1Q84

Two moons, the one paper-like, a cheap lantern, lit from behind and green with dust. Together the moons are a signpost of an alternate reality that the protagonist of Haruki Murakami's novel calls 1Q84. Get it? I'm not sure I do, but it is best to embrace your weaknesses when reading anything written by the master of relativity, Murakami.

I am back, dear reader, albeit not in one piece and not without a few scars. One is a pretty star shape and positioned like a gangster tat. There is only one moon here, but it is anaemic-pink with pollution and on sale.

So it is fitting that 1Q84 is my first review in a few months. It is the codex to my present. It is my white rabbit. It is a post-modern Ulysses sitting next to said tome on my bedside table. It is 1000-and-something pages light, and I read the first 100 pages three times and each time it was a different novel.

The novel is actually a trilogy, but what isn't in the aftermath of Peter Jackson's assault on Mordor? It was first published in three parts in Japanese in 2009 before being translated and published in English in 2011. Since then Murakami has written one more novel: Colorless Tsukuru Tazaki and His Years of Pilgrimage, which is news to me too.

My books travel with me. I never know when I may find an opportunity - and an almost physical need - to read, from doctors' waiting rooms to coffee breaks to shop queues. I have been (interrupted and) asked to describe this book many many times in many many contexts and each time I flapped my cheeks a few times before sighing, hoping this would suffice. When it didn't, I squinted at the back cover:

The year is 1Q84.

This is the real world,
there is no doubt about that.

But, in this world, there are
two moons in the sky.

In this world, the fates of two people
Tengo and Aomame, are closely intertwined.
They are each, in their own way,
doing something dangerous.
And in this world, there seems
no way to save them both.

Something extraordinary is starting.

"So," I would start. "This 1321-page book is set in an alternate universe, where everything is the same as ours except that there are two moons." I would look up from the blurb then, hoping this would have answered the question. "Um, ok. The story is told from the perspectives of two characters: an assassin-cum-gym-instructor and a writer-cum-maths-teacher. They are separately part of a conspiracy that is loosely bound to a cult that believes in faeries. The Old World kind of faerie. The nasty kind.

"I haven't finished reading it, yet," I would apologise. Still, my audience would stare.

Stop staring.

This standoff reminds me of a mistake I made once of asking an elderly sculptor what one of his pieces 'meant' - I was chewed out in Italian before being given the cold shoulder for the afternoon. Yes, meaning is relative - but meaning is also democratic, sir, and you are responsible for mowing the grass along your stretch of road whether you vote or not. Or something.

I imagine Murakami chewing me out for turning to the blurb for meaning.

In a previous novel, Kafka on the Shore, loose ends flip around like live electrical wires in the street after a violent storm. (The same street whose sidewalks you mow.) In 1Q84, the street is not only triple the length, with triple the number of sparking wires, but it also inhabits all 26 possible dimensions and then some. In other words, the novel is too long to safely sustain relativity.

The problem with the author scrapping his name from the voting ballot and setting fire to all evidence that he was ever there is that, the longer the novel, the more frayed plot points spark in the street and many of these streets are cul de sacs, each with kaleidoscopes of authors hightailing it in all sorts of directions, possibly dimensions, and while I don't mind singing for my supper, I would prefer it if we could stick to one metaphor. Right?

1321 pages is too long for the author to leave me to my own devices.

As if to punctuate this, my pet bunny ate the last 6 pages of the novel before I could finish reading. So, technically, I have not finished the novel. But neither do I have the urge to acquire those 6 pages and read them (imagine me curled up behind a bookshop bookshelf, listening for the footsteps of a bookseller who will politely ask me to buy the book if I want to know how it ends - they don't believe the story about Munroe the paper-munching rabbit).

This review is like one of those puzzles where you have to count how many shapes you see and you are supposed to count shapes in the shapes and shapes made of shapes and the shapes these shapes make. There are multiple blurbs in this post and not all of them belong to the same union. I was going to count them out for you and then I thought, nah, you could do with some exercise after your six-month break from my meanderings.

V & 1Q84

They have more in common than isolated consonants from the second half of the alphabet (that would be V and Q for those to lazy to glance at the heading and work it out). This is not beginning well. Which is another thing these books have in common. More accurately, they (the beginnings of these two books - and even this post) are awkward.

I felt the introduction should end awkwardly, too. Yes, I did that on purpose. Not because I had no idea where to go from there.

We will get back to the awkwardness shortly, don't worry. I want to tell you about something else they have in common, which is the real reason for this post of paragraphs that end like cliffs. Me.

As you should know (you religious reader of this irreverent blog), I am reading 1Q84, but in tiny portions like baby quiches and cucumber fingers stolen from trays carried by waiters around the room. After more weeks than I have limbs, I have only just reached page 209. Of 1 300 and something. And three parts. In between I have been reading 'sorbet' reads: frivolous, with happy(ish) endings and only light intellectualism.

So why then I should read V by Thomas Pynchon is a mystery. You know those competitions where marketers ask us to test the new flavour of chips or yoghurt or fizzy drink, and name it - which is so dubious because, if they can't figure it out, there has to be an experimental and perhaps accidental mouthful of preservatives and flavourants in there? This is that kind of mystery.

Let's retrace our steps back to the awkward introduction (not because we've lost our way. No. Definitely not).

Ulysses. Yet another thing these books have in common. If Terry Pratchett is prince of light reads, Murakami is prince of opaque Literature. James Joyce is king. The plot of a Murakami novel cannot be summarised without sounding like a Philip K Dick plot (which is really the snail trail of his brainwaves on acid).

You don't believe me? The first protagonist is a gym trainer slash assassin, who murders wife-beating politicians with a tiny ice pick. The second protagonist is a language tutor who discards his ethics to rewrite a short story so that the author can win a prize. She is a dyslexic, potentially emotionally disturbed young woman, who cannot use punctuation in speech. She also believes in 'Little People'.

Oh and there is some kind of space-time warp where events impose themselves in hindsight like a waiter with a tray of baby quiches into your conversation.

V is a colleague of said waiter, except he apologises and then explains what is on the tray under your nose. In other words, the characters and even the narrator steer you toward a premeditated snail trail of thought. The narrator outlines the potential paths you can follow and the exits you can choose, should you choose to follow and exit.

Despite the comparative doggedness of V's themes, the language of the first limbs-worth of chapters reminded me of Joyce. Sentences end abruptly, words leapfrog each other and dialogue is sometimes invisible.

The book begins by following a drifter who is AWOL from the navy. His name is Profane. He drifts for a while, building roads, until drifting back to his former cabinmates, all of whom are um choice characters. The moral epitome of the sort of person who doesn't read. Including the women. The language and even the characters quickly become your calendar - the setting for the memory of these days and weeks.

Despite this, I was irritated by how little of the chapters I understood. Until the chapter in which Profane signed up to hunt and cull alligators in the sewers. Here I finally understood Profane - divorced from most of the cabinmates I judge so pretentiously.

Confession (don't get excited; this is only a mushroom of a confession): My Kindle copy of V is not exactly legal. By which I mean it is entirely illegal. I rarely read free books unless they are loaded on my library card (if you happen to find it) or loaned from a friend. And by rarely, I mean never. I am setting a precedent for when I am an author and need income to pay for food.

As you don't know, because you never do such things, pirated copies are often of bad quality. This may explain the missing articles, prepositions and conunctions. And the misspellings of 'it' and 'and'. The BA student will loftily proclaim that this is a practical metaphor for the death of the author. But no. My guess is that either this is an edited but unproofread manuscript or an OCRed version of the Kindle version.

Perhaps the alligators never waddle through the original version.

Now, this is awkward.

Another confession (a toddler of a mushroom): The two books have less in common than I have suggested. Not only because my copy of 1Q84 is legal. V plays with language and ideas, but you can still read it for hours on end without remembering you haven't had a cup of coffee yet.

1Q84 is why you need coffee.

From these last two posts, you might think I do not like 1Q84. I do. (Confession: I am not sure whether I do or don't.) But, true to form, it is opaque, even opaquely opaque.

PS. This conclusion is intentionally awkward.

1Q84: Part 1 of many

The blurb of the book promises: "Something extraordinary is starting." Starting? Does this refer to a point within or beyond the covers? Because this thing is 1300 pages thick, sir. I am a fan. A fan strong enough to blow back the strings of a willow tree. But 1300 pages? I'm not sure I could generate more than a whiffle. A wheeze. A not-quite sigh. So please, by the alveoli of my heaving lungs, let the extraordinary something start, happen and resolve itself with enough space for a conclusion.

Ok, resolution and a conclusion is asking a lot from an author these days. But this is Haruki Murakami. If anyone can bend a convention until its toes meet its scalp, he can. But this is Haruki Murakami. He's allergic to resolution.

1Q84 came out first in Japanese in, wait for it, Japan. Writing in his first language? He's just contrary like that. The English translation came out a year later. Sorry, translations, because three's company - no, wait, that isn't how it goes. Yes, a trilogy. If people started having triplets at the same rate as they write trilogies, the race to inhabit deep dark space (which, fyi, we already do) would intensify out of necessity.

The benefit of having to wait for the translation(s) was that we could read all three together. Like Game of Thrones which I read consecutively. All five and some halves of consecutive.

At 1300 pages, we're talking slightly more than 400 words per book. (I worked that out in my head.) That's a decent length, unless you're a new author and the publisher isn't prepared to waste reams of paper on your mad skills. Then you get 200 pages and really big font. It's a decent length in which to resolve the "something extraordinary", I'm thinking like an amateur allergic reaction.

Kafka on the Shore is my favourite of his books (all three and a bit that I have read). That book has a conclusion. Of sorts. The conclusion being that we make meanings out of symbols we happen to latch on to, like a spiderweb in that willow tree. This has a twin benefit: you can write anything you want and call it literature, and you don't have to commit to anything afterward. Luckily for us readers, Murakami is not anyone and his books are not anything. But still, it's annoying.

The Wind-up Bird Chronicle is more contradictory. There are episodes that are so symbolic they shine, but  apparently no one else can see them. Just to make sure we know no one can see them and that the symbols are actually dull and ugly, more shiny symbols show up, like rival gangs in West Side Story. Only one can survive. Or neither, but that's another book.

As usual, I'm being facetious, because that is so much more fun than simply liking something. This way, my resolution and conclusion are more surprising, as if I had jumped out from behind your bathroom door first thing in the morning. (This depends on you being there, in both cases.) My readings are imposed, which is the point of all of Murakami's writings, after being entertaining.

I started 1Q84 about a month ago. Today I am 204 pages in. (That's part of Book One, just fyi.) I knew, but still only just remembered, how overwhelming every scene is. Every scene shines, whether the radioactivity spills from people's hands, the material they are wearing, the appliances in the kitchen and their purposes, or a family in a car in traffic. You can't tell whether you are supposed to notice them, you notice them because of your particular neuroses or you are being paranoid. Your neck muscles lock in defence, but you can't be sure you aren't imagining that too.

I haven't quite reached this point in the book, but forewarned is forearmed, and paranoia is a kind of arm.

Another kind of arm is to read other books between chapters. Not Neil Gaiman because I have made the mistake of parading Gaiman (whose plots and characters are so consistent he could write Mills & Boon novels. Maybe he does) in front of Murakami. Murakami wasn't mean, which made it all worse. He was like a Buddhist faced with the pacing and ranting of a fundamentalist. He listened and smiled, and went on adventures in his mind.

Terry Pratchett has survived scrutiny well so far. Maybe because he's so far off in his own direction that he caught up with the Buddhist in his mind. (Which is not to compare them directly, no. But the metaphor ran away with me.) I have read one new Pratchett and reread an old one. Which I realise is probably double what I have read from 1Q84. So it's more like I am reading Terry Pratchett, with some Murakami on the side. Murakami would listen to this and smile, and skip stones across the Amazon River until an alligator came by to debate vegetarianism.

I am trying to describe what I have read so far and what shines and what it shines on and whether perhaps I am imagining it. There are events that stick out, but honestly I would sound crazy if I wrote them here and told you they are a legitimate part of a legitimate novel. There's this and the fact that I am less than one-sixth of the way through the novel, which hopefully is the start and not something else but I cannot guarantee it. I cannot guarantee that page 867 doesn't tell me to go back to the beginning or that it begins to repeat on page 292 and then again on page 1287.

You guessed it, this "part 1 of many" cheat is a device meant to keep you reading. But I could be setting myself up for failure here if I give up just like I did Ulysses (which is not to say I have given up - I am just making a point). James Joyce also swanned around, making faces at meaning, but he also made faces at sentences and the English language. Murakami may have written in Japanese, but this novel (so far) is still easier to read.

Starting position: 1Q84

A trilogy? How blasè, we moan, hand to forehead like Scarlet O'Hara. (We're a dramatic bunch, us readers. After all, we choose to experience more lives, more stories. For fun.) These 'trilogies' are false promises: the episodes breed until, five books later, you're waiting for your favourite character to... die from old age. (My favourite died in Book 3. He wasn't old. There are a lot of pages to wade through after heartbreak like that.) Anyway, this trilogy is the Rhett Butler to your Scarlet O'Hara.

You know what book it is - the title is in the title of the post. So I can meander. Haruki Murakami's novels are not easy reads, in any sense. It's like James Joyce: You either think he's a genius or a hack. (Guess which side I am on. In both cases.) And that has a lot to do with the book you start with.

I started with Kafka on the Shore and didn't know what to think until the novel was almost finished. The author tells multiple stories at the same time and, although I enjoyed each story, I couldn't figure out where this was going. Then, like those clowns who twist and knot balloons into shapes (I hate balloons, incidentally), he tied everything up into a neat... poodle.

The Wind-up Bird Chronicle was not as pleasant. I disliked it for the same reason I liked Kafka. The stories are sequential, not parallel. And like everything Murakami writes, the characters are symbolic. So you're carrying your interpretation through the different stories, and it's supposed to be 'maturing' as the novel develops, but the clues keep mutating. Your poodle is suddenly a sausage dog and then it's not even a dog - it's a giraffe!

Both novels are intentionally cryptic, I think to make you aware of the process of interpreting what you read and to give you the freedom to essentially create your own novel with the author. All very post-modern hurrah. In Kafka, Murakami beckoned me on to a shaded verandah to create our balloon animals. In Wind-up Bird, he herded me into a kids' party and went to run some errands.

With a win-lose ratio of 50:50, you might doubt my objectivity here. Surely I need another round before proclaiming his novels Monarchs of their own Bookshelf? Consider that, after Kafka, I could not read anything for weeks. The first books I read after both of Murakami's novels were Neil Gaiman's. After Murakami's plot contortions, Gaiman's novels seemed staid. I'm sorry! I can hear you O'Hara-ing again! My point is only (settle down, please) that I was almost literally transfixed by each book, regardless of my review of it.

So here we go: 1Q84. Released in three instalments in Japanese only, it was translated and released in English a year or so ago. (The delay between the Japanese and English editions amounts to the same anticipation at the delay between installments. Clever.) Now, I have my eye on a copy and that copy is mine - all 1318 pages, bound in a black cover, with a spine that will crack beneath the weight of the words and their symbolism...

But you don't eat a biscuit at once. No. You twist the pieces until you can get to the centre: creamy, chocolatey, jammy, whatever. You eat the centre first and then the biscuit pieces. That is The Only Way. Cease and desist. Put away that balloon.

So first, I will place the book on a central surface (my kitchen counter). Second, I will manhandle it for a few days: ruffle the pages to feel their weight, open the book up to examine the typeface, examine the cover (front, spine and back), read the introduction, read the blurb and (this is the real test of an editor - I'll save the story for another time) smell the pages. Only then will I begin to read, armed with a bookmark and settled in a warm spot.

Trilogies might be tired, but we still buy the books and read them - Robert Jordan would be a lot quicker to write if he needed the money to pay off a car. Trilogies are epic. Unlike other trilogies, though, Murakami is going to abandon me standing on a stage with a handful of limp balloons and a clown costume. Guaranteed. This isn't The Lord of the Rings.