Product Description

>On October 11 the television star Jason Taverner is so famous that 30 million viewers eagerly watch his prime-time show. On October 12 Jason Taverner is not a has-been but a never-was -- a man who has lost not only his audience but all proof of his existence. And in the claustrophobic betrayal state of Flow My Tears, the Policeman Said, loss of proof is synonyms with loss of life.

Taverner races to solve the riddle of his disappearance", immerses us in a horribly plausible Philip K. Dick United States in which everyone -- from a waiflike forger of identity cards to a surgically altered pleasure -- informs on everyone else, a world in which omniscient police have something to hide. His bleakly beautiful novel bores into the deepest bedrock self and plants a stick of dynamite at its center.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #72175 in Books
• Published on: 1993-06-29
• Released on: 1993-06-29
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 240 pages

From Publishers Weekly
A TV celebrity of the near future suddenly finds that he has no identity in this SF variation on the amnesia novel, which suffers from an inadequate ending. Vintage also releases, for $10 each, Dick's Now Wait for Last Year (*-74220-4 ), about a doctor who is treating the world's most important and sickest man, and The World Jones Made (*-74219-0 ), about a fanatic clairvoyant.
Copyright 1993 Reed Business Information, Inc.

From AudioFile
The author salutes George Orwell and Franz Kafka with a frightening story set in the dystopian American ÒfutureÓ of 1988. The novel, written in 1974, follows television and pop star Jason Taverner on an odyssey into a nightmare world in which he apparently has never existed. The expert Scott Brick adds his particular narrative skill to the mix, making TavernerÕs plight believable and eerily real. Brick keeps the story afloat as it rushes through confusing waters. The listener knows no more than the storyÕs hero as he tries to salvage his identity amid a fascist regime in which NOBLESSE OBLIGE is a foreign concept to a self-indulgent ruling class. M.S. © AudioFile 2008, Portland, Maine-- Copyright © AudioFile, Portland, Maine

Review
"Dick [was] many authors: a poor man's Pynchon, an oracular postmodern, a rich product of the changing counterculture" Village Voice

Customer Reviews

Best if read twice
The plot will have you guessing throughout, but always guessing wrong. The reader always guesses consistent with his own prejudiced conception of reality; he's over-matched by the mind-blowing stuff Dick throws at him. Seasoned readers of Dick are perhaps an exception. If you're new to Dick, I suggest re-reading the book a second time, especially if you have to fully "get it" it to be satisfied.

Dick probes the profound mystery of personal identity and its particularly effective because it's set against the backdrop of a neo-Stasi, dystopian America. In this world, existence means a dossier, an ID card, a micro-transmitters, etc. It's inconceivable that existence remains undocumented. Nevertheless, as Jason Taverner proves, it is possible -- somehow! We ought to take note of the implications of this type of society considering the Real ID Act of 2005 will soon require us all to carry National ID cards.

The finale of the story is very provocative and satisfying. I adored all the female characters in the book -- they were all so colorful.

Altogether, and satisfying and trippy read!

Intriguing paranoid mess
Flow My Tears, the Policeman Said was published in 1974, the same year Philip K. Dick had his famous "revelation" that led to his extremely different later works such as VALIS. Presumably this book was completed before that revelation -- thus it stands as perhaps the last of what might be considered his "middle period." (If we call the early period the apprentice work in short fiction and the flood of uneven novels mostly for Ace, and start the "middle period" maybe with his Hugo winner, The Man in the High Castle (1962).) It seems to me quite characteristic of that body of work, though to my mind it ranks below the peak of his oeuvre.

The plot and setting are something of a mess, though I think this is partly by design. Jason Taverner is a successful pop singer (more in the Frank Sinatra mode than in any plausible 70s mode), and also the host of a very successful TV variety show. He lives in the US in 1988, in a future where almost all black people have either been killed or sterilized. There are flying cars, but otherwise the milieu is somewhat seedy and not too different from our real 1974. He believes himself to be a "six," one of a group of genetically enhanced individuals.

Then one day Jason Taverner is erased from existence. His records do not appear anywhere in the government's exhaustive databases. As such, he is vulnerable for arrest and assignment to a forced labor camp. His agent has never heard of him, and neither has his sometime mistress and costar and fellow "six", Heather Hart. He stumbles through a couple of difficult days, mostly marked by encounters with differently needy women: Kathy Nelson, who forges papers for him; Ruth Rae, another former mistress who doesn't remember him but is happy to take him in again; Mary Anne Dominic, a talented potter who helps him out of another fix; and perhaps most importantly Alys Buckman, the drug-addict sister of Police General Felix Buckman, with whom she carries on an incestuous relationship. Taverner is constantly under purview of the police, especially Buckman (the title "policeman")... confusingly arrested and released repeatedly, even as his identity is eventually restored.

As I said, the plot doesn't really make much sense. And the setting is absurd if one attempts to see it as a plausible 1988: certainly it makes no sense today, but it was also impossible from the point of view of 1974. One almost wonders if the original notion for the novel was conceived in the 50s. (Especially given that Taverner is much more an early 50s pop star than a 70s or 80s pop star.) But I actually think that Dick had no interest whatsoever in displaying a plausible future. He just wanted a vehicle for his wild speculations. Which turn out to be rather interesting: Taverner's situation, his loss of identity is given a philosophically intriguing explanation. And the main characters -- Taverner and Buckman -- are well depicted though neither is very sympathetic.

The novel is well worth reading, for reasons that are hard to explain. For all that it's an implausible mess, it is weirdly intriguing. Dick's ideas are always absorbing. That said, the ideas here are not as thought-provoking as in his best novels, the characters not as interesting, the plot not terribly strong. And of course Dick was never anything special as a stylist. In all ways, I must rank this novel as Dick at less than his best. But still somehow he held my interest.

I don't usually do reviews, but...
This book is so good that it's almost criminal to sit back and let it languish in a mere 4 star status. This book is a paranoid adventure from start to finish.

Do yourself a favor; get this,"The Man Who Japed" and "Ubik".When you have finished, come back and help this book get the rating it deserves. Take it from a fellow six.