Philip K. Dick, Ray Bradbury, Flann O'Brien

On a good day in September you talk to a few people in the market, take your place in the world for an hour or so, then go down to Vibes and Scribes to find something to read, and there are two books on the front display that will prime the change in the season.

Time Out of Joint by Philip K. Dick
How it is if you have paranoid tendencies and a missing twin. '... as if I'd been insane all my life and suddenly I had become sane.' Dislocation of the real. As respite. The relief of spelling it out is only temporary.

Fahrenheit 451 by Ray Bradbury
A story written by a library. 'I emerged from the library at age 28,'  says Ray Bradbury. Fahrenheit 451 is the fantasy nightmare dream tale of a graduate of libraries who has absorbed hundreds of styles and aspirations.

Science fiction is a total misnomer. Dystopian fiction even worse. More like the usual warped autobiography. If we're prepared to be honest. Ragle Gumm in Time Out of Joint is at the centre of an invented universe. Guy Montag in Fahrenheit 451 is trying to escape with his books intact. Their names tell all. These are auto-explanations of a rational/passionate/desperate order.

The resident image, recurring as with dreams, is Truffaut's film of Fahrenheit 451, with its speaking book people to and fro in the dusk or the dawn at the end of the film: he's Plato she's Alice in Wonderland, he's the Third Policeman. They walk to and fro saying their books, being their books in open spaces between trees.

A new Desert Island Discs question: if you had to choose a book to learn by heart, to guarantee for your lifetime, what would you choose? Fahrenheit 451? A Robert Walser story. A la recherche du temps perdu? One of the four quartets? Orlando?

Ray Bradbury invented Guy Montag, the fireman (though he claims it was the other way around) because he had grown in books and could not do without them. So he writes, or is written, as above all a passion for books, a need for books and libraries. Truths less carved in stone than printed on the memory.

Within a few pages Montag the fireman who burns books (with relish), meets Clarisse, the self-confessed insane 17 year-old with the faintest breath of fresh apricots and strawberries about her; and begins his transformation.

This is a redemption story. Ray Bradbury is a golden labrador of a writer. His enthusiasm for what he has to say is infectious.

Philip K. Dick, or PKD, on the other hand, is not redeemed. (I can't think of an introspective breed of dog.) He makes his tragic discovery and it's recessive. Everything he knows quickly leads to doubting everything he knows. Every border an introduction to a new unreality.

'Maybe,' Phil Dick told a Vancouver convention in 1972, 'all systems .... are the manifestations of paranoia. We should be content with the mysterious, the meaningless, the contradictory, the hostile, and most of all the unexplainably warm and giving...'