“It’s so detailed and beautifully written,
and I feel like I can grasp the structure of that lonely little planet. But I
can’t seem to go forward. It’s like I’m in a boat, paddling upstream. I row for
a while, but then when I take a rest and am thinking about something, I find
myself back where I started…. there is a sense of time wavering irregularly
when you try to forge ahead.”
1Q84 –
Haruki Murakami
eBook
location:16124-16134
To re-purpose Murakami’s own words, this
novel is detailed and beautifully written. But there was a lassitude to the
text that started to weigh me down the further I read. This can
partly be attributed to its length (900+ pages), but also to the gentle story-line. If this
novel were a river it would be the Murray-Darling: long and slow-flowing, moving inexorably along its pre-determined course.
Murakami’s novel centres on an adjoining
universe. Those who are drawn into this world distinguish two moons in the
night sky. The strangeness of this alternate world is accentuated (and
sometimes overpowered) by the idiosyncrasies of Japan in 1984. Word processors
and hot cans of vending machine coffee - all that is strange about the past and another country, rolled into one. Perhaps the unfamiliar setting meant that the strangeness of the alternate reality ( little people marching out of a dead man's mouth, for example) had less of an impact then it might have had otherwise.
Set in Japan and by a Japanese author, it
would probably be an understatement to say that this novel had a very “Japanese” vibe. Or perhaps I am projecting this onto the novel. Either way I felt that (with the exception of Ushikawa) the characters were quite passive, even Aomame,
the hit-woman of abusive husbands & bar-hopping man-hunter. All the
characters were quite similar: outcasts scarred by their childhood, their
internalised uncertainty and pain masked by their outer diffidence to society, yet successful in their chosen fields.
It just goes to show that even in a
alternate reality, people can lead solitary, quiet lives and spend a lot of
their time just waiting for something to happen.
If you got to the end of Julian Barnes’ The Sense of an Ending and wished that
it were longer, then this novel is for you.
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