Book Review – Ubik: The Screenplay by Philip K Dick

Philip K Dick’s Ubik: The Screenplay has long since been an obscure, out of print collector’s item for hardcore PKD fans like myself. First published in 1985 (three years after the great man’s death), the screenplay is difficult to obtain secondhand and exorbitantly priced. So I was pleased to discover earlier this year that Subterranean Press would be reissuing the book in hardcover (1500 copies) and lettered, signed hardcover (26 copies, very expensive). Being the PKD-phile that I am, I went out and preordered this from Amazon, and it arrived on Monday. I wasn’t disappointed.

I first read Ubik: The Screenplay in 2000 (from Murdoch University library) and I recall being impressed by PKD’s re-interpretation of his essential but often horribly written Ubik. PKD was commissioned to write the screenplay in the 1970s by a French filmmaker whose name I have temporarily forgotten, but the film was never made. Apparently, a film of Ubik may be on the horizon, but I wouldn’t be holding my breath. Ubik would probably  be one of the most difficult PKD novels to film, and his screenplay actually makes things even harder for the would-be filmmaker. An amazing film it would be, but I doubt I’ll ever see it.

I’m not going to run through the plot of Ubik here, as I’ve already done so in my detailed review of the novel. This can be found under the Philip K Dick category on this blog. This review will merely describe the differences between the novel and screenplay, and attempt to inform potential buyers as to what they will be getting for their US $35. In terms of the design and production of the book, Subterranean Press cannot be faulted. The cover is in fact more of a silver colour than the white depicted in the image above, but the physical construction of the book is immaculate. If only PKD could have lived to have seen his work revered in this way…

The main problem with the novel Ubik is that the first 60 pages or so are horrible. Ghastly. About as good as a much less well known PKD novel called The Zap Gun. I’ve charted the writing of Ubik in my novel review, but suffice to say that here PKD gets a second crack at it, and for the most part he improves on the overall story. Ubik: The Screenplay is full of strange filmic oddities (most noticeably the ‘Andy Warhol’ Ubik can intrusions) and spacetime slips. It’s pretty psychedelic stuff.

As I’ve read the novel version five times or more, I was able to instantly pick up which material PKD had added. I noticed a ’self serve abortion clinic,’ a pregnant minor character whose child becomes the new Ella Runciter (much in the fashion of the film 2001), and a punch up between two characters. None of the new material is important or even particularly good. It might even be said that some of the new material is slightly jarring or inappropriate, but that’s debatable. For the most part, however, PKD sticks to the story of the novel, removing a lot of wastage in the early part and focussing on the far superior later scenes.

One thing I noticed this time around is how modern and Matrix-like Ubik: The Screenplay is. This is really sophisticated fare, full of incursions into reality on Runciter’s part and truly mind-blowing scenes, like the one with the drugstore phasing in and out of reality. This truly would make an excellent film if it could be done properly. The central mystery of Ubik: The Screenplay is and remains Ubik itself? What is Ubik? We never find out. Therein lies the allure and possibly the frustrating aspect of the most elusive of PKD’s stories.

Ubik is an essential PKD novel, and Ubik: The Screenplay is an essential read for hardcore PKD fans. I only wish he could have lived to see how much people like myself revere his work.

Book Review – The Last Sky by Alice Nelson

Alice Nelson’s The Last Sky is the eighth winner of Western Australia’s TAG Hungerford Award. For those who don’t know, the Hungerford is a biannual award for W.A. writers who haven’t yet published a novel length work. The award is presented by none other than Tom Hungerford himself, who is well into his nineties now. Many of Tom Hungerford’s stories have been collected in the volume Straightshooter, which is made up of three earlier collections. Nelson’s novel won the award for 2006, which was actually awarded in Feb 2007, and the book was released in August 2008. No wonder, then, that the cover says ‘Winner of the TAG Hungerford Award’ rather than ‘Winner of the TAG Hungerford Award 2006.’ But I digress. The Last Sky is an effective mood piece of a novel, reminiscent of the works of earlier TAG Hungerford Award winning writers Gail Jones and Simone Lazaroo. Nelson rather impressively carves out her own space in this literary constellation, as this review will attempt to describe.

The cast of The Last Sky is fairly small. Maya Wise is the viewpoint character, although Nelson certainly blurs the boundaries between the perspectives of different characters. She is unhappily married to an archaeologist named Joseph. During the course of her time in Hong Kong shortly before the ‘Handover’ to Chinese rule, Maya meets Ken Tiger and Clarissa. Joseph is the protege of a famous archaeologist named Aurel Stein, whose name certainly rang a bell. My own interest in Chinese history has led to have a vague idea that Aurel Stein was an explorer of the Silk Road region in the early twentieth century. It turns out that the real Aurel Stein died in 1943, at age eighty. Nelson seems to have sent Stein a few decades into his future for the purpose of this novel. Through Ken Tiger, Maya learns about the lives of Ada Lang and Victor Kadoorie. We are also introduced to Maya and Joseph’s respective families through Maya’s ‘flights of fancy’ embellished from shreds of information. It’s hard to say who the main characters of this novel truly are, or what time period the book is mostly set in. Nelson’s technique is slippery and elusive, and for the most part well realised.

The Last Sky doesn’t have a plot, at least very little of one that is occurring in Maya Wise’s present. I could probably summarise the main events in a short paragraph, and it probably wouldn’t seem very impressive, but to do so would be to misunderstand The Last Sky’s subtle art. Rather there are events being remembered (or imagined) in various times, interwoven and interlocking. It’s the kind of thing I suspect would turn a fair few readers off, but I found the technique to be interesting enough. Maya’s life seems to consist of real and imagined wanderings around Hong Kong, as well as her recollections of various events in her own past. The only forward movement in time that I can discern relates to the drawing closer of the actual ‘Handover’ date, with which the novel ends.

One of Maya’s problems is that she feels no real affinity with the Chinese around her. Fairly early on she confesses to this and it causes her to feel alienated from Hong Kong society. For me this was a slight disappointment, as it meant that the narrative lacked the insider dimension that makes Simone Lazaroo’s The World Waiting to be Made so exquisite. Her husband Joseph is even less tolerant of the Chinese, whom he sees as barbarians unappreciative of his works of excavation and scholarship. Maya becomes increasingly ambivalent about Joseph’s charms (or lack thereof) and as such I found him to be an unlikeable character. Maya doesn’t have much more luck with the Chinese than her husband:

“Sometimes I think that these people [the Chinese] will always be inaccessible to me. Once I told Joseph that I thought they deliberately conspired to fulfil all the western cliches about them, about their inscrutability.” (p. 127)

But Nelson’s novel is not so much about this sense of dislocation as about her imagined flights into the lives of Ken Tiger, his lover Ada, and her husband Victor Kadoorie. Maya says it best herself, neatly summarising this novel’s methodology:

“Yes, that’s the place I’d like to be. In the landscape of someone else’s past, between the closed pages of the history book.” (p. 153)

This technique is by its very nature elusive and tangential, and thus the narrative does not so much progress as unfold. Late in the story, Maya rues the fact that:

“I have clung too tightly to a world that is not my own. Ken Tiger and Ada and Victor and Clarissa and Joseph. I have spent all these months here trying to pin them down. Have I become only a prism that refracts their stories, their lives?” (p. 228)

The Last Sky is easy to read, but difficult to review. The various strands fall together neatly and yet seem insubstantial when analysed in isolation. I read this over the course of something less than four hours, in two sessions over the course of one day. This serves as a testament to this novel’s readability, for readers of this blog will know that I often abandon novels mid-course. I found the impact of the novel to build to something like a crescendo toward the end, which is of course a good thing.

On the subject of presentation, Fremantle Press have done a good job of presenting what must have been quite a short manuscript (not more than 60,000 words, I wouldn’t have thought) in such a way as to make the novel appear longer than it is. Generous margins and ample use of white space bulks this up to 250 pages, but the pages themselves breeze by. This is clever work by the publisher, who would no doubt have been mindful of the fact that the manuscript was a little on the short side for today’s market.

This is a work of not insignificant promise. Nelson shows glimpses of an ability to produce imagery as dense and as vivid as Gail Jones. Similarly, The Last Sky tantalizes the reader with visions of an exotic Eastern landscape more fully explored in the work of Simone Lazaroo. In time, Nelson may equal those luminaries on both counts.

Two incomplete reviews and a new reading list – 26/8/08

I’ve been very, very naughty.

I started reading two novels, Simone Lazaroo’s The Travel Writer and Richard Yates’ Revolutionary Road, but I’ve given up on both of them after 90-100 pages. This is not to say that I disliked them, particularly in the case of the Lazaroo novel. Simone Lazaroo is such a good writer that her prose is exhilarating. She must be the best stylist of the eight Hungerford award winners I’ve read. Unfortunately for me, I wasn’t especially interested in her tale of women’s lives in Malacca and London during the twentieth century. This is my loss. I will come back to this, and her second novel The Australian Fiancee, in due course.

Expect to see my review of Alice Nelson’s TAG Hungerford Award winning The Last Sky in the next day or so. I finished reading it on the plane from Melbourne last night and was duly impressed. It also won’t be long before I’ll be able to review Philip K Dick’s Ubik: The Screenplay either, which has just arrived in the post from Amazon. And then there will reviews of Ha Jin’s The Bridegroom and other stories and David Mitchell’s number9dream.

Good times.

Book Review – Beijing Coma by Ma Jian

It’s fitting that I’ve been reading Ma Jian’s Beijing Coma during the Olympic Games. So fitting that the protagonist and his mother’s apartment tower ends up being demolished to make way for the construction of the Beijing’s National Stadium, the Bird’s Nest. But more on that later. Ma is the author of the outstanding travel narrative Red Dust, the short novel The Noodle Maker and the book of stories Stick Out Your Tongue. Only Red Dust can claim to be as important a book as this one, but ultimately Beijing Coma will probably be regarded as Ma’s masterwork.

At 584 pages in length, Beijing Coma is an imposing read. The novel’s main subject is the Tiananmen Square massacre of 1989, an event which is now unspeakable in China. Needless to say, Ma has long since fled China for the comparatively benign world of London. This event is described in exhaustive detail. What we get is literally hundreds of pages leading up to the ‘crackdown’ that those of us in the West remember best through the image of the unknown ‘Tank Man’ defiantly standing against the oncoming tanks. For those of you too young to remember this, here it is:

Beijing Coma is about a young man called Dai Wei who takes part in the student democracy movement in the months and years leading up to June 4 1989. The book is split into two narratives, both of which are told from Dai Wei’s point of view. The first narrative describes Dai Wei’s childhood and university life leading up to his near fatal shooting on the night of June 4. In the second narrative, which is interweaved with the first, we learn that Dai Wei was shot in the head and is now completely paralyzed. He can hear what is going on around him, but he can’t move a muscle or give the slightest indication that he can understand what people are saying.

I want to discuss some of the problems I had with this novel before I go on to talk about its outstanding qualities. Firstly, the book is long, possibly overly so. To make matters worse, there are no chapters. The novel is punctuated with short italicized passages which usually (but not always) indicate a shift between the two narratives. These short statements are often only obliquely relevant to the main story, and they often use medical terminology. An example from page 118:

“Cortisol seeps into your cells, filling them with sadness and causing your memories of her to ferment.”

Some of these statements are quite poetic, but a great many are pedestrian or even vaguely annoying. The lack of chapters is a significant but not insurmountable hurdle for the reader. Another hurdle is the fact that Beijing Coma sags very heavily in the middle. The problem, to my mind, is that much of what Ma Jian is trying to detail isn’t overly interesting in itself. While it is true that the novel pays off in the final hundred pages or so, many readers will probably give up after two or three hundred pages. Ma’s attention to detail is such that we get pages and pages of fairly insignificant conversation between young men and women who will later become the central figures in the student democracy movement. Worse, the story of Dai Wei’s life after his shooting only becomes interesting toward the end of the novel, and as such I found the first half of the book something of a chore to read. A third hurdle is the fact that Beijing Coma appears to lack an overall shape or drive. Perhaps this comes in part from the fact that we know that Dai Wei will end up being shot and falling into a decade-long coma. Upon approaching the end, I discovered that the book did have a shape after all, but it only ‘paid off’ for this reader in the final hundred pages. My final complaint is that Ma’s writing is, for the most part, devoid of what I might call ‘poetic flourish.’ Perhaps this comes from the translation, but I didn’t feel emotionally drawn into the story until the second half.

Having pointed out some of the book’s potential flaws (at least for the impatient and less careful readers among us – myself included), let me reiterate my belief that Beijing Coma is a tremendously important book. I hesitate to use the word ‘novel,’ for this reads more like journalism than fiction. Ma Jian has said that he considers himself to be a realist, and that his mission as a writer is to describe the people and events he sees around him. In this, Beijing Coma is a success. This is an insider account of the student movement that was so barbarically purged in Tiananmen Square, one so detailed that one can’t help but imagine that Ma Jian himself witnessed the terrible events he is describing. Most of the book is taken up with conversations between members of the student movement. The main characters are too numerous to mention, and it wouldn’t serve much of a purpose for me to try to outline their qualities here. Meanwhile, the second narrative is taken up exclusively with conversations and Dai Wei’s thoughts and reminiscences. This might be unique in fiction; it’s certainly unique in my reading experience – a protagonist who can’t move, speak or open his eyes.

This second narrative starts fairly slowly, as I’ve said. The reader is left to wonder whether Dai Wei will eventually wake from his coma. Meanwhile, he overhears conversations, many of which involve friends who come to see him in the aftermath of the purge. If Dai Wei ever wakes up he is to be arrested by the Communist authorities, so he is pretty much doomed. I guess what I’m trying to say here is that this second narrative seems to lack an escape route or goal. This seems to be Ma’s point here, but it’s a little hard on the reader. It wasn’t until page 373 that I encountered a passage that really seemed to resonate with me. I reproduce it here in full:

“My mother’s always forgetting to turn on the radio. The silence is a torment because it forces me to recognise that I am lying motionless on an iron bed. Whenever I contemplate this truth, I hurriedly return to the streets I used to walk down and try to hide myself in the crowds. After a while, my mind clears, and death shows its face to me. In fact, death has been lurking inside me for years, waiting to strike me down when a disease sends the signal. Most of the time, I pretend not to know it’s there.”

Dai Wei’s body suffers a multitude of atrocities and humiliations over the course of Beijing Coma, including but not limited to: being shot in the head; having one of his kidney’s removed and sold; having his urine sold as a mystical healing liquid (an amusing quote: “I had shingles. My feet were in so much pain, I couldn’t walk. I drank my urine for a week, but nothing happened. But after just one cup of this guy’s urine, I’m completely cured) (p. 427); being screwed by a nurse (Dai Wei likes this – he can still get an erection); having his mouth fucked by a male boarder (he’s not happy about this at all); and finally being virtually abandoned and left to die. As Dai Wei’s body decays, so too does the environment around him, namely the apartment tower that is to be demolished in preparation for the 2008 Olympics, and also his mother’s declining mental health. This narrative gets more and more interesting as it progresses,  to the point where it begins to the chart the sort of territory that J. G. Ballard made his own in novels like Crash and High-Rise.

Meanwhile, Dai Wei and his friends move inexorably closer to the bloodshed that was to befall them on June 4. There is a sense of inertia, of inevitability. One thing that jumped out at me was that the student protesters had ample opportunity to flee, right up to the point that the tanks started rolling into Tiananmen Square itself, but they found themselves unable to pull themselves away. In various ways, they become martyrs to the doomed democracy movement. One of the main characters, Wang Fei, says it best, years after the Tiananmen Square massacre:

“We’re the ‘Tiananmen Generation’, but no one dares call us that [...] It’s taboo. We’ve been crushed and silenced. If we don’t take a stand now, we will be erased from the history books. The economy is developing at a frantic pace. In a few more years the country will be so strong, the government will have nothing to fear, and no need or desire to listen to us. So if we want to change our lives, we must take action now. This is our last chance. The Party is begging the world to give China the Olympics. We must beg the Party to give us basic human rights.” (p 505)

Ultimately, Beijing Coma is a triumph. The two narratives finally reach their bleak and harrowing conclusions, to devastating effect. This is not a lighthearted book or one to be dismissed on the basis of a few stylistic quibbles. This is a powerful, vital story. There’s a great deal I haven’t mentioned in this review, such as the symbolism of the sparrow that adorns the book’s cover, or the significance of Dai Wei’s apartment tower being demolished to pave the way for the Beijing Olympics. The most straightforward thing I can say about this is that if you are interested in Chinese politics or the struggle against tyranny and oppression in China today, then you must read Beijing Coma.