Flow My Tears, The Policeman Said – Philip K. Dick

I was talking to a lawyer last week about how all the state needs to do these days to disempower a citizen and turn them into a nonentity is to take away their access to internet and banking. The precariousness of status and autonomy in an untrustworthy world was a theme that came to prominence in the 20th century; in the artifice of our present, all smoke and mirrors and alternative truths, it conditions all that a person might propose in their life.
 
Philip K. Dick, as ever, has a whole lot of serious fun with the idea of a powerful individual rendered an unknown. His existentialist sci fi carries the reader forward on a wave of rooting for the flawed Taverner, dropping in occasional absurdist treats during the ride.
 
I got the feeling that Jason Taverner secretly knows that he’s a fraud from the moment he wakes up, and then plays out the destructive script of his worst fear: “I don’t exist.” In this alternative reality, Dick presents us with a warning of a police state of forced labour camps, the slaughter of students, the sterilization of blacks and a cult of the leader. He throws up philosophical and theological arguments and introduces mescaline to make Taverner and us question and wonder — and fear the dangerous power of fundamentalist religion twisted into meaninglessness. An abusive policeman declares: “All flesh is like grass. Like low-grade roachweed most likely. Unto us a child is born, unto us a hit is given.”
 
I found pleasing gravitas in a certain cultural weight leant to the novel by references that start out with Dowland’s lament in the title, respect shown by characters for Rilke, Brecht and Sibelius, and respect shown by Dick to his teenage character, Kathy, who is reading Proust, and who continues Taverner’s quotation from Finnegan’s Wake with: “When the old washerwomen at dusk are merging into trees and rocks.” Together with Felix Buckman’s (the eponymous policeman) poetic reflections, they provide a kind of choral commentary.
 
At the same time, Phil Dick being Phil Dick, we have some priceless humour. The protagonist has set upon him a gelatine-like Callisto cuddle sponge, Kathy’s talking toy, Cheerful Charlie, brings strongly to mind Johnny Cab in “Total Recall”, and Buckman’s sister mentions a porn song called “Go down, Moses.”
 
Two other moments that jumped out at me were—in this 1974 novel—Taverner’s question: “Do you have an encyclopedia machine?”, and when Kathy asks in the Italian restaurant: “Are you responding to my warmth?” Really rather nice.