IQ84
There’s much talk of “evil” in the book, but it boils down to the belief that iniquity is either in the eye of the beholder or a stabilizing force in human society. (“The most important thing … is for there to be a balance maintained between good and evil.”) The former is moral relativism at its glibbest; the latter, bizarrely, a sales pitch for the dark side.
(In truth both are moral relativism … but that’s not the point of my posting this excerpt from Kathryn Schultz’s review of Haruki Murakumi’s IQ84 in today’s New York Times. I just bought Marakumi’s book yesterday having enjoyed the strange worlds of A Wild Sheep Chase and The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle. Sometimes reviews like this piss me off. It is so ambivalent in its judgement that I find it destabilizing: I can’t tell if I am going to like it or not. Well, I have it so I’ll read it and judge for myself.)
