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.

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.

The Solitude of Prime Numbers

Never judge a book by its cover? Psssht. The design of the cover tells you what genre it is, what type of reader the marketing department thinks will buy the book, how much the publisher was prepared to spend on the book, what the reviewers said and whether they can be trusted (the publication they write for)... And the title and author's name, of course. Then there's the blurb...

I never read the blurb. So many words that tell you nothing about the book. Unless you're in it for the plot. Are you? Do you read the 'new fiction' stacked at the front of the book shop? Head shaking, patronising sigh. No, no. The 'new fiction' up front is the stuff with plot in it. Plot... Pssssht. What you want are characters, ideas, revelation. You're looking for the next life-changing read.

So, you speed past the piles of ghostwritten and skeletal books, to the shelf of 'new fiction'. No, no, not the bestseller list. Have you been listening, like, at all? Around the shelf to the back of it. Ah, here is the real new fiction. The runts of the litter, the ones that will follow you around convinced you are some kind of deity from which freedom flows. These are the dogs - books - that will wrestle a bear to protect you.

(c) brusselspictures.com. Let's play find the reader.

The Solitude of Prime Numbers does not rest here. You zoomed past him 5 seconds ago.

Ok, ok, so 'new fiction' has its own place in the world of literature. It reaches many more people than new fiction, and what we really want is people reading. Because people who read are intelligent people, empathic people, empowered people. Yes, and democracy is a real thing. Did you know that a certain bestselling author, who produces one book every six months, actually uses ghostwriters? He gives them the plot, they write it, he overwrites and to the publisher it goes.

Luckily we live in societies that worship diversity (by which I mean the people who can host fundraisers and plonk pretty minorities in their ads and hire against a checklist of the previously disadvantaged that they still need), so you are free to stop at the front of the shop and pick up one of those books whose author's name is in bigger type than the title. And I shall not judge because I can't see you from behind the shelf and I am too busy playing with puppies.

I tricked you. Where do you think The Solitude of Prime Numbers is resting? Do you think it's at the front, flouncing its skirts? Ask yourselves how many seconds it will take to walk back to Raptor or Sally's Sonnet or whatever else is dancing in the window. Actually, ask me, because I actually know. 10 seconds! (I timed it. I don't have a watch but I can count, you.) Which means - ta dah! - that The Solitude of Prime Numbers is somewhere in between. Maybe hanging from the ceiling by some duct tape or held up by some poor staff member whose arm is beginning to atrophy.

The cover is made up of four layers: The first is a picture of a girl sitting on a bench. The second is a picture of a river with some water flowers reflected in the water, Monet-style but not quite. The third is a set of geometrical diagrams drawn in thin lines. Finally we have the title and the author's name, as well as the words 'haunting, bestseller,stunning'. In other words, the design is literally layered, suggesting the novel is the same.  But then there is that line-up of words that are worn through with use.

Marketing speak. Love it. There's more on the back cover but I won't bore you. The blurb? I didn't read it before I opened the book. Now, I realise, it reveals the entire plot except for the last 15 pages. Luckily, this book is about characters as much as plot, which is why it is permitted to hover in the centre of the room, caught between readers' judgements.

The novel focuses on two main characters: Alice and Matthia, both of whom suffered childhood tragedies and grow up with normal self-destructive tendencies like not eating and cutting oneself. Several other characters flow through like undercurrents, each with their own self-destructive tendencies. The plot focuses on the friendship of these characters, mostly in retrospect and with the importance we attach to single moments in our lives.

In psychology speak, they become co-dependent. They fill the void that would normally be filled with said self-destructive tendencies. Well, really, they just shove them aside.

The author treats the psychologies of the two characters with such empathy and understanding, especially Matthia. It is through Matthia that the promise of the philosophy of mathematics, posed in the title, comes through. (To be honest, I think it was the phrase 'Prime Numbers' that hooked me.) Although a lot of the book is dedicated to the characters' disorders, somehow we learn more about the characters themselves than just a list of their symptoms.

And this isn't a Jodi Picoult version of tragedy; these are the everyday lives of two afflicted characters, to whom little happens bar their early traumas. (So, don't worry, no one's sister dies unexpectedly at the end. That all happens at the beginning...)

But, see, here's the thing. Nothing happens... (I ain't a hypocrite - hear me out.) The characters meet and then we bound through their lives at intervals of a few years, sitting in their brains while they contemplate what is, was and might be. Then whoosh we're off again. We're tripping over loose ends and generally 

contemplating the angst that prevents us from ever having a real relationship with another human being - or, in fact, just saying what we bloody well are thinking - and everyone is just a step away from mental meltdown.

Then we have the last 15 pages not covered by the blurb. To give the author, marketers and reviewers the benefit of the doubt, I think maybe it's meant to be a happy ending. It only looks that way if I squint. If I squint, I can also appreciate that at least the blurb accurately describes the, errr, plot, which is really an accomplishment in the days when people can't spell without spellcheck.

Hush, now, here's a free lesson. Always judge a book by the first paragraph. This is the paragraph the author has slaved over, trust me on this. It should always leave a mystery hanging in the air, a mystery you want the answer to. That is a good book. (Except for once, when it turned out the editor must have known this and really crafted the first paragraph, because the rest was just badly written.) This good book may not be on display at the front of the shop, the cover design may be shoddy because no one really expects it to sell and, really, it may be a runt born from a runt. But have you never watched a Disney movie?!

The first paragraph of The Solitude of Prime Numbers hides the novel's mystery, letting us wonder what exactly it is until the very end. The paragraph focuses on a young Alice, does hint at the atmosphere of angst that each page coughs up, like a smoker's breath. You know this is not going to be a happy story. I was distracted by the reference to prime numbers in the title, thinking this novel was going enrich me. I probably would not have read it if I had read the first paragraph. But it's hanging in the middle of the shop if you want it.