It's death, he though. Death lighting up spots, burning up the world's life, second by second.
He continued to watch.
The people of the world, and San Francisco Bay specifically, thought the first bomb would be the last. Not consciously, of course, and there's always the fear, but they organized their lives and minds around it, speaking of it as an inflection point in time, but it wasn't the last bomb, and worse was to come: a series of nuclear explosions that left the world, all of it, in a state of near-ruin. In the Bay, communities are starting again; people are driving around in horse-driven cars and trying to reinvent combinations of spices that taste like tobacco. Dogs have learned to talk, but not very well. In West Marin, a strong and resilient community forms, distinct from faraway neighbors in Oakland and Bolinas, places that before the bomb dropped were only minutes away, not days. Dick casts this world with an unusually large cast of people, many of whom are worth enumerating, because this is a real ensemble affair:
Hoppy Harrington is a phocomelus, born with tiny flipper-like hands and legs, not because of the first bomb or the later ones, but because of the very not-fictional effects of thalidomide. Before the bombs go off, he's an outcast, having to beg for a menial job as a TV repairman, but with special powers: a system of electrical extensors makes him quite "handy," and he can see the future. In a trancelike state, he sees the aftermath of the bombs--a gray wasteland his onlookers take not as a wordly future but a vision of the afterlife--an afterlife in which he wields a kinglike power. And in truth, in the wrecked world of Marin after the bombs, he becomes nearly all-powerful; he alone possesses the know-how to build and operate a radio tower, and enlarges his physical power by tweaking the electric field of his extensors.
Stuart McConchie is a black TV repairman who works briefly with Hoppy, and who is deeply suspicious of him when others find him weird but harmless. Hoppy has a vision of him in the afterlife gnawing on a dead rat--which, lo, comes to pass. Food is scarce, after all, after the bombs. Stuart's role in the plot is pretty inconsequential, I think, but he brings in themes of race in a way that is unusual for PKD; will the new world be any different for black people in America? Hoppy Harrington uses society's upheaval to move from the margins of the world into the center, but for Stuart, depressingly, such a move seems not possible; when he arrives in Marin from Oakland, some community members make it clear they don't want black people--coded, again, as "urban"--in their town.
Bruno Bluthgeld is the "Dr. Bloodmoney" of the title. He is a researcher of some kind who is considered directly responsible for the initial bomb, and is perhaps connected to the later bombs also. He certainly thinks he is: he both believes that everyone in the world would like to murder him if they could, and that he can manifest nuclear bombs out of thin air with his mind any time he wants. Both of those things, it turns out, might be true. He's hiding out in Marin under an assumed name, living as a toothless shepherd, but his kind of power, if it exists, may not be the way of the world anymore, and puts him at odds with the ambitious and megalomaniacal Hoppy.
Walt Dangerfield is an astronaut who, along with his wife, is going to be the first human to live on Mars. His ship is launched shortly before the bombs go off, and so he finds himself stranded in orbit without anyway to return. His wife has died. Over the years, he acts as a kind of world radio, beaming music and conversation, down to those with working radio towers. He's a pretty obvious stand-in for God. Hoppy's plan is to use his radio tower to kill Dangerfield--with a kind of sonic beam or something?--and then to replace him with a practiced imitation, to become God.
Finally, there's Edie and Bill Keller. Edie is a normal seven-year old girl, and Bill, of course, is the shrunken homunculus of her twin brother who lives inside of her body. Everyone thinks Bill is imaginary, but he's not; he's "a terribly old, wizened thing," "hard and small, floating... [l]ips overgrown with downy hair that hung trailing, streamers of it, wispy and dry." He can swap bodies with other creatures if Edie presses her side to them, and obviously, he can talk to the dead.
One of my favorite parts of Dr. Bloodmoney is so silly I can barely believe it's in there: Bill Keller, correctly identified by Hoppy as a threat, is torn out of his sister by Hoppy's electrical powers and launched into the sky, where he is devoured by an owl. He flies around as an owl for a little while, and then vomited out like a pellet. It seems impossible, but Dr. Bloodmoney might be the most unshakably weird book of Dick's that I've ever read. Dick never could write a book about one weirdo in a normal universe; there always have to be two or three at least, and this novel really takes that dictum to its maximum. It's made of such disparate parts all stitched together that it seems like it should be a horrible mess, but it all holds together.
And what keeps it together is the frank terror of the idea of a post-nuclear world. As Dick writes in his afterword (how awesome to have a window into the thinking behind gonzo books like these), it's actually an "extremely hopeful novel." Society is not murdered by nuclear war; it remains in the form of small communities, banded together. Industry and technology are not obliterated but merely retarded; this is not The Road, where the best people can do is stack rocks and make fire. There is even the impartial suggestion that worldwide crisis can help spur society to reorganize itself. While Hoppy is clearly a monster, we're told that other phocomeli are also prized as "handymen" by their communities. Dick points to Bluthgeld as the real villain of the story: the kind of person who believes they have the right to provoke catastrophe in the world of others merely because they have the ability. Bluthgeld's ability to create bombs out of nowhere seems to me like a representation of the egos of Cold War leaders, who had the audacity to believe that they were capable of administering nuclear arsenals. Human decency is better represented in the figure of Stuart McConchie, who opens the book by humbly sweeping the stoop of the TV repair shop.
No comments:
Post a Comment