1Q84

The clue is in the title. This is an original and unsettling ode to George Orwell's 1984. Q sounds like the Japanese word for 9. This book has taken years to be released in English translation, and due to the heroic efforts of its translators, this 3-book, 1,000 page dystopian and imaginative book is finally here.

And it's a weird one. It's slightly uneven. It's baggy in places. It's never going to be The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle Reloaded but still, it's Murakami and he is an event and the book is great.

Book 1 introduces us to a typical Murakami world of jazz, cats and real world flourishes of science fiction and alternative reality. Book 2 is baggy. (Book 3 will pick up again, I promise). So, fall in love, persist and then finish with a bang.

Plot-wise, not much happens loudly. A lot happens quietly. In a nutshell: Aomame infiltrates a religious cult to try and get close to its allegedly superhuman leader. Tengo ghostwrites a novel for a seventeen-year-old girl and becomes inadvertently embroiled in a literary conspiracy. A lot of strange things start to happen that draw Aomame and Tengo together when they both start to notice that they are no longer in the world they recognise as their own. A high art exercise in bizarre love triangle, something Murakami has turned into his 'thing' develops. It's hard to try and pull the plot into anything more descriptive because that would ruin the strange other-worldly nature of the writing and because, while everything is incremental and existential and important to the ebb and flow of Aomame's and Tengo's relationship, somehow, them as the focus is what holds this uneven but still great book together.

Murakami is one of the world's most important writers and this book is a testament to his prowess as a novelist; it's not his best alas, but Murakami at half-speed is still head and shoulders above most of his competition.