![]() ![]() I have picked up several of his books, read a page or so, and then abandoned them. I have picked up and abandoned A Scanner Darkly more times than any of the others. ![]() It was, I think, the threat of his work being badly written. It’s the one thing I see repeatedly stated in relation to Dick’s novels. ![]() The ideas are great but the writing is poor. So I wanted to deal with that accusation straightaway. I consider myself to be highly critical of, and sensitive to, bad prose style and I did not find it here. Although that’s beside the point, of course.ĭick isn’t Nabokov, certainly, but then Nabokov is, as a stylist, overrated anyway. Dick’s style isn’t meticulous, or does not give that impression. And this is, I’m told, one of the more mature efforts. The language is jivey, the sentences – the word order, the grammar – idiosyncratic. I was strongly reminded, to the point of crying theft, of David Foster Wallace. For what it’s worth.Ī Scanner Darkly begins with a man’s struggle against the aphids he thinks have taken over his house, his dog and his own person. He took a whole lot of drugs and lost his mind and started seeing bugs, in the house, on his dog, and his own person. It is one of the funniest, and saddest, openings to any novel I have read. ![]() It sets the tone, too, for the rest of the book. A Scanner Darkly is about drugs and drug addicts, amongst other things. It is about what it is like to be an addict, the awful consequences. The premature ageing, the brain damage, the cravings. Guys sitting around talking shit for days on end. One guy fantasies about ‘a huge window display bottles of slow death, cans of slow death, jars and bathtubs and vats and bowls of slow death, millions of caps and tabs and hits of slow death, slow death mixed with speed and junk and barbiturates and psychedelics, everything–and a giant sign: YOUR CREDIT IS GOOD HERE. ![]()
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