Book reviews: The City and its Uncertain Walls, by Haruki Murakami | Hum, by Helen Philips

The unnamed narrator meets a girl when they are both finalists in an essay writing competition as teenagers: his topic is “My friend” and the essay is about his cat. They are in love, then she disappears, but not before describing a semi-mythical land where there is a library of old dreams. The narrative is split between their story and his eventual discovery of the walled town with its melancholy unicorns and a clock without hands, and where his eyes are damaged and his shadow amputated so he can become a dream reader.

The parallel story is of his later self, back in reality, still pining for the missing adolescent crush. He gives up being a book sales manager to become a librarian in the small town of Z**, where he meets the former librarian (who happens to be a transvestite ghost), a nice muffin shop owner and a high functioning savant called “Yellow Submarine Boy” who reads endlessly without discrimination and has the uncanny ability to know what day of the week any given day was. There is also an old cat in the library, and like much else, that may or may not be significant.

A reader even mildly acquainted with Murakami’s oeuvre will recognise tropes, a cat, for example, being of significance in The Wind-up Bird Chronicles. There is a man who can talk to cats in Kafka on the Shore and a sanctuary library, there are parallel realities in IQ84, as there was in Hard-Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World, which also featured a character whose shadow had been excised, training to read dreams.

You might justifiably say that Monet painted a lot of haystacks, but there was an attempt to capture differences of light and atmosphere. The effect is different here: you can shuffle the pack, but the “message” is consistently inconsequential. “How much of what I remembered was the truth”, the narrator asks, “and how much was fiction? How much had really happened, and how much was made up?” We are treated to a little lit-crit about Gabriel García Márquez: “’In his stories the real and the unreal, the living and the dead, are all mixed together in one,’ she said. ‘Like that’s an entirely ordinary, everyday thing’. ‘People often call that magical realism,’ I said.

Here is the rub. The endnote informs us that The City and its Uncertain Walls was originally a novella published in 1980 – when such ideas seemed exciting and new. Parts were then rejigged in Hard-Boiled Wonderland… and this is yet another reimagining of the original. ‘All we do… is take that limited palette of motifs, change the approach and methods as we go, and rewrite them in all sorts of ways’. A manifesto, if you will, for exhausted self-plagiarism.

Yet there are flashes. A backstory for the ghost involves the death of his son and the subsequent suicide of his wife. She leaves two scallions in the bed before leaving. The symbolism of this is entirely opaque, movingly so. But the same strategy can fall utterly flat. The narrator at one point cannot remember all the names of the Russian Five. He can recollect Mussorgsky, Rimsky-Korsakov and Borodin, knows Tchaikovsky was not one of them, and eureka-like gets Balakirev. At no point do we then get César Cui. Is this about being forgotten? Or cultural nationalism? What does it mean is not the question. What does it matter is.

To turn from Murakami to Helen Phillips, and her new work Hum, is like moving from stifling to bracing. This is an urgent and sophisticated novel, and manages to be eerie without resorting to jump-scares.

You might not think so from the opening sentence – “The needle inched closer to her eye, and she tried not to flinch”. The protagonist, May, is having an experimental non-cosmetic alteration that confuses image recognition; she is paid for it, but it has invasive advertising.

She and her husband are just about managing in an overheating city, and the money allows them a trip with the children to the Botanical Gardens, a literal paradise, or walled wilderness. May insists they don’t wear their “bunnies” – a sort of FitBit, smartphone and tag – and of course the children go missing.

There are “wooms” – sleeping pods that play soothing music, films or porn – and “hums”, servant style androids. A scene where a hum seems to commit suicide, when in fact it is saving a human, captures the icky ambiguity of the hums knowing what is best for you and acting on it regardless.

Add in online mobs, paranoia and the dystopia of small print and you have a genuinely stunning and chilling depiction of our world a semi-tone out or a year hence. This epitomises the “uncanny valley”, and it sums itself up best in this exchange: “It’s not actually that dramatic… right?” “That’s what’s creepy about it".

The City and its Uncertain Walls, by Haruki Murakami, Harvill Secker, £25

Hum, by Helen Philips, Atlantic Books, £14.99