In my last year of high school, a teacher complemented me on the simple fact that when I didn’t know something, I asked about it. It was a type of accountability for learning he didn’t see often in schools. Later that same year at an internship I was doing, one of the other interns blamed the printer for his fuck up instead of asking why something wasn’t working. I had encountered the same problem perhaps a week earlier, but instead of blaming the technology, I asked a question about it.
Questions are important. And when around that same time period I read Philip K Dick’s The Man in the High Castle, I had questions.
I don’t bring this up trivially. To borrow a term from video game culture, Lavie Tidhar’s Osama, is a ‘spiritual successor’ to Dick’s High Castle (which is to say, not a sequel, but something with the same vibe). It is, briefly a book about some books, an author, and those books relation with our own world. Like High Castle was about an alternate history where the Nazi won the second world war, this story is about an alternative history where Osama Bin Laden is a fictional character in cheap pulp novels. That’s not spoiling Osama, as you will get all that pretty early on.
I decided that Osama was a better Castle before I was even a quarter of the way through it. In much the same was as I (perhaps controversially) say that Toni Morrison did William Falkner better than William Falkner, Tidhar captures the spirit of PKD without boring me to fucking tears. This is not to say the writing here is exactly good. The hard boiled detective vibe did capture my attention and kept my engaged enough, but it got old fast. There were a couple of lines that gave me some pause, as when a character is described as having ‘clothes that were new once’. My brain liked the line at first, but almost immediately afterwards something niggled, and it dawned on me that such a remark would describe almost all clothes. I have a three piece suit and I have gym shorts – they both look like they had been new once. Because the protagonist is a detective, the narration relies far too heavily on a sort of gumshoe cadence that got really old, really fast.
But Tidhar leverages dramatic irony like a master, and that really matters heavily in this story. As readers we are never lost when even the main character is, and what just seems like cryptic nonsense in the book is buttressed by what we know about our real life. He still manages to keep the whole thing suspenseful too. It was really well done.
I’ve done no research, because I’m fucking busy reading other things, but as I read this I became increasingly convinced that Tidhar wrote this at least in part as some homage to PKD. One detail at the end really cemented that opinion for me. He either was, or he is lying about it.
I opened this up with mentioning a tendenacy I have to ask questions. When I was younger and I had read Dick’s The Man in The High Castle, I really didn’t get the book. I chalked it up to not being bright enough to figure it out. I waited a decade, then read it again. It didn’t get much clearer, and at some point, I read it a third time. At some point, it dawned on me (perhaps from speaking to other people who had also read it) that there really wasn’t anything else to get. I don’t know what state of Alternative history as a genre was to the general public back in 1962, but High Castle to me really does feel like little more than PKD passing you a joint and saying “have you ever thought about other worlds?” It may have had a revolutionary conceit at the time, but during my reading it came off as just plain bad, with a story that mostly spins its wheels with some fake-ass spiritualism. The virtue of Tidhar’s Osama, is that it actually has a story beyond the conceit. A good one, too.
Failures in Polymathy 