The Three-Body Problem - Cixin Liu

The Three-Body Problem is the first part of the trilogy Remembrance of Earth's Past.


It would be simplistic to compare Cixin Liu to Haruki Murakami, especially as both have written novels with similar-looking titles - China 2185 and 1Q84 respectively. But in truth there are very few similarities other than the fact that we in the West are extremely ignorant of contemporary trends in oriental literature.


Hurakami is a fantasy writer who dabbles in science fiction. Liu is hard-wired sci fi. There is a touch of fantasy in this novel but only as a literary device to introduce the male protagonist to the core idea of the book. Wang Miao is a researcher in nanomaterials, so you get an idea of just how extreme the central premise is. He is introduced to a VR game called Three Body. In the game historical scientists - some so ancient as to be mythical - try to solve the problem of an unstable world which crashes from civilisation to apocalypse and back again. Only the most knowledgeable and persistent players work out the answer and when they do they are invited to share a secret - that the world of the game is real and that the inhabitants of that world have been in touch.


The female protagonist Ye Wenjie watched her astrophysicist father get stoned to death during the Cultural Revolution in 1967. An astrophysicist herself, she is taken to a rural outpost for 're-education'. She starts at the bottom of the hierarchy, working with the basic mechanics of the radio scanner. But she progresses. The work becomes her obsession and she abandons hope of ever re-joining civil society. Eventually she is sufficiently trusted to be allowed into the secret of the real purpose of the scanner - the search for extra-terrestrial life - and she is on duty when the first message comes through.


After twenty years or more, China has changed. It has opened up, to a certain extent, to the West. Ye Wenjie is restored to academia. She develops followers, with whom she creates the Three Body game. She ends up, in the 'present' of the novel, which is a few years in the future, as the secret high priestess of the cult awaiting the arrival of the extra-terrestrials. Other secretive factions, including international security services, are not so keen.


Whilst it is not an easy read, especially for the science-phobic like me, The Three-Body Problem is nevertheless an extraordinary achievement. Cixin Lui is a scientist and obviously knows his stuff. He is equally in command of literary devices: the meta-drama of the game, the seamless sliding through time, even a spot of noir crime. I genuinely have never read a book like this. I simply have to read the next in the trilogy, The Dark Forest.

The Difference Engine - William Gibson and Bruce Sterling

What we have here is a collaboration between two founding fathers of cyberpunk, an alternate history in which Babbage's proto-computer has changed the world, notably Britain. The Tories under the Duke of Wellington tried to hold off the Radicals until Wellington was assassinated and the Rads took over. Byron is Prime Minister, his daughter Ada is effectively First Lady, and the House of Lords has become an appointed senate of savants. Steam carriages prowl the streets and the greatest, most popular form of communication is by way of punched cards. Vast bodies of data are stored and minutely analysed. The Victorians of 1855-56 even have their own version of fake news - eye-catching headlines on big screens with no real fact or analysis behind them. Which is pretty damn impressive for a book published in 1991.


It fascinated me. I loved the game of style played by the authors in which we have a series of five more or less standalone 'iterations' and conclude with a 'modus' of pseudo documents. We have a series of protagonists who come and go, some taking up more space than others. We have the Rad prostitute Sybil Gerard, who becomes involved with the speaking tour of ousted 'Texian' president Sam Houston; then there is Edward Mallory, discoverer of the Wisconsin Brontosaurus. He falls in with Laurence Oliphant, a sort of effete James Bond with connections in the very highest circles in Britain, the US and, for some reason, Japan.


These are fascinating characters. The world they inhabit is vividly realised down to the tiniest detail. The warnings to the modern reader are manifold. The problem is, though, I haven't the faintest idea what the book was about. What is its theme? What exactly are our heroes trying to achieve? And what do they actually achieve?


I'm not at all sure these things actually matter. They didn't in any way spoil my enjoyment. I suppose in a way there's a similarity to Murakami's 1Q84. Essentially, this is the world I have created for you; this is what these people do in it; make of that what you will.

1Q84 Book One - Haruki Murakami

I do so many things backwards. Reading 1Q84 was one such. I read it out of sequence. I knew how it ended before I knew how it began. It made no difference whatsoever. I enjoyed every second of it and discovering 1Q84 introduced me to Murakami's other work, of which I have now read a good deal.


Here we get everything we need to know about Tengo, Aomame and, perhaps most importantly, Fuka-Eri, the seventeen year old genius behind Air Chrysalis and the Sakigake cult from which she has escaped. It's an interesting link - Aomame left the Witnesses at about the same age. Akebono, which I don't remember from the later books, was a militant sub-sect of Sakigake, and their shootout with the police (very 1980s) is why the police (in 1Q84) are armed. This is the first discrepancy which Aomame notices when she crosses into the parallel world. Tengo doesn't actually cross over in this first book. We learn the full details of the very tenuous connection between our two protagonists and - for what I suspect is the one and only time - why the book is called 1Q84. Aomame comes up with the name to reinforce the idea that she is no longer in her 'real' 1984; whatever this is, it isn't that, so the Q stands for question mark. I can't even imagine how this worked in the original Japanese.


The style - leisurely, straightforward prose rolling gently out - is there to smooth the edges of the ideas which are often incredibly complex. I feel sure we get most if not all of Murakami's world view across the trilogy, but it so gently, so persuasively done that nothing jars, nothing seems at all unacceptable. For example, we see what Aomame does for a living right at the beginning of the book. We are later given suggestions why she does it. In lesser hands it would repel us or at least warn us we are tackling a noir world. But here it doesn't repel. Here the two-moon world is far from noir.


1Q84 is what it was instantly recognised as being - a classic of world literature. That's a beautiful thing.

Norwegian Wood - Haruki Murakami

This is Murakami's 1987 breakout novel, the one that made him a bestseller in Japan and successful around the world. This was because of its universality - ostensibly your basic rite of passage story - its apparent simplicity and its slightly offbeat characters. Typically for Murakami, the protagonists are welded in sexless love. Watanabe loves Naoko. Naoko loves Watanabe but cannot have penetrative sex with him (though they have plenty of non-penetrative) because she is still mourning her childhood sweetheart Kizuki, who also happened to be Watanabe's best friend. Kizuki killed himself at 17. Watanabe and Naoke have both gone to university in Tokyo, although they attend different ones. Watanabe loses Naoke when she enters a sanatorium to try and get over her grief. Left to his own devices Watanabe trails along in the wake of the dormitory Lothario Nagasawa, who picks up girls for them both, has sex with them and dumps them. Nagasawa is fully aware of his shortcomings, but accepts the way he is. After all, he is open with his longtanding girlfriend Hatsumi - there is no deceit involved with her or with the pick-up girls. Hatsumi quite likes Watanabe and would have sex with him, were it not for Nagasawa.  Meanwhile Watanabe visits Naoko at the sanatorium and meets her room-mate, the forty-year-old musician Rieko, who has been there seven years. Naoko and Rieko sleep together. Watanabe has sex with neither. Back at university, he meets a fellow drama student, the ultra-cute Midori, who would like to have sex with him but....

So it's not quite your usual rite of passage scenario. More a case of - boy meets girl, boy loses girl, boy has lots of girls, boy meets two more girls and a woman, boy cannot have any of them, but he finally loses the first girl, has sex with the woman, and decides to take up with the girl he should have focused on all along. Typical Murakami after all.

The beauty is the simplicity. Like the song, which Watanabe hears many years later in Hamburg (which then provokes his memory of Naoke, whose favourite song it was), the writing is incredibly simple yet exceptionally captivating. The translation here, by Jay Rubin, strikes what is surely the right note. The chronology seems to be straightforward but in fact a vast amount of backstory is sneaked in, even for comparatively minor characters. There is a regular use of letters between the principals in which they can reveal truths to one another which they could not say in person. Truth and untruth is one of the themes of the novel - Nagasawa is the extreme example of someone who is brutally honest about his actions whilst fooling himself that admitting his betrayals somehow legitimises them. Reiko is his opposite; again painfully honest about her past life, she excoriates herself unnecessarily. Nobody ever seems to tell the whole truth to Naoke and Watanabe  does his best but has no real idea about his true feelings. Discovering them, embracing them, is his coming of age (he is still only twenty-one at the novel's end). The exquisite final paragraph suggests that he has just for him the real journey is only just beginning.

Because I have come at Murakami the wrong way round, reading his most recent and ambitious work first, I was initially slightly disappointed with Norwegian Wood because it seemed so simple and unambitious. But I stuck with it and discovered the true depth and complexity. I cannot pick favourites. Read them all is my advice.

OTHER MURAKAMI NOVELS DISCUSSED ON THIS BLOG:

1Q84 Book 3
COLORLESS TUKURU TAZAKI AND HIS YEARS OF PILGRIMAGE

Colorless Tsukuru Tazaki and His Year of Pilgrimage - Haruki Murakami

Having discovered Murakami in a roundabout sort of way by happening on the third volume of his magnum opus 1Q84, I was naturally keen to try more.  Tsukuru Tazaki is a more recent (2013), much shorter work. It is equally good.

The story is this: Tsukuru and four other high school students do voluntary work one summer and become the closest of friends for the rest of their secondary education.  The four others, two boys and two girls, happen to have references to colour in their names, hence the 'color' part of the book's title. Tsukuru doesn't; his name means 'builder of things'. As such, he has to go to university in Tokyo because only Tokyo offers a course in his specialism, the building of railway stations.  He comes home for the vacations and, to begin with, everything as it was before he left. His friends are delighted to see him, desperate to hear news of the big city.  But then, for reasons unknown, they cut him dead. They refuse to take his phone calls. When one does finally speak to Tsukuru it is only to tell him that they have all agreed they want nothing more to do with him.

For five months thereafter Tsukuru thinks only of dying.  His life, without his friends, has thus become 'colorless'.  He recovers, graduates, gets the job of his dreams and stays in Tokyo. Sixteen years later he starts dating a woman whom he can at last envisage a future with. She tells him he seems blocked by what happened with his friends.  She convinces him that they only have a future together if he can relieve himself of the burden of his past.  With her help, he tracks down his friends. One of the girls, Shiro, has been murdered.  The other lives with her husband in Finland.  The two boys, Aka and Ao, are still in their home city.

Tsukuru visits them all, even making the trip to Finland to track down Kuru.  They are all pleased to see him.  They all regret having cut him off like they did.  But what else could they do when Shiro told them what Tsukuru had done?  Naturally, I'm not going to reveal what that was.  The important thing is the way Murakami handles the revelation.  Did Tsukuru do it?  Did he later go back and murder Shiro.  If he didn't do either, who did?  And the beauty - the mastery - of his technique is that we never find out.  It's four or five days since I finished the book and the questions are still rattling round in my head.  High art - downright brilliant.

1Q84 Book Three - Haruki Murakami

OK, not the best idea to read book three of a magnum opus with no knowledge of the first two.  But there we are.  This is what I did - and it didn't matter.  Murakami's dystopian world is so similar to the 'real' world as it was in Japan in 1984 that it makes no difference. His big concept is self-explanatory and does not subsume the three main characters, Aomame, Tengo and Ushikawa,  Aomame has crossed into this world and killed the Leader of the Sakigake sect.  She is being hidden by the Dowager but it obsessed with finding Tengo, briefly a schoolmate twenty years ago.  Tengo is a part-time teacher who has ghost-written the sensational bestseller Air Chrysalis for the teenaged prodigy Fuka-Eri, real name Eriko Fukada.  Air Chrysalis is ostensibly science fiction but actually it is an expose of the Sakigake cult.  In this world - which no one has noticed is different, even though the main difference is two moons - the air chrysalis and the Little People who make them are real.  Ushikawa is the profoundly ugly investigator who has been hired by Sakigake to track down Aomame.  He goes to great lengths because he feels responsible, as he was the one who vetted her when she started work for the cult.  Unable to breach the Dowager's elaborate security he decides to track down Tengo instead.

It is an intriguing book, which keeps rumbling on in the mind long after you've put it down.  The Little People, when they appear, are jaw-dropping.  Who is the unseen fee-collector for the national TV service who keeps banging on people's doors - even when they haven't got TVs?  What is his relationship to Tengo's comatose father?  What difference does the smaller, greenish moon make and why has nobody noticed?

Murakami's cool, understated prose makes the bizarre instantly acceptable - and, when the truly bizarre things happen, gives them double the impact.  By focusing on the three main viewpoint characters, and giving them each a chapter in turn, he builds an appreciation of their personalities by sheer accumulation.  Their linking characteristic is a patient stoicism - it doesn't matter how long Ushikawa has to stake out Tengo's apartment; Aomame cannot and will not leave Tokyo for a safer location until she has found Tengo, even though she has no reason to believe he has thought about her since they were ten years old; and Tengo is content to sit by the bedside of the father for whom he has no feelings whatsoever, using his spare time to plod away at his novel.

Superb.  I will be happy to read the other two books (published in a single volume in the UK) but what really appeals to me is Murakami's earlier international successes, Norwegian Wood and Kafka on the Shore.