Flow My Tears, the Policeman Said

Rating:
Summary: Alienation and Existentialism
Review: I am a Philip K. Dick fan but I didn't like this book much. The plot here doesn't make much sense. The usual quirky take on the world of tomorrow is there. The central figure Jason Taverner (who is not the title character) is not particularly likable nor are his thoughts as expressed in his internal dialogue especially believable. This book gave me the impression that the author used the slim plot of the story as a framework to give us his take on situations from his own life and from events of the day. (The book was written in the early seventies.) Taverner is a smarmy variety show host in the early '70's Johnny Carson mold. He is assaulted by a deranged woman with whom he's had a predatory sexual relationship and is grievously wounded. He loses consciousness and wakes up in sleazy motel. Taverner discovers that he has lost his identity: no one's ever heard of him and there's no record of his existence. Taverner meets a delusional petite young woman and fantasizes about sex with her. Soon after they meet she demands that he have sex with her and he immediately is turned off. He meets an aging ex-girlfriend and takes advantage of her hospitality, putting her in danger of a police jam in the process. He cruelly mocks her fading looks to her face. There's a funny scene where he describes a mural depicting the ascent into heaven of Richard M. Nixon. The policeman of the title and his S&M-minded sister seemed like bizarre characters inserted more for their weirdness than for appropriateness to the story. The powerful ruthless policeman shows that, underneath it all, he's just a touchy feely guy who would like to give the world a hug and a flower. His sister, on the other hand, is interested in weird sex and mind altering drugs. There's an unlikely background story of a fascist police state holding left leaning university campuses in a state of siege; students are hunted down for extermination or deportation to labour/death camps. It's all very cute and funny but not enough to justify a book. I read this straight through on a ten-hour plane flight and I was left feeling emotionally isolated and disassociated and wanting those hours back.

Rating:
Summary: Levels of fascination and revelation
Review: I am a PKD fan and I regularly select a PKD work from my bookshelf to reread between other books. Now it was the turn of 'Flow My Tears'. This is a very pacy novel that generates great impetus with its engaging characters. And it resolves into such a typical PKD ending - enigmatic and open-ended. Did PKD have difficulty with endings, or is it we, the readers, who have difficulty with his endings?

There is one point early in the novel when Eddy, the hotel clerk, takes Jason Taverner to the forger Kathy. But does Eddy stay or leave? It appears that he leaves but then he is still there. This seems to me to be a case of poor editing - I would have expected that a good editor would have picked up this inconsistency and given PKD the chance to correct it. But then I don't know how difficult PKD was to work with.

From p39 in the Daw edition there is a great quote: 'He felt sympathetic. The truth, he had often reflected, was overrated as a virtue.' On p61 there is an original word 'thungly' - or is that a misprint? It doesn't conjure up any immediate impression for me - but I really don't mind an author creating words and 'kipple' from 'Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep' is definitely part of my everyday vocabulary.

I have previously reviewed a marvellous biography of Brahms by Jan Swafford. In the evaluation of Brahms and his place in musical history Swafford aligns Brahms with the classical tradition - Mozart, Schubert, Beethoven of the fourth symphony - and opposed to the 'moderns' of his day - Beethoven of the Pastoral Symphony, Berlioz, Liszt and especially Wagner. And then he links Brahms into the future via - of all composers - Schoenberg. What does this have to do with PKD and 'Flow My Tears'? Well let's consider this quote from p95 and you may wonder, like me, just how perceptive PKD was. 'He detested Wagner. Wagner and those like him such as Berlioz, had set music back three centuries. Until Karlheinz Stockhausen in his "Gesang der Junglinge" had once more brought music up to date.' For those who do not know modern 'classical' music, Stockhausen is a whole step further advanced along the avante garde than Schoenberg but the drift of ideas is clearly the same as the one ventured on by Swafford. PKD continues to surprise in surprising ways! The next time I reread a novel I fully expect a new revelation that will only then become apparent from some other reading I've done in the meantime.

There is one serious anachronism in this novel. It relates to phonograph records - even the term is so outdated. Perhaps a future publisher should do PKD the service of reworking the text to replace phonograph with compact disc. The story would work just as well. There is a minor point I would quibble at (and that's a bit of a play on words) - in this novel people get about by means of flying cars called - yes, quibbles. And yet at one stage the police have a (heli)copter - surely they would be obsolete if every vehicle could fly?

I hope in this review I have opened up just some of the ways in which PKD and his writing fascinate me - it's not just the story, or the plot, or the language use, or the philosophy, or .... It's so much more in one giant amalgamation.

Rating:
Summary: Another PKD Masterpiece
Review: I disagree about the weak ending, I think the ending was one of the best ever! I also like the characterizations, the settings, the plot...in short, this book was--not a sci-fi, but a LITERARY--masterpiece. Dick was visionary; I think he could see the future. Just look at the scene where he describes addiction to phone sex; it describes, in vivid detail, the phenomena of internet usage and addiction.

Rating:
Summary: interesting but painful read
Review: I find PKD's ideas fascinating, thought-provoking, "far-out," you-name-it. He was clearly a cutting edge thinker. However, his writing here is so god-aweful, I could not summon the will power to slog through this book. The exposition was so heavy-handed and the dialogue so cheesy I had to stop. When he wrote of a Rolls Royce skyflyer(a rocket of some sort, apparently) that its engine "idled throbbingly," I nearly flung the book (frustratedly?) across the room. I then picked up VALIS. So far, much better. I'm looking for a pun involving "Dick" and "throbbingly" but my kid is crying for dada. Help anyone?

Rating:
Summary: interesting but painful read
Review: I find PKD's ideas fascinating, thought-provoking, "far-out," you-name-it. He was clearly a cutting edge thinker. However, his writing here is so god-aweful, I could not summon the will power to slog through this book. The exposition was so heavy-handed and the dialogue so cheesy I had to stop. When he wrote of a Rolls Royce skyflyer(a rocket of some sort, apparently) that its engine "idled throbbingly," I nearly flung the book (frustratedly?) across the room. I then picked up VALIS. So far, much better. I'm looking for a pun involving "Dick" and "throbbingly" but my kid is crying for dada. Help anyone?

Rating:
Summary: Great introduction to the author
Review: I have been interested in reading Philip K. Dick for some time now, after realizing he was the original author behind two of my favorite science fiction films, "Total Recall" and "Minority Report". Not knowing where to start, I lucked out by picking up "Flow My Tears, the Policeman Said" on a whim. I will definitely be seeking out more Philip K. Dick novels in the future. "Flow My Tears..." is one of those great novels that works equally well on multiple levels. It is an exciting thriller, while at the same time working as both a haunting allegory of what could happen to our country if too many freedoms are lost, as well as being a fascinating treatise on the concepts of reality, identity and humanity.

One of the unintentionally funny aspects of this novel, which was originally published in 1974, is seeing how Dick envisioned the "future" of 1988, when the novel is set. In Dick's 1988 all vehicles could fly and all phones were picturephones, yet LP's were still the standard format for producing music and the most popular show on television was a musical variety program.

Despite a few miscalculations about the future, it is actually amazing how well this novel stands the test of time. In today's America, as we continue to debate which, if any, civil liberties we are willing to sacrifice in the name of security, the police state of "Flow My Tears..." with forced labor camps, miniature nuclear devices that can be implanted on citizens and detonated at the whim of the police, and where innocent people can be framed and tried for crimes they had nothing to do with, this novel is surprisingly relevant nearly 30 years after its publish date.

Rating:
Summary: What it means to be human
Review: I have read a lot of PKD's works and have always found that his short stories are stronger than his novels. This is because he is great with ideas and concepts but extremely week on character and prose. He tends to recycle his ideas and his subplots and characters are nearly the same in a huge amount of his novels. This is probably because he had to churn these out quickly to make a living.

This novel is by far one of his best. Though some of the sci-fi ideas are recycled, he instead uses it this time as a diving board into a deeper ocean of present day existential angst. What appears to be one of his "What is reality" type of novels on the outset is really a "What does it mean to be human" type of novel in it's core. It may not work as well as a Sci-Fi novel as does Ubik or Three Stigmata (his other two strong works), but it really works well as a means of reflecting life, death, lonelyness, 'popularity', anonyminity, value, empathy, selfishness, self-preservation and meaning.

What it is really about is how people make meaning out of their lives. Jason, the main character is just a means of meeting different characters that find ways of creating meaning out of their ordinary lives. We find that the woman who hates animals has very meaningful experiences with animals. When Jason loathes someone, there is also a bit of self-loathing as well--the anonymous Jason is a person he is trying to escape from.

Many characters have contradictions and the one that seems to show the most is the Policeman in the title. The story could have been left with a darker and more philosophical ending but for some reason an Epilogue is added to make some final twists that may be less satisfactory then what was before. On the otherhand it also seems to make fun of TV endings and makes you realise, that it is afterall, just a story.

Rating:
Summary: Late Night with Jason Taverner
Review: I have read very few Philip K. Dick books that I did not love. Unlike many my age, I prefer my Sci-Fi to be from the old school of writers. Many of todays sci-fi, has little to think about. Prefering to get you with action and quick one liners. Don't get me wrong, Heinlein, Bester, and even Dick each threw one-liners, and the like into their stories, but they also knew how to make you think about the story and brought out today's problems in their fiction. This book, though not Dick's best, or one of the religious trilogy that he wrote is still a great read. I try not to give the story away, you can read the back of the book cover. It is the reader's job to decide to read a book without knowing the story. Just get the book of you like Dick's work, you won't be disappointed.

Rating:
Summary: SF Readers Are All Plot
Review: I just finished thise one, and it's absolutely Philip K. Dick. This means it's absolutely excellent. The plot has been explained by others, so I'll get right to the good stuff.
PKD clearly loved to play with ideas of perception and reality. He does it really well here.
Previous reviewers have mentioned that they felt this novel fell apart at the end, but was consistently good before this. I have to disagree. The first majority of this book is great pulp SF. The last ten or so pages (don't count the epilogue as the end, PKD just uses it to tie things up) are a whole lot more contemplative and less action filled than the rest of the book. Most people don't expect much stylistically from a speculative fiction author, but the end of this book flows like poetry.
There is no masterful unfolding of some vast plot, and there is no enormous confrontation to close up the story. PKD is beyond clever; he's insane. I love it.

Rating:
Summary: bang bang bang bang fizzzzzzzzzzzzz
Review: i like PKD, and this was an amazing 5-star novel... up until the end, where it plummeted straight down in a shooting stream of crap for the last 40 pages or so and never came back up. i hoped, i wished, i prayed, and it still went straight into the toilet. PKD, like jim thompson, was a great 220-page writer who for money's sake was forced to write 180-page books and could never really get the hang of it. his visions were much more suited towards lengthier books. if you're interested in his work, read "man in the high castle" or UBIK or "scanner darkly." don't start here.