Murakami, The City and its Uncertain Walls

Haruki Murakami, The City and its Uncertain Walls (Harvill Secker)  

It's more of the same. Murakami is now 75 and that's not the sort of age at which one strikes out in a new direction. There'd be more consternation if he did than a Times reviewer stating the obvious, that we've seen it all before.

The unnamed first person is a dream reader in the library of a city that has no fixed shape. He loses touch with his teenage girlfriend. The unicorns are gratuitous. He moves to a small, provinicial town in a mountainous area to be chief librarian. People are separated from their shadows. Mr. Koyasu established this library but has died although returns regularly to provide advice and guidance. A teenage boy with savant syndrome in a parka with a Yellow Submarine motif concentrates intently on wide-ranging reading matter. And on, and on.

It's never quite the right time to ask such banal questions as whether we are dealing with parallel realities, dreams, ghosts, the sub-conscious or what. If it wasn't for the customary low-key, casual ordinariness of the Murakami genre I'm sure I'd find fault with it at every level for being cult/fantasy/dreamworld/surreal/science-fiction/alternative reality and any other adolescent irrelevance one cares to mention. One would love to draw the line at dreams and say such an old device has long had its day but, then again, it's part of a long tradition.

It doesn't mean anything quite so specific although here, more than anywhere he ever has before, Murakami explicitly refers to magic realism and Marquez, and identifies one of the places his character goes to as a place 'deep down in your consciousness'. Like anything that has gone beyond its initial novelty, it's comfortable by now and, if ever Murakami represented the shock of something new there was always a balance between the mundane and the strangeness and we have become so accustomed to the strangeness that even that is gently familiar, too.

He's almost showing us his workings now and telling us that, no, there was no more to it than any of the ready-made interpretations we might have brought to it. But that's not what some of us wanted. Sometimes we want mystique, to be left not knowing 'what that was all about' but thinking that we'd enjoyed it nonetheless.

My Murakami shelf overflows with this latest hefty volume - I'm sure it could have been achieved in at least 100 pages fewer but the repetitive snowfall, the recurrent motifs and the inconsequential detail are all part of the slow movement. Other shelves overflow, too, as further books by or about writers one has signed up to threaten the semblance of order in one's own library. It is books for book's sake, words for word's sake and fiction for fiction's sake. If Andy Warhol reproduced reductive images on a mass scale, Murakami achieves an equal if opposite effect by writing at length endlessly detailed evocations of extraordinary things in ordinary circumstances that might, at a stretch, be compared with Cervantes.

His books are commodities, as much lifestyle choices as they are art. They come with their recommended dose of sadness, their glimpses of beauty and wonder, their daily routine and, I still hope, some 'postmodern' lack of an answer.

If nothing else, I want to be the first, and only, reviewer -if I can be be- to find the parallel between Murakami's first person here in his provincial library and the time spent by Philip Larkin in his first such job in Wellington, Shropshire. Murakami's Beatles obsession may or may not extend into the English poetry of the time but it's a fit, a palpable fit, and it's best if we can make our own such connections and not know because if we are still post-modern, still de-constructed and like to remain floating and contingent, I'd rather not know than know.