This is a dystopian novel by Philip K. Dick, which he described as semi-autobiographical. It tells the story of Robert Actor and his flatmates and friends, who are drug addicts. Most of them are addicted to a drug called Substance D, or death which deteriorates the users brain over time until they lose track of reality.
I particularly enjoyed the character of Barris, who is always confidentally explaining everything with a drugged up confused chain of thought that barely connects. He is also constantly tinkering with machines, trying to make a silencer for his gun, and suggesting how to fix and improve the protagonists car. These always fail however, and the machines are left broken.
There’s clearly a parallel with the machines and the characters minds, in particular something called the cephaloscope. It has been damaged, and no one really remembers doing it. They’re each paranoid that maybe it was them, and the main character is paranoid that it’s Barris trying to destroy him.
The main character it turns out is a narcotics agent, who in his job wears a suit that makes it impossible for people to tell who his is. The scramble suit is constantly showing a mix of lots of different people so that they appear like a blur. Due to no one knowing who he is, he actually ends up being assigned to report on himself.
As his mental state deteriorates from the amount of drugs hes taking, he starts becoming confused about who he actually is. When he’s watching himself on the cameras that have been installed in the flat it’s as if he actually is another person trying to find evidence. He starts having to take tests as a part of his job, and the people administering them explain that his corpus collosum has been damaged, and the two sides of his brain no longer communicate with each other. It’s interesting just how similar the way the nurses talk about his issues is to how his friends talk. They explain his problems in a very detatched meandering way, almost unconcerned with what he needs to know.
There’s a chapter near the end where his girlfriend drops him into a drug rehabilitation clinic called NewLife which I found heartbreaking. By this point the main character is completely destroyed, and it’s the first time that he’s given any real empathy for what’s happening. Despite that it turns out that his girlfriend is a federal agent, and has been reporting on him and his friends as well. She’s clearly upset by this however, and tells a story about someone she knew. This person experienced God through drug use, he kept seeing a door which he knew led to better things until one day it disappeared. This caused him to go into a complete breakdown and rage, knowing that he’ll never have that experience again. It feels like this is a metaphor for just about everything in this book, no one ever achieving what they’re after, everything always falling apart, things being taken away one by one deliberately or by entropy.
It turns out at the end that the New Life clinic itself is manufacturing Substance D, using the burnt out husks of the addicts to farm the plant. Not only that Donna and someone undercover in a less secure part of NewLife intentionally destroyed Arctors mind to try and get someone in that they thought would report on what’s happening. We never really find out if this works. Every person is using everyone else, everyone is part of a system that is chewing up everything it can. The drug dealers are no different from the government, which are no different from the rehabilitation clinics.