Flow My Tears, the Policeman Said by Philip K. Dick
My rating: 2 of 5 stars

Grand Theft Identity

An old-fashioned Western dressed as sci-fi? Could be, but with a Dickian twist: everyone loses, and no one gets the girl. Or a murder mystery? Only no one is murdered. I tried my best all the way through to pick up the thread. It eluded me entirely.

The guy in the White Hat, Jason, is an intelligent, handsome, talented and popular musical celebrity. He is also a narcissistic, misogynistic druggie who manipulates women to get where he thinks he should be. He is fundamentally amoral and bred to be that way, despite his occasional flashes of empathy. Jason is picked by the Black Hat, for reasons that really are not reasonable, to take the rap for the accidental death of Black Hat’s sister.

The Black Hat belongs to Felix, an authoritarian senior policeman who believes that anything justifies the maintenance of the established order. He has an incestuous relationship with his sister, whose intolerance for orderliness he protects from scrutiny. On the other hand, he is single-handedly responsible for shutting down forced labour camps and protecting the lives of student demonstrators. On the whole, despite his occasional flashes of conscience, he is a rat.

Jason and Felix come into contact through a vague slippage between alternative universes, which temporarily erases Jason’s identity. It’s not clear whether this is drug-induced, a criminal conspiracy, or divine forgetfulness. But the end result is that both end up more or less where they started. Jason is vindicated and has a marginally bigger audience. Felix mourns his sister’s death but gets on with his life of law enforcement. Both retire after long and comfortable lives. Then they die, apparently unmourned.

And so? I suppose there is a certain nihilism which appeals to those who are fed up with society in general... or just with Westerns. Reputation, either through celebrity or formal authority is a fleeting compensation for the battles we fight in life. I can understand that. But if that sentiment defines Dick’s target audience, the story could have been improved by killing them all off sooner.

And God alone knows what John Dowland’s composition for lute has to do with any of it. The whole thing has about as much literary merit as a computer game.

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