Flow My Tears, the Policeman Said

better the second or third or whatever time

Absolute trip of a book but the unsatisfactory ending annoyed me.

A winding immersive dystopian novel which at first poses a mystery that unravels eventually to depict what is essentially a thought experiment on mind/universe dynamics - can a change in the mind alter a person's reality? And more implausibly but no less interestingly, can such a change in perception have ramifications on shared reality and so the realities of others? The key unsurprisingly is drugs, but despite the familiar themes and occupations - oppressive states, surveillance, the relationship between personal identity and outward/official identity, genetic modification, 'prince and the pauper' reversals - the story still feels fresh and fascinating. Philip K. Dick builds gorgeous, compelling worlds and characters out of these ideas. My favourite is the unexpected poetry that resides within the stories, that even after all the exploration of concepts, the fleshing out of characters and the new world, there is still room for the exquisite songs of John Dowland, and moments of sheer tenderness between human beings.

“Love isn't just wanting another person the way you want to own an object you see in a store. That's just desire. You want to have it around, take it home and set it up somewhere in the apartment like a lamp. Love is"--she paused, reflecting--"like a father saving his children from a burning house, getting them out and dying himself. When you love you cease to live for yourself; you live for another person.” Flow My Tears, the Policeman Said was published in 1974 and was awarded the John W. Campbell Memorial Award for Best Science Fiction Novel in 1975. The novel is a profound, absurd, and mind-bending parable on the nature of loneliness and disaffection. It’s a novel filled with uncharacteristic heart on the behalf of Dick and its themes are familiar ones: drugs, the nature of reality, and personhood. Flow My Tears, the Policeman Said is a dystopian novel that addresses a range of existential, social and polictical themes: identity and loss of identity, celebrity and ordinariness, subjective perceptions and objective realities, state sponsored mind control and drug induced mind bending, genetic engineering and emotional networking. A near future America — which, in this early 70's narrative, means 1988 — that unsuccessfully tries to hide its cultural decay and social dysfunction behind empty celebrity worship and self-gratifying class boundaries. But the problem with living in a rigidly stratified society is that, when you're radically removed from your accepted place in it, you effectively lose everything...including you. At the outset of Flow My Tears, the Policeman Said, we meet Jason Taverner, a famous television star whose show is watched by an avid audience of thirty million viewers. But such happy moments of well-being and acclaim never last long in a Dick novel. Before the end of the first chapter, an ex-lover tries to kill Taverner – by means of a Callisto cuddle sponge, which digs its fifty feeding tubes into his body. And by the second chapter, Taverner has awakened in a low-down, bug-infested skid-row hotel room, without any recollection of how he got there. When he tries to phone his friends and colleagues, none of them recognize him any more. On October 11, Taverner was a celebrity; on October 12 he is a nobody, with no identification, nothing. He finds himself in a surveillance society that monitors its citizens' every move while keeping it docile and compliant through vapid entertainment (which he is a part of), material reward, and drugs. He decides to forge an ID which brings him into trouble with the police state and brings him into contact with Police General Felix Buckman and his lover/sister Alys. Little does Taverner or Buckman know that Alys is the key to Taverner’s plight (her use of the reality-warping drug KR-3 is the reason Taverner was transported to a parallel universe where he no longer existed). This novel, while not perfect, is endlessly fascinating. Taverner starts the novel as a high profile celebrity, who is self-absorbed, and blinded to reality of the dystopian police. One could say he actually operates above it. But when he is transported to a parallel reality where he doesn’t exist, he is faced with actually observing reality, feeling what it feels like to be a “normal.” By the end of the story we are lead to believe that Taverner is back to his former reality, but perhaps changed. Likewise, the character progression of Police General Felix Buckman finds him forever changed by the end of the novel. In fact, Dick seems to suggest that police can rebel from the systems they serve. When the Buckman experiences his epiphany at the climax, embracing a black man whom he has encountered randomly at a gas station, it's not only as if Dick is trying to apologize for centuries of racial injustice but he is pointing out that Buckman has finally learned that the objectification of the other is wrong (this a bit ironic considering this novel doesn’t treat its women characters very well – Dick seemed to have held some sexist attitudes). Flow My Tears, the Policeman Said is one of my favorite books among Dick’s works. It blends high philosophical concepts with the typical pulp fiction writing we come to expect from Philip K. Dick. Its prose is indeed pedestrian but I rather like the straightforward approach he takes to language. It’s the conceptual underpinnings of a novel by Dick that I rather enjoy.

** spoiler alert ** A famous singer and TV personality wakes up in a motel one day to find that he is unknown. Unknown and undocumented in a near-future police state. Published in 1978, this novel isn’t politically correct today, managing to be offensive to blacks, working women, parents, and lesbians. He got the flying cars wrong, too. As the TV star tries to get his documentation and find out what happened to him, it becomes a Pilgrim’s Progress and he meets many colorful characters, some of whom help him along the way. This was the best part of the book, as it showed the brutal aspects of the police state, the complexity of bureaucracy, the tenuousness of our existence, the human will to survive, and the difficulty in knowing whom to trust. It’s an interesting thought experiment, however i didn’t find the characters likable (see above comment re misogyny, racism and homophobia). I was quite disturbed by the laws enacted in this future that lower the age of consent to 12. As if that’s not bad enough, the reason behind the change was to keep the politically powerful (who were and continue to be caught with underage children) out of jail because these were “victimless crimes.” What might have been “daring” or “scandalous” in the late 70s now comes across as creepy and pedophilic. Also a bit too much, given the latest about R Kelly and Jeffrey Epstein Game of Thrones aside, don’t get me started on the incest storyline. Finally, since I’ve already warned you about spoilers, I was disappointed in the solution. How does our hero get his mojo back? Drugs. Deus ex machina.