Murakami/Anderson/TheFall

Today I read the first fifty pages of Haruki Murakami’s 1985 novel Hard-Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World. http://www.randomhouse.com/features/murakami/site.php. So far I’m enjoying the novel but expect to spend most of the first fifty pages figuring out what the hell is going on! The novel oscillates from one plot to another from chapter to chapter. The odd-numbered chapters tell the story of a ‘calcutec,’ a person trained in data encryption, who is doing a job for a scientist who is researching, among other things, sound removal. The calcutec and the scientist both work for the System, unlike the semiotecs, who work for the Factory and who dedicate themselves to trying to steal information, including the scientist’s research. The even-numbered chapters are set in an unnamed walled town possessed of a large number of unicorns, all of whom are sent outside the town walls each night by the Gatekeeper before let back in at the start of the next day. The main character of this part of the novel is a young man who has just arrived in the town to become a dream reader, a process that involves having his eyes mutilated by the Gatekeeper so that he cannot go outside during the day. His work as Dream reader takes place in the town’s library, but what exactly it involves, and whether the two halves of the plot will have anything to do with each other is as yet unclear. All will (hopefully) be revealed!

I also read the next section of the special issue of New Left Review written by Perry Anderson on the subject of American foreign policy. In about sixty pages, Anderson covers American foreign policy from the beginning of the Cold War to Obama’s second term. Obviously, in such a broad sweep, details are going to be lost, but what one gains is a sense of the continuities that underlie American conduct and ambitions during this period. For example, from Anderson’s perspective, the differences between, say, Reagan and Bush on the one hand and Carter and Obama on the other are so minimal as to be insignificant. Indeed, one of the most useful contributions of this overview from my perspective is to underline the perplexity I always feel when so-called American leftists continue to portray Obama as a progressive. This is where Anderson’s understated style can be strangely powerful. “Democratic take-over of the White House in 2009 brought little alteration in American imperial policy.” Indeed. Anderson also explains why Obama’s championing of drone warfare has a deadly cynical logic about it. Most Americans have only ever cared about American aggression abroad when American casualties are involved. Remove those casualties and Obama can more or less proceed with impunity because the fact of the matter is that dead foreign civilians are no competition for most Americans’ need to believe in Obama the savior. Anderson is witheringly accurate on this point: “No-one would accuse this incumbent of want of humane feeling: tears for the death of school-children in New England have moved the nation, and appeals for gun-control converted not a few. If a great many more children, most without even schools, have died at his own hands in Ghazri or Waziristan, that is no reason for loss of Presidential sleep.”

I also watched the first episode of the 2012 television drama series The Fall, starring Gillian Anderson. http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/p00wrk40. In the interests of full disclosure, I should say that I worship Anderson and think that she should basically be put in charge of everything (she was the only good thing in NBC’s awful Hannibal) so I can’t even pretend to be objective. Her role in this series inevitably reminds one of Helen Mirren in the Prime Suspect dramas and it speaks volumes about Anderson’s performance that she survives that comparison. The other thing that struck me about this opening episode is how the serial killer character was portrayed: as a family man (wife and two young kids), as someone with a job (a bereavement counselor, no less!) and a functioning social life, and as someone who is very physically attractive. Each of these decisions works to both generate audience identification with this character, as well as working against the stereotype of serial killers as either asocial loners or genius-level ubersmenschen. Spector is a part of his community in multiple ways. The question then becomes what The Fall will do with the fact: use it or squander the opportunity it represents.