beer good
Well-Known Member
Haruki Murakami, 1Q84 vols 1&2, 2011
Few 20th century books are used as a reference for how society works (or doesn't) as often as George Orwell's 1984. But it's also, according to a recent poll, the book that the most people lie about having read, so let's just establish this: 1984 isn't (merely) a book about how the state keeps tabs on us, and the key phrase isn't "Big Brother Is Watching." The key phrase is "We have always been at war with Eurasia." Whoever controls language and information controls history, controls the present, controls people's entire concept of who and where and when they are. The purpose of newspeak is to make dissent impossible. And the scariest concept of all is that we let it happen. We might be happy with two minutes' hate per day and fear of an unknown enemy, seeking safety in paranoia. And when the world changes, when we find ourselves through the looking glass, we can't even use words to explain what used to be different.
(Of course, the real 1984 didn't turn out like that. Phew.)
So it's no coincidence that that 1Q84 starts with a subtle nod to another English classic. One spring day in 1984, Aomame is late for a very important date, so she takes a shortcut through a metaphorical rabbit hole and winds up in another Japan where history went ever so slightly different. Nothing much has changed, really, it's the little things that she barely notices at first. She's still herself, she's still in Tokyo, she's still an assassin who sends abusive men to "the other side"... but suddenly the cops have always been armed with heavier weapons, the US and the Soviet Union have always been friendly, a mysterious religious movement have always hidden up in the mountains, and when she looks up at the night sky there's two moons hanging there.
In what first looks like an unrelated story, something similar happens to Tengo, a math teacher and unpublished novelist who's hired to ghost write a flawed but fascinating novel by a high school girl who grew up in a weird abusive religious sect. His job is to rewrite the story, polish it and make it more palatable, but leave in that bit about the two moons.
Here's what 1Q84 is not: it's not a rewrite of Orwell, at least not to the extent that the likes of Burgess (or The Daily Mail) have tried it. Apart from a few references to 1984 by the characters themselves it's all rather subtle; the ideas, rather than the slogans, sneak into the narrative, changing the past almost seamlessly. And Murakami fans won't need to be disappointed, he does a lot of things right; he's got two fascinating, well-drawn main characters, and there are lots of little rabbit holes hidden within the two storylines linking them together both plotwise and thematically. Some people have noted with interest – personally I think it's little more than a curiosity – that the novel is based on Bach's Das Wohltemperierte Klavier; two books, 24 chapters each, one for each musical key, alternating between the major and the minor. The storylines twist around each other, constantly teasing that one of them might be a fiction within the other or that they both might be within something greater, building to a climax that leaves me going "...WHAT? MORE! NOW!"
But at the same time, every time I go through one of those rabbit holes, I keep wondering if it's really as clever as it thinks it is. For one thing, there's still something about it that makes me wonder if it's supposed to seem as obviously constructed as it does; maybe it's just that I was never much of a Bach fan, and would have preferred the jazz fan Murakami to improvise more – as it is, the novel seems organized by mathematical precision, with the characters even remarking themselves on the obviousness of some of the dramatic ploys he uses. What's (possibly) worse is the way Murakami presents a novel this rich in themes, asking a lot of rather sinister questions about identity, paranoia, reality and power on a personal, sexual, societal level that would make a Pynchon, a Dick, a Cronenberg or even a Ryu Murakami rub their hands and cancel all their vacation plans, whereas Haruki almost seems to chicken out and say "Well, that's just the way it is, whatchagonnado." I'm not saying a novelist is required to always tackle the Big Questions, but when you let the wasps out you better know you've let them out. Don't just dazzle me with big-screen entertainment, have it mean something.
Of course, the irony of that is that the whole thing is told from the POV of characters who are themselves caught up in a story controlled, not by Big Brother (unless you mean Murakami himself), but by what takes Big Brother's place when everyone's too busy congratulating themselves on not living in 1984. There's one volume to go, and if Murakami wants it to, it could blow 1Q84 wide open. Maybe that's his plan. Maybe there is no plan and the novel, like Orwell's state, only exists to perpetuate itself. I can't tell right now.
Few 20th century books are used as a reference for how society works (or doesn't) as often as George Orwell's 1984. But it's also, according to a recent poll, the book that the most people lie about having read, so let's just establish this: 1984 isn't (merely) a book about how the state keeps tabs on us, and the key phrase isn't "Big Brother Is Watching." The key phrase is "We have always been at war with Eurasia." Whoever controls language and information controls history, controls the present, controls people's entire concept of who and where and when they are. The purpose of newspeak is to make dissent impossible. And the scariest concept of all is that we let it happen. We might be happy with two minutes' hate per day and fear of an unknown enemy, seeking safety in paranoia. And when the world changes, when we find ourselves through the looking glass, we can't even use words to explain what used to be different.
(Of course, the real 1984 didn't turn out like that. Phew.)
So it's no coincidence that that 1Q84 starts with a subtle nod to another English classic. One spring day in 1984, Aomame is late for a very important date, so she takes a shortcut through a metaphorical rabbit hole and winds up in another Japan where history went ever so slightly different. Nothing much has changed, really, it's the little things that she barely notices at first. She's still herself, she's still in Tokyo, she's still an assassin who sends abusive men to "the other side"... but suddenly the cops have always been armed with heavier weapons, the US and the Soviet Union have always been friendly, a mysterious religious movement have always hidden up in the mountains, and when she looks up at the night sky there's two moons hanging there.
In what first looks like an unrelated story, something similar happens to Tengo, a math teacher and unpublished novelist who's hired to ghost write a flawed but fascinating novel by a high school girl who grew up in a weird abusive religious sect. His job is to rewrite the story, polish it and make it more palatable, but leave in that bit about the two moons.
Here's what 1Q84 is not: it's not a rewrite of Orwell, at least not to the extent that the likes of Burgess (or The Daily Mail) have tried it. Apart from a few references to 1984 by the characters themselves it's all rather subtle; the ideas, rather than the slogans, sneak into the narrative, changing the past almost seamlessly. And Murakami fans won't need to be disappointed, he does a lot of things right; he's got two fascinating, well-drawn main characters, and there are lots of little rabbit holes hidden within the two storylines linking them together both plotwise and thematically. Some people have noted with interest – personally I think it's little more than a curiosity – that the novel is based on Bach's Das Wohltemperierte Klavier; two books, 24 chapters each, one for each musical key, alternating between the major and the minor. The storylines twist around each other, constantly teasing that one of them might be a fiction within the other or that they both might be within something greater, building to a climax that leaves me going "...WHAT? MORE! NOW!"
But at the same time, every time I go through one of those rabbit holes, I keep wondering if it's really as clever as it thinks it is. For one thing, there's still something about it that makes me wonder if it's supposed to seem as obviously constructed as it does; maybe it's just that I was never much of a Bach fan, and would have preferred the jazz fan Murakami to improvise more – as it is, the novel seems organized by mathematical precision, with the characters even remarking themselves on the obviousness of some of the dramatic ploys he uses. What's (possibly) worse is the way Murakami presents a novel this rich in themes, asking a lot of rather sinister questions about identity, paranoia, reality and power on a personal, sexual, societal level that would make a Pynchon, a Dick, a Cronenberg or even a Ryu Murakami rub their hands and cancel all their vacation plans, whereas Haruki almost seems to chicken out and say "Well, that's just the way it is, whatchagonnado." I'm not saying a novelist is required to always tackle the Big Questions, but when you let the wasps out you better know you've let them out. Don't just dazzle me with big-screen entertainment, have it mean something.
Of course, the irony of that is that the whole thing is told from the POV of characters who are themselves caught up in a story controlled, not by Big Brother (unless you mean Murakami himself), but by what takes Big Brother's place when everyone's too busy congratulating themselves on not living in 1984. There's one volume to go, and if Murakami wants it to, it could blow 1Q84 wide open. Maybe that's his plan. Maybe there is no plan and the novel, like Orwell's state, only exists to perpetuate itself. I can't tell right now.