The Big Seven

The Big Seven is a little ridiculous. Maybe more than a little ridiculous. Harrison pitched it as a "faux mystery" because the mystery isn't necessarily the point, and I can buy that. Unfortunately, the point appears to be to wander through the head of a sex-obsessed retired cop.

The Big Seven is a meditation on the twilight of one's life, on sex, on violence, and man's inability to change. There isn't exactly depth here -- the man whose psyche we spend the novel rattling around in isn't a deep or a profound thinker, even if he is very well read. I assume there's more than a little of Harrison in that.

I don't know how representative this is of Harrison's work in general -- I'll have to give him another chance, because this didn't totally grab me.

Hard-boiled Wonderland and the End of the World

I was unfamiliar with Murakami before I picked up Hard-boiled Wonderland and the End of the World on a whim. While I enjoyed the novel quite a bit, it's not what I expected Murakami to be -- although the more I think about it, the more "the End of the World" sequence is what I had anticipated.

Hard-boiled Wonderland and the End of the World is two seemingly unconnected narratives that Murakami gradually draws closer together. "Hard-boiled Wonderland" reads as inspired by Western pulps, although it becomes nearly immediately obvious that this isn't quite the world we currently live in.

"The End of the World", in contrast, is obviously something very different -- the narrator is watching unicorns from afar as the first chapter begins. As the narrative unfolds, it becomes clear that something is very, very different -- this isn't just a normal fantasy world, this is something else entirely. As the novel progresses, more and more is revealed about the world of "The End of the World" and it becomes more bizarre and surreal. In contrats, "Hard-boiled Wonderland" stays at roughly the same level of odd -- sure, the modern world depicted isn't quite our modern world, but it's similar enough.

The unifying thread here is consciousness, and what one's mind is doing beneath the surface. The medical procedure our unnamed protagonist is described as having gone through is a tone-setting example of that. The separation of the narrator from his shadow in "The End of the World" is another, as are the twin narratives here.

Recommended.