Literature's most mind-blowing drugs
The Guardian 13.02.2010

Forget what the shady character down the pub is offering you, the most extreme psychedelic experiences come in book form

News of a documentary about the life of William Burroughs sent me scurrying – giant bug-style – back to his most celebrated work, Naked Lunch. Actually, it was more of a tentative crawl, because this was and remains the most difficult book I've ever encountered.
Maybe I'm about to commit hara kiri on my intellectual/literary credibility – such as it is – but I must confess: I find Naked Lunch pretty much unreadable. And not in the Dan Brown/misery lit/sleb memoir sense: I could read those if I had to, I just wouldn't enjoy it.
But Naked Lunch, my God … It's like someone swallowed the diaries of a hallucinating lunatic and vomited the resultant mess into your ears, stomach bile and all. While I can admit Burroughs was an important and seminal (pun probably not intended) writer, I can't read Naked Lunch without feeling queasy. And I can't finish it.
Lord knows I've tried. I wrestled with it again just this week. But once more this slim volume defeated me, forcing me to pound the mat and yell, "No more!" I felt as exhausted and brain-fried as someone coming out the far end of a two-week bender, but without any of the pleasurable memories.
Each time I get about halfway through, battling each disconnected sentence, all that disturbing weirdness, trying to mentally force some kind of shape onto these brilliant, demented ramblings, and then … I don't know. I run out of energy, maybe. Or interest. Or time. Or willingness to engage with the most grotesque and unsettling imagery this side of a prog rock album covers compendium. (The specific line this time round, the literary straw that broke my camel's back, was: "Mold odors of atrophied testicles quilted his body in a fuzzy grey fog …" I'm not sure which disturbs me more: the horrible vision conjured up, or the annoying spelling of "mould" and "odours".)
No: for me the best part of Naked Lunch – the only part I can get through – is the pharmacological essay in the appendix. A fascinating explanation of the effects of narcotics on mind and body. And it got me to thinking about drugs in literature; more specifically, fictional drugs.
Inventing a drug gives authors a certain freedom: they're no longer bound by the known, recorded, provable consequences of real-world consumption. You can't have a character hallucinate vividly and poetically, for instance, if they've injected heroin: it doesn't have that kind of effect (according to Dr Benway in Naked Lunch, it "affords relief from the whole life-process"). But a fictional drug offers a blank slate. Now the characters can do anything, go anywhere, have any sort of reaction, good or ill – and indeed, make any political argument the author wishes them to make.
The most famous invented drug is probably soma in Aldous Huxley's Brave New World. It was an integral part of the story because it was an integral part of the authorities' control mechanism – they were literally keeping the people doped up and happy. Sounds alright to me: a permanent state of blissed-out semi-catatonia. In fact, given my choice of fictional narcotics, soma would probably be first.
Nor would I mind sampling some melange/spice from Frank Herbert's Dune (long life, heightened awareness and possible extrasensory properties, cool blue eyeballs); septus from Iain Banks's Transition (the ability to flit between parallel worlds and inhabit others' bodies); Dylar from Don DeLillo's White Noise (no more fear of death); the various hallucinogens drunk with the old moloko in A Clockwork Orange (a nice quiet horrorshow starring Bog and all his angels); Can-D in Philip K Dick's The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch (allows you to participate in a group hallucination). I also quite like the sound of the Pan Galactic Gargle Blaster in Hitchhikers' Guide to the Galaxy, described as "like having your brains smashed out by a slice of lemon wrapped round a large gold brick". Well, it beats aspirin and sniffing exhaust pipes.
But as in life, so in literature, and not all fictional drugs are this appetising. Pretty much anything in William Gibson's work, for instance, gives me the heebie-jeebies (betaphenethylamine from Neuromancer, Dancer in Virtual Light, whiz in Mona Lisa Overdrive, The Fear in Red Star, Winter Orbit). Substance D in Dick's A Scanner Darkly is an unholy combination of LSD and crack cocaine: super-addictive, immediate, neurologically corrosive, brutal, deadly. Mimezine in Bruce Wagner's brilliant graphic novel Wild Palms is the designer drug from hell. Serum 111 in A Clockwork Orange rewired Alex's brain, destroyed his free will and damned him to an eternal purgatory of existential and biological nausea …
Maybe the drugs really don't work. On the other hand, maybe the trick is to stick to something beneficial, un-addictive, cheap and easily available, which imbues super-strength and comes in very handy when there's a dolmen needs tossing at a Roman legion. I give you the magic potion from Asterix: good for what ails you.



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