A Scanner Darkly by Philip K. Dick
Officer Fred's job is to watch people and to be watched.
Fred is a police agent hunting for dealers of the highly addictive Substance D. He is also deep undercover as Bob Arctor, a small-time dealer of Substance D. Fred cannot be seen because he wears a suit that conceals his identity; Bob is being watched constantly in his home because Fred put in hidden cameras and bugged it. The police want Arctor caught so that they move up to the next highest rung on the ladder to get that much closer to the origin of Substance D.
Fred much catch himself. But who is he? One of the side effects of Substance D is it splits the left and right hemispheres of the brain into distinct entities that battle for domination of the self. Is he Fred watching himself? Or is he Fred watching Bob? Or is he himself watching Bob? In between these struggles of the self, Bob floats among his demented, drug-addled friends -- Barris, a hyperactive know-it-all; Luckman, an easygoing layabout; and Donna, his girlfriend -- while they slowly destroy themselves.
Drug use and abuse has been written about an untold number of times. However, A Scanner Darkly is not just about the drugs. (Although that is a big part of it -- the novel takes plenty of influences from Dick's own life, and in the author's note, he dedicates the book to friends of his whose lives were obliterated because they "wanted to have a good time ...") This is a drug novel dealing with many of things that predominantly interested PKD throughout his literary career -- the essence of reality, and our construction and perception of it; our perception of the self and the mind; and paranoia, dealing with who can and cannot be trusted in the world.
PKD is almost never pointed to as a master of the English language, but the more I read his writing and think about it in the context of the stories, the more I am impressed with it. He writes perfectly for what he is writing about -- his style is fluid, frantic and visceral, always on edge. When the story focuses on Arctor, thoughts pile onto the reader, splintering off in different directions and float there to be pondered. Officer Fred's sections are cold and factual until Substance D seizes his mind and erodes his grip on reality. PKD really knew how to write.
Something that definitely does not come across in my synopsis of the plot is the novel's dark humor. Arctor's associates are a bizarre bunch -- Barris always has something to say, whether it's about how to have sex with people for 98 cents or how to build a cheap silencer from ordinary household items. Luckman is like a sad dopehead in a teen movie. After a botched suicide attempt, one of Arctor's friends has a hallucination involving a many-eyed creature that reads him a list of every major and minor sin he ever committed. These are very funny, but it's strange, guilty sort of funny, as if the reader is always on the outside looking in. It's a laughter that comes without understanding.
The novel is definitely not all about laughter, though. At heart, it is a tragic story of loss of the self and reality. Substance D warps Arctor's mind; he doesn't know who he is and watches himself obsessively, not knowing he is doing so or why he is doing it. His friends disappear into themselves and betrayal; more than one is completely different than his perception of them. The biggest tragedy, however, is Arctor lives in a self-defeating system that sets him up to fail from the start. His mission is to capture himself. There is no other way it can end. He went undercover and lost himself to capture himself.
This novel is a classic of science-fiction and one of PKD's best stories (it's actually my favorite of his that I've read).
