Everyone seems to be talking about Murakami these days, but somehow I'd never really got much of an idea of what his writing was actually like, or what he wrote about - which sort of makes sense, because even now, having picked up this book at random (it was the only one of his on the library shelf) and read it with great enjoyment, I'm still somewhat at a loss as to how to describe it.
In its adoption of a quest/search narrative (with certain overtones of paranoia and failure of communication thrown into the mix), coupled with a willingness to make some fairly OTT excursions into the imaginative-fantastic, the immediate reference point for me is Pynchon, but this comparison only goes so far - the narrative of A Wild Sheep Chase is far more linear, and its style of writing in general far less dense (it's related in prose that is unfailingly clean - in the sense of 'clear and seemingly transparent', rather than 'free of the profane/colloquial'), and it's more obviously metaphysical (while less political), as well as more humanistic (albeit in a very particular way), than Pynchon's exercises in endlessly proliferating signifiers, sub-plots and characters.
On its own terms, then (really, the only way to take a book like this one), what to make of A Wild Sheep Chase? Well, as the title suggests, it's the tale of one man's search for a sheep, and the novel is entertaining and well-plotted in its progression towards its rather unexpected ending. But the quest narrative also functions as a framework within which Murakami is able to develop a subtle, nuanced picture of the individual in/and world, and I think that the Pynchon comparison is instructive here: whereas Pynchon's take on identity and meaning in contemporary society is shaped by his conception of the world as, basically, a Tristero system (so that 'identity' and 'meaning' must always be constructed from out of the chaotic collective diaspora of signs and broken connections that make up that system), Murakami orients his treatment of those same themes around the essential experiences of individual isolation and detachment (so that, for him, while 'identity' and 'meaning' are intrinsically meaningful in a way that Pynchon would baulk at, the starting point is that there will always be spaces between the individual and the world, including between individuals themselves).
Or, at least, that's what I think.
Truly, I haven't entirely got my head around this book yet - I think that I may need to read a bit more of Murakami's work before reappraising A Wild Sheep Chase (in a kind of example, I guess, of the so-called hermeneutic circle). But, that notwithstanding, this really is a marvellous novel - it's fluent and readable and fun, and yet also subtle and wistful and wise. Without ever trivialising the individual, it is, I think, profoundly allegorical - it's a fable, seeming to hint at some deep truth. And, in the end, its denouement proves the whole novel to have been a sustained flight of fancy. What more could one ask?
