FINISHED READING - 1Q84 by Haruki Murakami

And so I come to review this immense brick of a book. I can see there is always with a trilogy of novels a desire in a publishers mind to produce a compendium volume. Each of the three parts of 1Q84 comes in at over three hundred pages, so they clock up just under a thousand pages when combined. This produces probably the most unwieldy book I've ever read physically in paperback. A hardback, though it would've added more weight obviously,  could have provided greater purchase in the holding of it. As it is, it can affect your reading experience. Put this in your satchel bag, I can tell you this novel is a pretty weighty thing to be carrying about. It might be categorised as an offensive weapon.

So that's the physical experience of reading 1Q84, what's it like as a novel? The story has all the familiar Murakami tropes. Its a strangely off kilter love story of Aomame and Tengo. They met briefly, but significantly, as children and each believes they will meet once again by accident later in life. Aomame has become a sports trainer and professional assassin. Frequently employed by a retired dowager to despatch abusive men. Tengo is a brilliant maths teacher, and an aspiring writer, who gets drawn into rewriting a novel sketchily written by a strange seventeen year old girl. Throughout the three parts of this novel their lives become increasingly life threatened and entwined in their destiny, even as they struggle to find each other again.

Aomame and Tengo live in a separated facet of 1984, in 1Q84. The only way to know you are in 1Q84 is that it has two moons. The book that Tengo rewrites, Air Chrysalis, describes an abusive religious cult the Sakegate and how they are being manipulated by their Leader and he in turn is being used as some sort of avatar by The Little People. What this fictional novel described then starts to mirror or predict lives and experience. Also our reading of it starts to develop multi dimensional qualities.  Real life experience and the novel re-formin the nature of the experience. Is the novel that Tengo is in the process of writing, the story of Aomame we are reading, and does that have more than just a fictional existence?

So 1Q84 is a hugely ambitious novel, if only by virtue of its scale. It managed to keep my attention without in the end fully justifying its length. It has an immersive quality, an easy relaxed pace and a way of captivating your attention, through interesting minor details of character. The world he creates is on the surface no different to any other dimension. There are always significant, but minor, discrepancies, such as the two moons, the Little People inhabiting and having influence in one world but not in another. There are also wacky anomalies, like Tengo's Father who, though in a coma, sends his ghostly spirit to knock on doors aggresively demanding the people inside pay him their TV License Fee. 1Q84 is a very engaging read. Though it is good, I would not describe it as his masterpiece.

CARROT REVIEW - 6/8