Book Review: 1Q84
25 Jan 2012 Leave a Comment
in New Release Reviews Tags: alternate realities, cults, fiction, japan, metaphysics, science fiction, sex
1Q84 by Haruki Murakami (pub date 10/25/11)
I have never read Murakami until now, and I read somewhere that if you’re going to get into his writing, this is not the book to start with. Oops. It certainly seems that this is a divisive book. People either love it or hate it, and even some of Murakami’s diehard fans were disappointed with it, as was The New York Times.
This definitely has to be one of the strangest books I’ve ever read. I joked that it should have been called “WTF84.” Clearly, it isn’t for everyone. But if you have the patience and the imagination to stick with it, you may find it as peculiarly endearing as I did.
The plot of 1Q84 is almost impossible to describe concisely. It’s a metaphysical science fiction story with crime, sex, and romance thrown in. The title refers to an alternate reality set in the year 1984, and is a play on words; the words for ‘nine’ and ‘Q’ are homophones in the Japanese language. The two main characters are Aomame, a fitness instructor and part-time assassin, and Tengo, a math teacher and aspiring author. Gradually they come to believe that they have been transported to an alternate world, and end up in a strange plot involving a religious cult, a teenage writer, weird sex, murder, a sky with two moons, and a malevolent force referred to as “the Little People.”
It’s weird. Really weird. And my summary doesn’t do it justice. But as it says in the book, if you can’t understand it without an explanation, you can’t understand it with an explanation. It’s a book that has to be experienced to be understood. And if you look past the weirdness, you can see some very simple themes emerge in the writing, and that is what makes this book so interesting. Underneath the convoluted plot are themes of love, longing, and free will versus fate.
One common critique of 1Q84 is that it’s repetitive, that the characters say the same thing over and over. While it’s true that some lines are often repeated by different characters, I wouldn’t go so far as to call the book repetitious. What some call repetition I call variations on a theme. The book shows how each of the major characters reacts to the same strange events. Each character makes his or her own discovery in a different way.
At over nine hundred pages, this book requires some commitment to get through. But it’s incredibly imaginative, amazingly detailed, and quite a mental workout. It’s heavy on exposition and backstory, but the slow-building drama is worth it in the end. Again I’ll say that this book isn’t for everyone. But if you’re tired of quick and easy reads and are looking for something different, 1Q84 is about as different as literature can get.
