one can imagine in a future where one’s gender can be so easily switched, one’s sexuality becomes equally fluid. Life as not only post-human but post-genetic and post-gender. Sexual evolution facilitated through technology.

This is perhaps the biggest criticism of the Culture novels. That Banks built a world of interesting possibilities and then didn’t follow through with its many potential thought experiments. It is true that the Culture books are space opera and each concentrates on some crisis point within the galaxy, but these are also character studies and the sex lives of the characters are for the most part hetero-normative. Whatever the mainstream distaste for such considerations, it seems a lost opportunity to create a world of gender fluidity and then only shine a light on the most frozen regions where men love women and women love men. Other than Genar-Hofoen and Dajeil, the only other kinds of same sex coupling are in the orgiastic parties of the hedonistic GSVs. Or the affair between Gilt President Geljemyn and her underling in The Hydrogen Sonata, which is still a hetero-normative cliché.

To Banks’s credit, the Culture novels are filled with strong, self-possessed, fully realised female characters. They are often the main protagonist in a cavalcade of characters, particularly in the final three books in the series (Matter, Surface Detail and The Hydrogen Sonata). Even in the duelling, two character novels (Use of Weapons and Inversions), female POV characters take up half of the narrative. I’m not sure the Culture ever crosses the threshold for passing the Bechtel Test. The nearest two named women come to having a conversation about something other than a man is in Surface Detail, where Culture agent Yime Nsokyi is sent to prevent Lededje from killing Veppers. The closest we come is with Nsokyi being in conversation about Lededje. The two women never meet and the Nsokyi subplot is perhaps the least important of the novel.

However, it is again a curious kind of redundancy to talk of male and female characters in a gender fluid society. There are no trans characters and the only kind of androgyny is found in the Avatars that represent the Minds. I don’t think we can judge Banks too unfairly, as this is a problem inherent in all science fiction. In shining a light on the rest of the universe, we really only reflect our own personal experience and preference (and prejudice), in the same way that alien races in Star Trek are indentified as ‘other’ by slightly different nose,  forehead and neck ridges. Aliens always conform to human expectations. Klingon women still have cleavage and even reptilian women are identified with prominent bosoms, despite not being mammalian. Even lizard women must conform to an adolescent male idea of sexuality on which much of entertainment is still based.

Indeed, many of these issues come down to the simple fact that science fiction was for the longest time the sole preserve of male writers and directors. Just as progress on Earth moves slowly because white, male, hetero-normative power structures are reluctant to relinquish power and increase diversity, so do we see a mainstream view of society reflected in our science fiction.

If you want a vision of something outside of the conventional, waspish view of the universe, you have to step outside the white-male-centric world and read science fiction written by women and people of colour. Ursula Le Guin’s The Left Hand of Darkness, with its species of non-binary peoples, was considered revolutionary when it was published in 1969 (though it seems fairly tame by today’s standards, which is a testament to progress made in the last fifty years). Octavia Butler’s Xenogenesis trilogy (aka Lilith’s Brood) presents visitors to Earth who are so truly alien that humans become nauseous at the mere sight of them⁷. Or Afro SF (published 2012), a collection of short science fiction stores written by African writers, which reflects the issues facing the continent, from post-colonialism to political corruption, in the same tradition of all science fiction. There are myriad other examples, all of which get buried beneath the foundations of classic science fiction, which is, for the most part, entirely white and  entirely male. This is starting to change. Albeit slowly.

These criticisms are perhaps a little unfair and overly harsh, because I am a massive fan of Iain M Banks (and Iain Banks) and of the Culture in particular. They are all better than average novels, well written and well executed. What’s more, there is incredible variety in their structure. No two books are exactly alike. Consider Phlebas is a series of adventures. The Player of Games is one contiguous narrative. Use of Weapons is the first dueling narrative, one story moving forwards, the other backwards in time. Excession is the first of the space opera books. The dueling narratives of Inversions are lock-stepped in time.  Look to Windward mashes everything together. Matter and Surface Detail are perhaps the most similar, but still significantly different.

I think what Banks’s science fiction represents is a bridge between the classic 20th century science fiction that runs from Asimov to Philip K Dick and the emergent 21st century worlds of Liu Chixin, Arkady Martine and the countless modern science fiction writers I have yet to read (I have a pile I am working my through). I don’t know if or how much James S. A. Corey’s Expanse series was inspired by the Culture books, but it seems a kind of natural successor. For all its utopian pretensions, the Culture introduced a grittier, darker kind of universe to science fiction and the Expanse definitely leans into that. Both series employ a similar level of casual violence (though the TV adaptation dials it up somewhat). I like the Expanse books, but the prose seems a little terse at times. Could do with a few more run on sentences. A minor criticism.

 

 

There are features to Banks’s final Culture novel, The Hydrogen Sonata, that make it seem like a book written by a man who knew he was dying. The Gzilt are preparing to Sublime, an activity which had been alluded to in other Culture books, but not enlarged upon. To Sublime is to enter a higher state of reality and leave the physical world (the Real) behind. The book is written as a sequential narrative, counting down to the day on which most, if not all, of Gzilt society will Sublime. Though the reality of Subliming might not be as concrete as many believe. The search for this truth drives the book’s narrative.

All good metaphors for death and the beyond. In fact, Banks wrote the book before his final diagnosis. His final non-fiction book, The Quarry, is the one he completed as he was dying and is structured around a son and his terminally ill father. However, if Banks was going to write a final Culture novel (it was the last book released before his death), the themes addressed in  The Hydrogen Sonata are a fitting and ironic way to conclude the series. It is one of the best of the series: The conclusion feels like Banks accepting death and the uncertainty of what lies beyond. No matter the circumstances under which he wrote it, The Hydrogen Sonata always reminds me of Karaoke and Cold Lazarus, the final two TV series written by Dennis Potter in the mid-90s as he was dying of pancreatic cancer. The desolation of the final scenes of The Hydrogen Sonata play out like a metaphor for a world without Iain Banks living in it. Which is a sadder and more impoverished place to be.

Banks died ten years ago as I write and as a committed socialist and humanitarian, I can only imagine what he would make of what has happened to the UK and the world in general in the decade since he left us. Brexit, Trump, Ukraine, the cost of living, Partygate, anti-Wokeness, transphobia, the refugee crisis: Utopia rarely seemed so beyond our reach. We could do with a few Minds about now to save us from the mindless. And the heartless. And ourselves.

The Culture showed that science fiction novels can embed themselves in a common world without the need for a continuous narrative featuring recurring characters. Which is still something of a radical idea. Even the great world building books of science fiction and fantasy are concentrated on a common theme, whether it be the forging and destruction of the one true ring in the Lord of the Rings, or the formation and concealment of the various incarnations of the Foundation in Asimov’s novels. The actors might change, but the goal remains the same. Either that or authors create new worlds with each new novel⁸. Few authors other than Iain M Banks use world building as a background to a series of single arching, single use narratives.

The moving finger writes. And having writ, moves on. And we must move on. To the science fiction inspired by the Culture. And to the books that follow in its wake. Iain M Banks smoothed the way. His pioneering work should not be forgotten.

Footnotes:

¹A complete list is available at: https://theculture.fandom.com/wiki/List_of_spacecraft
²Similarly, the five year long party held on a floating platform in The Hydrogen Sonata appears to be based on a similar one in Life, the Universe and Everything, which, in that book, has been going on for four generations.
³The Doctor’ chapters are narrated by Oelph and ‘The Bodyguard’ by a more general narrator.
⁴I always find it funny that when Blade Runner was released in 1982, it was considered a bleak vision of the future - today it looks almost naively optimistic.
⁵It’s why Dante’s Inferno is enthralling, Purgatory interesting and Paradise dull as dishwater.
⁶Ironically, given Banks’s issues meeting his deadlines, Matter is the book I read quicker than any other. I managed to read all six hundred pages in two days, while holding down a full time job.
⁷Butler’s Patternmaster series does explore elements of the gender fluid relationship of long lived entities, but that relationship is for the most part patriarchal and domineering.
⁸Three other Iain M Banks novels, The Algebraist, Feersum Endjinn and Against a Dark Background are non-Culture books, but nonetheless just as good.

 

Books on Film: A Scanner Darkly

Book: A Scanner Darkly, Philip K Dick, 1977 

Film: A Scanner Darkly, Dir. Richard Linklater, 2006

Richard Linklater‘s 2006 rotoscoped film, A Scanner Darkly, remains the most faithful cinematic adaptation of a Philip K Dick (PKD) novel to date. But then the competition for this accolade is hardly fierce. Few authors, it seems, have been so poorly served by Hollywood as PKD.

Both versions of A Scanner Darkly, novel and film, tell the tale of Bob Arctor (AKA Fred), an undercover police officer investigating a new street drug being sold in Los Angeles. The drug is known as Death, or Substance D. As Arctor insinuates himself into the drug culture of Orange County, he becomes increasingly addicted to Substance D, leading to his mental collapse and entry into rehab. 

A Scanner Darkly is partly based on PKD’s own experience and addictions. In the novel’s Afterward, PKD states that everything in the book is based on real events, before going on to give a roll call of his friends who died or were otherwise debilitated thorough addiction. PKD includes himself amongst the names of the fallen as having suffered permanent pancreatic damage. The stroke that ended his life in 1982 may have been a direct result of these earlier excesses.

While nominally considered a science fiction novel, there is little in A Scanner Darkly that could be considered futuristic. Other than holo technology and the Scramble Suits beneath which Arctor and his fellow officers conceal themselves at work, it is a novel routed in the here and now: Even if it is set in 1994 (or 2013 in the case of the film). 

Indeed, the relative ordinariness of the landscape is necessary to bring objects in the foreground into sharp relief. All of what is strange or other worldly in A Scanner Darkly is brought on by the debilitating effects of Substance-D. Hallucinations. Paranoia. Characters falling down rabbit holes of wild conspiracy theories. Arctor’s own eventual aphasia, as he becomes obvious to the fact that Bob Arctor and Fred are one and the same person.

Richard Linklater’s aim in rendering the live action with rotoscoping was to make the film feel more like a graphic novel at a time when the term, graphic novel, was starting to seep into the public consciousness. Yet the choice of rotoscope is appropriate to the story. The camera is itself an addict and views each scene through a disjointed narcotic haze of Substance-D. Moreover, PKD’s book does contain comic-book elements, like Charles Frick playing out paranoid scenarios in a thought bubble above his head. In a purely live action movie, this might come across as naïve or naff. In a comic or graphic novel, it is part of the narrative language. 

The film is far from a perfect or complete adaptation of the novel. Few films are. Novels are for the most part a continuous narrative. Cinema, being a direct evolution from theatre, is a series of set pieces threaded together. Thus scenes are truncated. Scenes are cut. Scenes appear out of order from the book. Jerry Fabin is excised from the film entirely and his few scenes given to Frick. Yet what remains is a fair representation of the original text.

Compare A Scanner Darkly to, say, Blade Runner. Blade Runner might be the best film adapted from a PKD novel and one of the best science fiction films ever made (in its 2007, Final Cut version), but its differences to Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep are legion. Even the name is taken from Alan E Nourse’s 1974 novel, The Bladerunner, adapted into a screenplay by William S Burroughs for a never made film.

Many, if not most, of the book’s main narrative threads are cut from Blade Runner. The replicants[1] are made more menacing. Much of the comedy is lost. Richard Deckard, a character of low status and low ambition in the novel, becomes heroically high status when played by Harrison ‘Indiana Jones’ Ford. A great movie, but not a great PKD adaptation.

Worse is Stephen Spielberg’s 2002 film, Minority Report, based on the 1956 PKD short story of the same name. The word, ‘based’ here is doing a lot of lifting. The PKD version is a nuanced evocation of Heisenberg’s Uncertainty Principle, where the act of observing an event changes that event. John Anderton is predicted to murder someone in the near future, causing him to police his own actions and ultimately defy the prediction. 

In the film this nuance is reduced to a clichéd, ten-a-penny Hollywood thriller that could’ve  (and has) been made at any time since the invention of sound. The effects are well executed but the futuristic landscape and technology are ultimately incidental to the plot. In all regards it is a poor shadow of the original source material. All cinematic adaptations of the written word are imperfect. Some are more imperfect than others.

Unlike Blade Runner, Minority Report, or indeed Total Recall, which again diverges wildly[2] from PKD’s short story, We Can Remember It For You Wholesale, A Scanner Darkly does a reasonable job of capturing the book’s narrative and themes. The main motif is one of paranoia. Everyone is paranoid, not just the addicts but the police as well. The later are so paranoid, they hide from each other behind Scramble Suits that generate a constant blur of fragmented images to render them barely visible to anyone looking in their direction. The effect is well approximated in rotoscope. 

At one level the Scramble Suit is the greatest flaw in A Scanner Darkly. If no-one knows who is and who isn’t a cop, how do they know who to monitor and who to ignore? Which is inevitably what happens. Fred, aka Bob Arctor, is charged with conducting surveillance on himself. Hs addiction has become such that when he is unmasked Arctor, it is most a surprise to himself. Even his immediate superior, Frank, has figured out who he is by that point. Which again seems to render the Scramble Suit a pointless plot device.

On the other hand, the Scramble Suit is PKD applying the twisted logic of the junkie to those supposedly in the know. The brass are so paranoid about their officers colluding with each other or with the dealers that neither they or anyone else knows who they are. Given the levels of assumed or actual conspiracy in the story, A Scanner Darkly resolves into a truth that is anathema to most conspiracy theories: Those in authority are no more well organised or less shambolic than the general population. 

Yet there is conspiracy here. The main dealer among the core group of addicts is also an undercover agent. The people growing Substance-D’s active ingredient also run the rehab clinics. In many ways, PKD predicted the recent opioid crisis in the US. The drug addled Arctor is sent to work on one of the farms on which the plants grow in the hope that his few remaining brain cells will fire and return with the evidence. Ultimately, it seems, his undercover mission was not to spy on Barris, Donna, or even Arctor, but to become so frazzled he can be sent into places other agents cannot infiltrate.

This is perhaps the weak point of the film. In the book, Arctor’s journey through rehab lasts several chapters. The cinematic version is rushed through in the final ten minutes. It’s understandable. At one hundred minutes, much fat needed to be trimmed to make it a lean production. Besides, the rotoscoping took eighteen months to complete as it was, whereas principle photography was completed in a few weeks. A longer film would have significantly increased the time to animate it. 

In other regards, the film squeezes in as much of the book as possible. It didn’t need to be much longer. It wouldn’t require, say, four seasons of a TV series to narrate a PKD book of similar length (I’m looking at you, The Man in the High Castle). A Scanner Darkly introduces little into the narrative that wasn’t already in the novel. It’s almost as if by employing rotoscope, Linklater felt little need to impose his own vision or ego upon the story in the way that most other directors invariably do.

There’s a nice touch where an preexisting stoned conversation about a man who pretended to have been a famous con artist (i.e. he faked being an fake) is augmented with reference to Catch Me if You Can, the 2002 Leonardo DiCaprio movie about a famous con artist. Although there is also a discontinuity when Hank, states that Fred could be anyone, including Barris, even though Hank has already seen Fred in the same room as Barris. In the book this makes sense, as it happens before Barris appears at the station. In the film those two scenes appear in a different order and apparently no one thought to amend the script. 

In spite of that, it’s difficult to imagine another cinematic PKD adaptation getting any closer to its source material than A Scanner Darkly. Nor should they try. Different mediums have different narrative methods and much fidelity is lost in the transfer process. Despite publishing forty four novels, there aren’t many remaining PKD books that would translate well onto film. Ubik maybe, which Linklater was originally going to make before dropping it in favour of A Scanner Darkly. Flow My Tears the Policeman Said would be interesting. VALIS, probably PKD’s best novel, would be next to impossible to film, not for anything in it, but in delaying the final reveal. A bit like trying to film Agatha Christie’s The Murder of Roger Ackroyd. The Penultimate Truth would be interesting if reframed to deal with the climate crisis.

In spite of its sprinkling of sci-fi elements, A Scanner Darkly is perhaps PKD’s most personal and autobiographical novel. It’s inappropriate to lump it in with purely sci-fi books like Ubik, Do Androids Dream of Electric Sleep, or Flow My Tears the Policeman Said, accomplished as these undoubtedly are. The science fiction elements in A Scanner Darkly are little more than a veneer applied to the farce and human tragedy beneath; like the rotoscoping drawn over the film. 

A Scanner Darkly fits better with PKD’s more grounded novels, like VALIS or The Transmigration of Timothy Archer. Indeed, those books were written in response to psychological episodes PKD experienced that were arguably the consequences of his earlier narcotic experiences. A Scanner Darkly does not quite scale the heights of VALIS, but would still make the list of many people’s best PKD books. And while A Scanner Darkly, the film, might not quite reach the heights of Blade Runner, it is still a faithful and honest attempt to portray and project the world as PKD saw it. 

All cinematic adaptations are unfaithful. Some are more faithful than others.

---

[1] A term absent from the novel

[2] Essentially the film’s first twenty minutes is loosely based on the story, after which it goes off entirely on its own trajectory.

Reading Murakami (or What I Think About When I Read Haruki Murakami)

For much of 2019, I found myself consumed  with reading the novels and other books by Japanese writer, Haruki Murakami. It is a journey that began, or should have begun, a decade earlier.

What happened was that back in December 2009 an American friend sent me a copy of Murakami’s novel, Kafka on the Shore, as a Christmas present. It’s a risky business buying me books I haven’t asked for. Or by authors I don’t know. I have so many books I bought for myself that have gone unread year after year in favour of newer acquisitions. Several shelves worth all told. So an unsolicited book is bound to get lost in the wash. I added it to a pile and read something else. And then something else. And then something else.

Fast forward to January 2019, more than a thousand books later. I was flying by then. Reading all the books given to me as Christmas presents before the new year had barely begun. In a fit of optimism, I decided to make a list of all the books that had languished on my shelves for far too many years. Aristotle’s Politics. Machiavelli’s Discourses. Conrad’s Nostromo. The Decameron. War and Peace. Oliver Twist. Life on the Mississippi[1]. Kafka on the Shore. Over the course of the year I would read them all, along with one hundred other books, new or more recently bought. Of those new books, fourteen would be other works by Haruki Murakami.

I read Conrad’s Nostromo first from the list. I found it so-so. Nowhere near as good as The Secret Agent, or Under Western Eyes. Over January I also read books by Agatha Christie, Arthur C. Clarke, Gerald Durrell, and Gabriel Garcia Marquez, as well as Gordon Bowker’s biography of George Orwell, the Collected Stories of Collette, The Beastie Boys Book, volumes six and seven of Keiji Nakazawa’s Barefoot Gen, the graphic novel adaptation of Octavia Butler’s Kindred, the regular novel of The Parable of the Sower, W.E.B. Du Bois’s The Souls of Black Folk, Robert Graves’s Goodbye to All That, and a handful of other books besides. It was a good month. Unmatched for the rest of the year.

Yet of all the books I read that month, Kafka on the Shore was the highlight in terms of sheer revelation. Did you ever finally do something and then realise you’d wasted so much time not doing it sooner? That’s how it felt in finally reading Murakami. That I could have been reading his books for the last ten years. Or earlier. The man’s been writing since the late 70s after all.

In many ways, Kafka on the Shore is the ideal book with which to start reading Murakami. It contains many of the tropes and themes that recur across his body of work. There are the twin narratives, with alternate chapters concentrating on Kafka Tamura, a fifteen year old boy who runs away from home, and Satoru Nakata, a mentally disabled elderly man who supplements his government stipend by looking for lost cats. The characters come from the same district of Tokyo, but are unknown to one another. For different reasons and through different routes, they leave the city on separate journeys that cross in certain places but never actually touch.

The twin, dueling narratives device is reused by Murakami in what is perhaps his masterpiece, the three volume 1Q84, with the narratives of Aomame and Tengo Kawana this time playing off against one another. Parallel, alternating stories are also found in the earlier work, Hard Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World. Although here the stories take place not simultaneously, but at different points in time.

Much of Murakami fiction writing is characterised by that much maligned phrase, magical realism[2]. All of his books, with the exception of Norwegian Wood, feature elements of the supernatural, spiritual, or the profane. Kafka on the Shore contains more than most, with scenes of UFOs, ghosts of Japanese World War Two soldiers, ghosts of the living seen as they appeared in the past, abstract concepts that take on physical human form with Western sounding names like Johnny Walker and Colonel Sanders, alternate realities, and desolate villages that lie behind the living world and act like waiting rooms or purgatory for the ever after. Satoru Nakata not only finds missing cats, but has two way conversations with cats. He summons downpours of fish and frogs at points on his journey away from Tokyo, seemingly without any understanding of how this is achieved.

As well as the supernatural, there are all the customary references to the mythical and the theatrical in Kafka on the Shore. Murakami infuses the narrative with references to Japanese, Middle Eastern, and Southern European legend. Kafka Tamura runs away from home to escape his father’s taunting prophecy that he is cursed to become like Oedipus and kill his father and sleep with his mother. Whether, or to what extent, the reader believes this prophecy is fulfilled depends on a individualistic reading of the book’s ambiguous conclusion.

Later, in the private library in which Kafka takes refuge, Tamura reads Richard Burton’s translation of 1001 Tales of the Arabian Nights[3]. One thinks of the criticisms of Burton’s translation, in part for being over sexualised, and how influential those stories have been in the west during the last three hundred years; maybe as early as the time of Chaucer and Boccaccio, although opinion is divided on this point. The names of Sinbad the Sailor, Ali Baba, and Aladdin have become as famous to us as Hercules, Odysseus, and Perseus, even if their tales were added later to the Arabic texts by western translators. Tamura’s own narrative wouldn’t seem out of place being told by Scheherazade to Shahryar over one or many of those thousand and one nights: It conforms to many of the same themes.

Kafka is not Tamura’s real first name. We are never told what it is. At the beginning of the novel, and at various points throughout, Kafka maintains an imaginary conversation with someone called ‘The Boy Named Crow’. Kafka is homophone to a Czech work, kavka, meaning jackdaw, which is part of the corvid, or crow family of birds. Franz Kafka, after whom Tamura takes his name, was himself born in Prague, the capital of the modern day Czech Republic. Kafka and The Boy Named Crow are therefore two sides of Tamura’s personality, each as illusory as the other.

Kafka is another recurrent theme within the books of Haruki Murakami. His works can often be seen as Kafkaesque, in that it is not always clear what is going on, or for what purpose. Murakami won the Franz Kafka Prize for fiction in 2006. Kafka is referenced most prominently in the short story, Samsa in Love, in which Gregor Samsa, the man who woke to find himself transformed into a giant insect in Kafka’s Metamorphosis, instead wakes to find himself transformed back into Gregor Samsa, but without any memory of being an insect. While evidence of what has taken place is evident to the reader, it remains unexplained to, or realised by Samsa. A textbook case of Kafkaesque storytelling.

The element that one finds in all of Murakami’s books is reference to music. Characters are at all times listening to and discussing classical or contemporary music. Murakami has a seemingly encyclopedic knowledge of all kinds of music and maintains a large collection of vinyl records. He owned and ran a jazz bar in the 1970s and jazz bars appear in a number of novels and short stories, including his first novel, Hear the Wind Sing and its sequels, as well as 1992’s South of the Border, West of the Sun[4] and the short story, Kino, from The Elephant Vanishes collection.

Haruki Murakami pictured with some of his records

The titles of many of Murakami’s novels and short stories make direct reference to music. Norwegian Wood, the book that made him famous when it was released in Japan in the 80s, prompting a period of self-exile to the United States, is taken from the Beatles song from the album, Rubber Soul. Short stories like Honey Pie, Yesterday, and Drive My Car also take their names from Beatles songs. In February 2020, Murakami published a new piece in the New Yorker entitled, With the Beatles, after the album of the same name.

The title of Murakami’s most recent published novel, Killing Commendatore, refers to a scene from the Mozart opera, Don Giovanni. The unnamed narrator finds a painting in the attic of the house he is renting, which depicts a scene from the beginning of the opera. Don Giovanni fights a duel and kills Commendatore after Commendatore catches Don Giovanni trying to rape his daughter. In true Murakami form, the two foot high image of Commendatore takes physical form and holds court over the narrator in his living room.

Murakami’s previous novel, Colourless Tsukuru Tazaki and His Years of Pilgrimage from 2013, also makes reference to classical music in the title. His Years of Pilgrimage, or Années de pèlerinage, is collection of three suites composed by Franz Liszt in the 1830s. The novel makes particular reference to a piece from First Year: Swiss (Première année: Suisse): Le mal du pays, or Homesickness. An apt choice, given the novel’s eponymous protagonist, Tsukuru Tazaki, who has been frozen out and ostracized by a group of childhood friends sixteen years earlier and sets out on a journey to discover the reasons for his unexplained exile.

The Greek derived word, nostalgia, has come to mean the pain and longing we feel for the past, but in its original sense it referred to a form of homesickness (nostos – returning home + algos – pain). What we feel when we feel nostalgic isn’t really a longing for home or for an idealised past that never really existed. Nostalgia is really just a longing for our youth. Tsukuru Tazaki spends years in pain and isolation after being rejected by his friends. His girlfriend makes him find out what happened so they might have a future together. Le mal de pays, which combines the sense of homesickness and nostalgia, is perfectly chosen to reflect Tazaki’s journey. In order to look to the future we must first make peace with our past.

We also find classical and operatic references in The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle, published as three books in Japan from 1994 to 1995 and printed in one volume in an abridged English translation in 1997. Each book takes its name from references to birds in classical music and opera. The Book of the Thieving Magpie is named after the Rossini opera. The Book of the Prophesying Bird is named after a piece of piano music by Schumann. The Book of the Bird-Catcher Man is named after Papageno, a character in Mozart’s The Magic Flute.

Kafka on the Shore is itself named after a fictional pop song that appears in the novel. Yet the title combines elements and coincidences that coalesce across time. The song in question is itself named after a painting showing a boy facing away on the shore of a lake: A future echo of Killing Commendatore, once again combining music and art into one title. The painting might or might not depict Kafka Tamura, who was not born until years after the picture was painted. Then things like cause and effect have little agency in the world of Kafka on the Shore. Or in the fiction of Haruki Murakami in general.

Kafka on the Shore also features real world music. Tamura listens to Prince, Radiohead, and John Coltrane on his walkman while exercising at the gym or hiding out in a cabin in the mountains. The histories of Beethoven, Haydn, Schubert, and Schumann are discussed at various points by various people to varying levels of detail. If the book has a real world theme, it is Beethoven’s Archduke Trio. The secondary character, Hoshino, hears the piece for the first time in a bar (where else?) while waiting for one of Satoru Nakata’s long, comatosed sleeps to come to an end. It sets him on a journey of cultural awakening that will continue long after the novel ends.

Wherever we go in Murakami’s world, music is there in one form or another. Whether it’s Leos Janacek’s Sinfonietta, that serves as a leitmotif for Aomame’s crossing into an alternative reality in 1Q84[5], to Bob Dylan’s A Hard Rains Gonna Fall, which soundtracks the denouement of Hard Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World, to Tetsuya Takahashi, the trombonist who recognises Mari Asai in Denny’s at the beginning of After Dark, setting her course for the rest of the night, music is all things to all characters in the work of Haruki Murakami. Someone (someone else) should compile a list of all the music referenced in his body of work.

Murakami also appears in music. The same year he won the Franz Kafka Prize, the composer Max Richter released Songs From Before, which features Robert Wyatt reading passages from Murakami’s novels. This hits me where I live and, like the title of a Murakami novel, combines three things in one: the novels of Haruki Murakami, the music of Max Richter, and the Soft Machine’s Robert Wyatt. The only thing that matches this is Gillian Anderson reading Virginia Woolf’s suicide note on Max Richter’s 2017 album, Three Worlds: Music From Woolf’s Works. Although for obvious reasons, the latter is not something one can listen to very often.

So after taking ten years to get around to Kafka on the Shore, I read it in two days. It is certainly in the top tier of Haruki Murakami’s fourteen published novels (sixteen if you count the three volumes of 1Q84 as separate books[6]). However, being an American translation, the version I read has some curious elements to it. The front cover proclaims the books a ‘National Bestseller’, which tells you all you need to know about America’s place in the world. Any other country would hail the book an ‘International Best Seller’. Ironic, considering the world’s first international bestseller was Harriet Beecher-Stowe’s, Uncle Tom’s Cabin, the book which Abraham Lincoln famously (although apocryphally) described as the book that started the American Civil War.

What can you do? This is the country whose sports teams declare themselves world champions in sports in which no other countries are invited to compete. What’s national is rendered interchangeable with what’s international because all other countries are simply removed from the equation. Which probably explains why all non-American quantities like the Japanese yen are translated into American equivalents like the dollar. Stars forbid that an American reader should be asked to consider anything outside of their comfort zone or outside of their personal frame of reference. Which kind of destroys the whole point of reading. It’s not the fault of Americans. It’s the fault of cultural gatekeepers like the publishing industry.

'National' bestseller, Kafka on the Shore

That being said, the book was a big hit. Albeit a decade late. A couple of weeks later I spent a weekend with relatives. The trip included an afternoon in Oxford in the snow. In the local Waterstones I bought Hard Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World and the first two volumes of 1Q84 published in one volume[7], as well as Kintu by Jennifer Nansubuga Makumbi. Within twelve months of finally reading Kafka on the Shore, I would read all of Murakami’s novels, three of his four published short story collections, and the partial autobiography, What I Talk About When I Talk About Running[8].

Having read all of Murakami’s novels, it’s worth noting that Kafka on the Shore is also unlike his other books in a number of ways. His novels had for years been characteristic by being told by first person narrators. Yet Kafka on the Shore began a run of novels written in the third person. Or rather, Kafka on the Shore is written in alternating voices. Kafka Tamura tells his own story. The third person narrator tells the story of Satoru Nakata. After Dark, 1Q84, and Colourless Tsukuru Tazaki and His Years of Pilgrimage are all told entirely in the third person, the narrator focusing on one or more point of view characters. Only with Killing Commendatore does Murakami return to a purely first person novel, eighteen years after Sputnik Sweetheart in 1999, which last used the technique in its totality.

Some have been critical of those Murakami novels not written in the first person, but then the same people damned Dylan for going electric. Some people expect creative artists to stay on the same note forever. To never grow. Constantly recycling the same old hits. Yet the Beatles wrote songs in different narrative voices and from different points of view (cf. She Loves You). Murakami’s first person narratives are always told by male narrators. By writing in the third person, he could introduce female point of view characters, like Mari Asai and Aomame, where perhaps he felt uncomfortable writing directly through a female voice. Perhaps that’s why critics are really upset. Mr Murakami let girls into the clubhouse.

Murakami’s characters are usually isolated people, filled with existential angst or entering a period of change. Lonely students, unrequited lovers, husbands trapped in loveless marriages, or recently separated and going through divorce proceedings. Tsukuru Tazaki, the man rejected by his friends a decade and a half earlier, is perhaps the most isolated of all. The sadness that Murakami instills in him is almost too much to bear at times. Yet Colourless Tsukuru Tazaki and His Years of Pilgrimage might be my favourite of all his novels. Even more so than Norwegian Wood, it is his most human novel. Stripped of almost everything supernatural or other worldly, but with all the moments of Kafkaesque ambiguity and unresolved mystery. One is never sure whether to hug Tazaki or shake and scream at him.

Murakami’s novels often feel like Edward Hopper paintings brought to literary life. They have the same sense of emptiness and silence hanging on the air. Lonely figures staring into space. Couples and groups of people disengaged from one another. Rarely looking at one another. Rarer yet looking at the viewer.

Nowhere is this more evident than in the beginning of After Dark, where we find Mari Asai sitting alone in a Denny’s close to midnight. She is reading, but we are never permitted to know what. The scene plays out like Hopper’s 1927 painting, Automat, reimagined by Katsushika Hokusai in a modern Tokyo setting. The third person narrator watches Asai like the viewer in Automat, who seemingly sits at another table watching the young woman in the green fur-lined coat and beige cloche hat staring into her coffee cup. There it is also after dark, as expressed by the rows of lights reflected in the window behind her. Other than the lights, the only thing the window reflects is darkness. Hopper’s subject is frozen in time. Mari Asai, however, will be nudged out of Denny’s and out of her isolation by events set in motion by the trombonist, Tetsuya Takahashi, recognising her because of her sister.

Automat, Edward Hopper, 1927

Kafka on the Shore somewhat bucks this trend of isolated characters making their lonely way in the world. Each is isolated in their own way, but one finds a greater depth of comradeship and community in Kafka on the Shore than in most other Murakami novels. Satoru Nakata is helped on his journey by Hoshino. Kafka Tamura is taken in by Oshima, the young assistant at the library, and hides him from the police in the family cabin in the mountains. Tamura is estranged from his father. His mother and sister left years before. Yet he has The Boy Named Crow for company. Nakata is isolated due to the nature of his disability, but vocalises his thoughts out loud. He is unable to read or drive, but manages to get where he wants to go through the kindness of strangers.

Indeed, the characters in Kafka on the Shore are the least typical of Murakami’s creations. They read less like avatars for Murakami himself, compared with Toru Watanabe of Norwegian Wood, or Toru Okada of The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle, or the unnamed narrators of Killing Commendatore or the Trilogy of the Rat[9]. The characters of Kafka on the Shore are not ordinary men struggling to find their way in a society increasingly decentralised from purely male concerns, but are instead school boys and transsexuals and people with disabilities. Hoshino is the character perhaps closest to the usual Murakami male archetype, but even he has previously served in the army and is atypical in this sense. Although former army men appear in a number of Murakami novels. Usually Second World War veterans.

If there is anything critical to say about Murakami’s writing, it is in his treatment of female characters. Women are often treated as little more than sexual objects by the male characters and sometimes it feels as if their only purpose within the story is as objects for the male gaze. Either that or they exist so their actions will serve as a catalyst for change within the life of the male protagonist. Having read all of Philip K Dick 44 novels, I started playing a game to count how long after a woman is introduced into a narrative before Dick makes reference to her breasts (rarely very long). On occasion it feels like Murakami does something similar. That a female character’s physical attributes are the most singular thing about her. Although this is more a criticism of Murakami’s earlier books. Still, it is no surprise to realise that nether Murakami or Philip K Dick pass the Bechtel Test.

Another recurring Murakami theme is sex taking place telepathically or through dreams. These sexual encounters often happen without consent, even if they ultimately only take place in the character’s imagination. Kafka on the Shore contains one such act of psychosexual rape. It also features the familiar sight of a character hand washing his semen stained underwear in the sink.

Then again, the women in Murakami’s novels are often more proactive and well organised than their male counterparts[10]. They take the lead in romantic or sexual relationships with the insular, awkward men of Murakami’s world. Tsukuru Tazaki’s girlfriend, Sara, sets him on his journey to find out what had happened to him all those years ago. It would probably never have occurred to him without her prompting and questioning (and doing all the ground work). Aomame in 1Q84 operates as an assassin, targeting men guilty of domestic violence. She also relieves the stress of her profession by picking up older men in singles bars.

Midori Kobayashi initiates a friendship with Toru Watanabe in Norwegian Wood and controls how much information she parcels out to Watanabe about her family situation and the speed at which their relationship develops and progresses. Also in Norwegian Wood we see Reiko Ishida go through a kind of spiritual redemption, set in motion by the tragic events at the end of the novel, causing her to leave the isolated sanatorium in which she has self-isolated for many years. Through her guitar playing, the recurring theme of Norwegian Wood makes many of its recurring appearances.

If there is any recurring criticism of Murakami’s novels, it is how they end. One often sees criticism of his novels, After Dark and Killing Commendatore for instance, for concluding ambiguously and ruining the rest of the book. Yet while some see this as a weakness of Murakami’s novels, it is in fact one of their greatest strengths. Literature is not TV or film, where loose ends are all tied up in a nice, neat bow in the final scene. Murakami empowers his audience by inviting them to draw their own conclusions.

When the English translation of Kafka on the Shore was released, Murakami gave an interview in which he stated that the book, “contains several riddles, but there aren't any solutions provided. Instead several of these riddles combine, and through their interaction the possibility of a solution takes shape. And the form this solution takes will be different for each reader.”

This is the power of the written word. Reading (and indeed writing) is a symbiotic relationship between reader and writer that creates a unique and unrepeatable experience. Good writers give you just enough information to picture a scene and let you fill in the gaps from your personal experience, whether you do so consciously or not.

For instance, if I say to you the set up to that classic joke, a horse walks into a bar, then you will have a different horse and a different bar in mind from the one that I or anyone else chooses to think about. You will also picture a different barman asking the horse, what’s with the long face. This is the power of narrative storytelling, whether on the page or in the vagaries of a good joke. Or indeed a bad joke. Like a play, no two performances are ever the same. We can exist in parallel universes with diverging sets of experiences and yet feel as if we live in the same world.

TV and film are fine mediums in which to tell stories, but here the viewer is at the mercy of the director’s personal vision. Only between scenes are the audience permitted to exercise their imagination; to colour in what happens in the gaps. Visual storytelling has more than a whiff of the totalitarian about it and those who only ever consume passively through a two dimensional screen without ever engaging with words on a page will always be at the mercy of another’s personal vision of the world. Reading is freeing because the experience of reading is unique for every person that reads a particular book. It isn’t a solution in itself, but if more people read then the world might not be in such a mess. Reading stretches those parts of the imagination other mediums can’t reach.

So then to criticise a writer for not leaving everything tidied up and explained to a tedious level of detail rings somewhat hollow. Figure it out for yourself. Perhaps it would be nice to see the man who beats up the Chinese sex worker and steals her clothes in After Dark get his comeuppance, but After Dark takes place over the course of one night and real life is not resolved so quickly. In real life bad people often get away with doing bad things.

Perhaps it would be nice for Colourless Tsukuru Tazaki and His Years of Pilgrimage to end two chapters later, or for Murakami to tell us what happens to Toru Watanabe in the intervening years between the events of the novel and hearing the orchestral version of Norwegian Wood that sets off the wave of nostalgia upon which the narrative surfs. Perhaps it would be nice to know how much, if any, of the Kafka prophecy if fulfilled.

Perhaps. Perhaps. Perhaps.

Better for the reader to fill in the gaps for themselves and talk the details through with others. I’ve never been to a book club, but isn’t that the whole point of their existence? Isn’t that why myths and stories from the age of oral storytelling have so many different versions? Because each new teller brings their own perspective to the tale and embellishes it accordingly. Isn’t that why the New Testament has four different accounts of the life of Jesus Christ, all of which differ from one other on most of the actual details? Isn’t that why I read eighteen Haruki Murakami books in the space of twelve months? Or why I’ve already reread most of them?

I am not a critic, nor would I wish to be. One could sleep four hours a night and spend the rest of the time immersed in any single form of media (literature, film, TV, music, or gaming) and still not scratch the surface over the course of a lifetime. One couldn’t even watch all the new content added to YouTube in a single month in that lifetime. So then to waste your time engaging with anything that doesn’t appeal to you seems pointless. And self-defeating.

Yet a cursory glance through Twitter or YouTube comments will reveal a plethora of people shouting into the void about the things they hate and abusing anyone who doesn’t agree with them, rather than finding something, anything, that makes them feel alive and connected to others. People who have never created anything of lasting meaning but still feel the need and the right to critique those who have. Disappointed people wasting even more of their already wasted lives. In deference to Haruki Murakami, I invoke the lyrics of The Beatles: Look at all the lonely people.

As such, I can only tell you what I like and why you might like it too. The books of Haruki Murakami represent all that’s good and worthy about reading. They aren’t perfect. Nothing is. But they are entertaining and thought provoking. They take you into different worlds and to a different part of the world. Like Dickens’s London, or Joyce’s Dublin, they open a window on life in Tokyo and its environs.

You’ll learn that even in one of the most densely populated cities on Earth, people still feel isolated and alone. You’ll also receive an extension course in musical appreciation. In my year of reading Murakami, I added Leos Janacek, Albert Ayler, and Curtis Fuller to my already fairly eclectic tastes. I could write an essay on the music I have discovered through reading. And the books I have discovered through music.

All of which is a long winded way of saying that reading Murakami is an immensely rewarding experience. Time spent reading Murakami is never time wasted. If anything here has piqued your interest, why not give Haruki Murakami a try? Just don’t waste ten years getting around to him.

Haruki Murakami: Where to Start

Kafka on the Shore

Norwegian Wood 

Hard Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World 

Colourless Tsukuru Tazaki and His Years of Pilgrimage 

After Dark 

The Elephant Vanishes (short story collection)  

Diving Deeper

1Q84 (three volumes)

The Trilogy of the Rat/Dance. Dance, Dance 

The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle 

Killing Commendatore 

Men Without Women (short story collection) 

What I Talk About When I Talk About Running (non-fiction)

---

[1] NB. There aren’t many books by women or people of colour on my unread shelves, because I tend to read these straight away. So much of the cannon of world literature is written by white men that it’s nice to cleanse one’s palate wherever possible. One of these days I’m going to have a year where I read no books by white men at all. One of these days.

[2] My friend, Ehrinn, who sent me Kafka on the Shore, refers to Murakami as existentialist surrealism. Better.

[3] Tamura also reads the works of Natsume Soseki, cited by Murakami as his favourite author. Increased interest in Soseki’s work in the English speaking world is said to have been sparked by Murakami’s endorsement.

[4] Named after the 1939 song, South of the Border, written by Jimmy Kennedy and Michael Carr and recorded by everyone from Bing Crosby to Willie Nelson.

[5] The Japanese word for 9 is ku, hence the Q in the title to suggest a different version of 1984, the year in which the book is set.

[6] 18 if you count The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle as 3 books.

[7] At the time I didn’t realise there was a third volume, published separately.

[8] To date, I’ve read all of Murakami’s works published in English, including Underground, his series of interviews with the victims and perpetrators of the 1995 Tokyo underground gas attacks.

[9] Made up of Murakami’s first three novels, Hear the Wind Sing, Pinball 1973, and A Wild Sheep Chase. The sequel, Dance, Dance, Dance is told by the same narrator but not part of the trilogy.

[10] As has often been noted, women have shit to do.