'Flow My Tears, the Policeman Said' first was published in 1974; this UK Granada / Panther paperback (204 pp) was published in 1976. The cover artist is Richard Clifton-Dey.
I'm going to start this review by cheerfully stating that I consider Philip K. Dick to be one of the most over-rated sf writers of the 20th century. 'Flow' does nothing to alter that judgment.
The novel is set in a dystopian USA in October, 1988. Protagonist Jason Taverner is a popular crooner whose records sell in the millions; the host of the highly-rated weekly variety program The Jason Taverner Show; the lover of the beautiful redhead Heather Hart; and a wealthy man. For Jason Taverner, life is very good indeed.
Until he wakes up in a bedroom in a seedy hotel in Los Angeles's Skid Row. With a wad of cash in his wallet........ but none of the identification cards that are necessary to function as a legitimate member of society.
Bewildered, Taverner makes phone calls to colleagues and acquaintances.......only to discover that they've never heard of him.
Adrift in what seems to be a living nightmare, Taverner finds himself forming a precarious alliance with the fixers and document forgers who operate outside the law. But as Taverner learns more about the disturbing world in which he has found himself, a disquieting possibility arises.
Which 'reality' is 'real' ? Which reality is likely a hallucination: the reality of the Jason Taverner of fame and fortune, or reality of the Jason Taverner who is wandering Skid Row, dodging police checkpoints ?
Jason Taverner needs to find out. But can he evade General Felix Buckman of the L.A. Police Force long enough to discover the truth ?
I'm sure that someone, somewhere, at some time has rhapsodized about how 'Flow' forces the reader to confront his or her understanding of the Nature of Reality. Or something like that.
But the 'reality' of 'Flow' is that, while the narrative is reasonably engaging, and succeeds in inducing the reader to persevere in order to learn what, exactly, has happened to Jason Taverner, the Big Explanation that serves as the denouement is too contrived, and too full of holes in its logic, to be anything other than a disappointment.
Indeed, at times 'Flow' reads as if its main objective was to satirize the Hollywood nightclub culture of the early 70s. Jason Taverner is in fact a caricature of Dean Martin; Heather Hart, for example, is an amalgam of Joey Heatherton, Angie Dickinson, and Jill St. John. The cultural milieu within which these two operate is peopled with facsimiles of the VIPs and Beautiful People who partied with Dino, Sinatra, Hugh Hefner, and the other icons of the Playboy era whose glamour was fast fading with the advent of the 1970s.
Underneath their boozy innuendo, wealth, and privilege, Dick signals to us, these individuals are so vacuous and self-absorbed that their lives are less 'real' than those of the outcasts struggling to survive on the mean streets of L.A.
Summing up, I can't recommend 'Flow My Tears, the Policeman Said' as a stellar example of 70s sci-fi. This one can be passed by.
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