A Scanner Darkly

NOT recommended!

I am amazed that this novel is placed so highly on so many review lists. Intensely depressing - many long long long! boring passages. Every time there seems to be some light at the end of the tunnel, every time that you escape the utter hopelessness of the situation - you are plunged back into utter despair and pointlessness. Perhaps that the point that PKD is trying to make - but it was a major struggle just to make it through to the end of the narrative. Perhaps so of this narrative was supposed to be humorous???? If so, then PKD has a very strange sense of humour! In fact, there is no doubt that he does, along with a strange sense of reality. I doubt that I would have finished the novel if it had been much long, or if I wasn't so determined to read ~all of the books on the "Classics of science fiction" list.