Murakami/Anderson/TheFall

Today I read the next fifty pages of Hard-Boiled Wonderland. The two threads of the story are starting to come together in the form of a skull and a librarian. After completing the first part of his assignment, the Calcutec working for the scientist is given a skull by the scientist, apparently as a gift. The Calcutec doesn’t really know what to make of this gift until someone paid by the Semiotecs attempts to steal the skull, and then he starts to realize that there is something significant about it. Meanwhile, the Dreamreader starts his job in the town library, where he learns from the Librarian that the dreams he has to read are all contained in unicorn skulls. The other point of connection is the figure of a Librarian: in one story, she trains the Dreamreader, and in the other story, she provides the Calcutec with books and information as he attempts to understand the significance of the skull he’s been given. Murakami does a masterful job of developing two separate fictional universes economically and evocatively, so much so that even though connections are starting to emerge, you would continue to read even if no such connections existed. Part of the reason for this, I think, is Murakami’s adroit use of the tropes of genre fiction, including crime fiction and fantasy/speculative fiction. In this regard, it’s no accident that one of the books recommended by the librarian to the Calcutec is Jorge Luis Borges’ Book of Imaginary Beings. http://www.theguardian.com/books/2012/nov/23/caspar-henderson-rereading-jorge-luis-borges

I also finished the special issue of New Left Review written by Perry Anderson on American foreign policy. This final section, titled ‘Consilium,’ reviews the mainstream literature of the last 20-30 years on America’s role in the world. I found this section of the analysis much less interesting than the earlier discussion of American policy, but I still have to take my hat off to Anderson for plowing through so much grandiose and verbose prose (although I suspect that Anderson actually enjoys this stuff!). One of the least surprising but also most depressing features that emerges from Anderson’s discussion is the sameness that characterizes the available literature. In other words, although there may be disagreements about the most immediate or the most serious challenges facing the maintenance of American hegemony, along with related disagreements about the place of, say, China or Iran, in American policy, such disagreements are minimal next to the uniformly held belief that America has a (divine) right to lead the rest of the world. The insistence on this point seems to me to be a product of a peculiarly American combination of monomania and megalomania. And the worst of it is, the longer one spends in this country, the more commonsensical such a belief appears! This is just one reason why regular trips outside the US are essential for the maintenance of sanity.

I also watched episode two of ‘The Fall.’ One of the things that surprised me about the first episode is that it didn’t make very much use of its Belfast setting. That’s still true in some ways (the vast majority of scenes take place indoors, for example) but this second episode is starting to introduce more plot lines that draw upon the complexities and tensions of policing in Northern Ireland. It’s not that I’m opposed in principle to introducing the subject of police/political corruption into a show of this kind (indeed, one might argue that it’s essential) but there’s no denying that in doing so, ‘The Fall’ is becoming a police procedural as much as (more than?) a psychological study, and I suspect the success of the series will depend in part on how well it balances these two parts of the show. The other thing that strikes me about this episode is the interesting ways it juxtaposes images of life and death. This is the kind of thing that could easily seem very corny or hackneyed (in the midst of life we are in death, etc), but it’s actually done very well in this case. For example, the scene where the father identifies his murdered daughter and asks if he can touch her is balanced by a scene featuring the murderer’s wife, who works as a neo-natal nurse, cradling a baby is very thought-provoking. I know, it sounds like it shouldn’t work, but it does. Another example of paired scenes involving hair-washing are powerful and creepy in equal measure. And can I just say that, up to this point at least, the murderer is blessed with an amazingly unsuspicious and trusting wife?! Some suspension of disbelief required on that point…