A Scanner Darkly by Philip K. Dick
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Philip Dick’s novels have permeated our culture through the many movie and television adaptations of his work; this particular novel, though, is the one that I think about most often, even though the film version of it was not such a big moment for many people, nothing like Blade Runner or Minority Report. The novel tells a surreal, twisted story of a man whose life inverts on itself, an undercover cop whose identity is secret even to his superiors, and who is asked to observe surveillance footage of himself in his undercover role. This is one of those ideas that strikes true from the first moment, a brilliant concept that Dick elaborates in a way that is more personal than other books. At least I think this is true. The idea hit home with him and called up some of his best work. He wrote a lot of books and stories and it’s easy to identify the stronger ones because their ideas engaged him more completely and drew out his best sentences. And this is one of the very best, though it is not always named among his finest. The man who watches himself portray a criminal and in the end becomes suspicious of himself, separates himself from the version he is observing, and questions the reality of the background world. A hint of the quantum idea that the act of observation changes the observed, and in this case, the observed is the observer, only in another context; the whole thing spirals in the mind. The writing is some of Dick’s finest, even though there are cruder moments in the sentences, indicative of the speed with which he wrote. Includes an essay by Dick at the end of my copy of the book, a sobering reflection on the way he lived his life, the way drugs ate him up.