Book Review

VALIS

by Philip K. Dick

     Philip K. Dick is not an author who can be taken lightly. Most readers seem to have a similar reaction to him when they start getting into his novels. A common reaction is to think the stories are easy to follow, but the deeper meanings of them are baffling, opaque, and difficult to grasp. After reading several of his novels, you might begin to notice patterns and recurring themes. Ultimately, though, there still might be some kind of message that is slightly beyond your reach. If you’ve gotten to this point with his works, then it probably is time to read VALIS.

The first thing to come to terms with in this book is the narrative framework. Horselover Fats is the central character although he is actually a literary persona of Philip K. Dick. The writing is in the third person omniscient with a twist; the narrative voice is that of Phil who is also a persona of Philip K. Dick, the author. At times, he breaks out of the third person framing and addresses the reader directly as the narrator and then at other times he writes himself into the story, side by side with Horselover Fats as the two have conversations together. The two characters are the same person but separate.

Horselover Fats is an aging hippie who has admittedly fried his brain with drugs and suffers from mental illness. When he has a mystical experience seeing a color that doesn’t actually exist and having a vision of an army of Roman soldiers and an iron prison, he comes to the conclusion that time is not real and everything throughout history and into the present and future are happening at the same time. We just don’t perceive it that way. His mystical experience also gives him the power to see that his son has a health problem threatening his life. When taken to the doctor, this is confirmed and surgery is performed so that he can live. Then Horselover Fats attempts to save a woman from committing suicide and also tries to help a woman recover from cancer, a disease he believes to be a self-inflicted illness. He fails in both cases. This leads him to an existential crisis because he can’t understand why his religious powers helped him save his son’s life but not the lives of the two women. He winds up in a psychiatric hospital. He begins studying religious and mystical traditions and starts writing an exegesis, a book explaining his theological views.

The exegesis covers a lot of territory, exploring and combining aspects of Taoism, Hinduism, Socratic and pre-Socratic philosophy, hermetic traditions, and esoteric Christianity. He especially gets deeply into Gnosticism, the religious order that was seen as a competitor by early Christians who proceeded to destroy their writings and persecute them out of existence. The Gnostics and Horselover Fats hold the belief that the world is animated by a consciousness that is referred to as God. However, this god is a blind idiot god that is irrational, chaotic, and insane. That is why the world is insane. But there is also another god who is rational, good, and orderly, and he sometimes manifests as religious leaders like Buddha and Jesus Christ, bringing knowledge and sensibility to a world that is out of control. This god he refers to as “Zebra”.

This exegesis takes up a large portion of the novel. This is a weakness in the story. There are times when the plot just disappears into a long-winded fog of mystical thinking, making it look like VALIS is just an excuse to shove unorthodox religion down the readers’ throats. Even worse, none of this exegesis is original, or at least, if you have been previously acquainted with the aforementioned theologies and philosophies, there isn’t anything exciting or new to read about here.

However, if you don’t get bored and give up, the story eventually takes some unpredictable and interesting turns. Horselover Fats and the narrator Phil are taken to a movie called Valis by their skeptical friend Kevin. The movie confirms a lot of what Horselover Fats has written and even presents them with some coincidences that are loaded with meaning. They contact the film’s producer, Eric Lampton, a character loosely based on David Bowie, who invites them to Sonoma to meet his two year old daughter who can talk and claims to be the messiah they are looking for, an incarnation of the rational Gnostic god named Sophia. Sadly, Lampton and his followers turn out to be a bunch of crazies and Sophia is nothing but a hoax. But what about all those coincidences in the movie?

What makes VALIS an intersting story is not just its content, but also the layering of the narrative structure. Horselove Fats and Phil represent two different sides of the author. Horselover Fats is the wild and emotional mystic searching for a messiah and the solution to a mystery that may not even have a solution. Phil, the narrator, is the voice of reason who pokes holes in Horselover Fats’ theories, believes him to be insane, and even accuses him of solipsism, projecting his subjectivity onto the world and proclaiming it to be the truth. Notice how the former person is characterized by insanity and the latter is characterized by rationality. Now take into consideration that Philip K. Dick is the author, the god in the narrative machinery of the novel, the one who arranges the events of the plot and then writes himself into the novel as the man who is writing the novel. At this point, something about Philip K. Dick and all his writings becomes clear. He was a deeply religious man and he was also deeply skeptical of his own religious beliefs and experiences. He was both things simultaneously and with equal intensity. This may account for the recurring themes throughout his works: the illusion of time and space, our inability to firmly grasp objective nature, and our inability to base systems of moral certainty on such an unstable system of epistemology.

Then there is another great thing about the way this novel is written. Horselover Fats at times works himself into a frenzy of intense mental activity, then narrative events or the commentaries of Phil or other characters deflate it all, bringing the writing back down to earth and anchoring the story line in a more sober reality. The technical term for this narrative device is “ironic deflation” and Philip K. Dick does it effectively here.

Whatever flaws this novel may have, and there are many including an over-dependence on dialogue to move the story along and some plot holes here and there, are easily overshadowed by its merits. Such merits are a well-developed theory that interlocks with the narrative events, the contrast between illusion and reality, the inherent sense of exasperation expressed when Horselover Fats’ theories don’t adequately match up with his experiences, and the way it leaves the question of certainty and ultimate truth an open ended question that is impossible to answer.

In the end, VALIS is the book that puts all of Philip K. Dick’s other novels into clear light. It is the skeleton key that unlocks the mysteries of all his other books without actually solving the philosophical problems he presents. That probably is the point of it all. The answers will always be beyond our reach. For this reason, VALIS should not be the first Philip K. Dick novel anybody reads. It should be the one they read after being thoroughly confused by his major works. That uncertainty in his writing should be encountered and experienced on a deep level before reading this. And then once VALIS has been read, it is a good idea to go back and re-read everything that has already been read. May that cycle last forever, taking on deeper meaning with every revolution of that wheel.

Final question lingering after finishing this book: If God is a systematic network of information, as Horselover Fats claims he is, would Philip K. Dick entertain the thought that the internet is a physical manifestation of God? If it is, are we in serious trouble?

 

Book Review

Counter-Clock World

by Philip K. Dick

     Life is uncertain. Our perceptions of reality are shaky, incomplete, distorted, and inaccurate. If we use our perceptions of truth as a basis for making decisions and plans of action, how can we possibly know if we are doing the right thing or not? We can’t so we just do what we think is right and hope it works out for the best. This is the central, unstated theme of Philip K. Dick’s Counter-Clock World.

Sebastian Hermes is at the center of it all. He lives in a future time when dead people reawaken and rise from their graves and after being reborn they get younger with the passage of time, eventually becoming children then infants and returning to the womb. Sebastian runs a business, assisting people as they return to life then selling them to whoever will be their caretaker for the immediate future. One night while working in a graveyard, he realizes that the leader of a religious cult called the Uditi, named the Anarch Peak, is about to come back to life. Sebastian realizes this is an opportunity to make a huge amount of money, so he helps to resurrect the Anarch Peak, but not everything works out as smoothly as he plans.

The antagonist of the story is the Library which is run by a secretive group called the Erads. Their mission is the control of information and they operate by erasing and destroying all works of literature that they decide are harmful for society. They realize that the Anarch Peak is about to return, so they hatch a plot to kidnap and assassinate him before he can spread his religious message further than it already has. They know his return will be even more important this time because during death he would have had direct contact with God. The Erads send a charming and beautiful woman named Ann Fisher to seduce Sebastian Hermes while an attempt on the Anarch Peak’s life is made since he is being held in the care of Sebastian’s office building. Ann Fisher’s plans get spoiled because two secret agents from Rome tip Sebastian off to her plot. These Romans are most likely unstated representatives of the Catholic church who have a vested interest in getting a hold of the Anarch Peak.

At this point in the book, it becomes obvious that this is an action/thriller story with science-fiction trappings and theological undertones. Since the world moves in reverse, people disgorge food rather than eating it and they blow smoke into cigarette butts which elongate until they can be put into a pack. The climax of sex happens when the male’s sperm separates from the egg and returns to the man. There are other science-fiction details like flying cars, robot people, and exotic high-tech weaponry. None of this feeds directly into the main point. The author wanted to write a story about resurrection and made time flow in reverse, then added these details in to make it feel more complete and maybe a little more trippy like some mind-blowing window decorations. This was written in the late 1960s after all. These details, aside from the dead returning to life, are more or less just gimmicks. But at least they are unique and interesting gimmicks. The theological conversations and meditations on the nature of time and mortality are not terribly original either and seem to be tacked onto the story to give it a more mystical atmosphere.

As the story progresses, the actual theme of the book becomes a little less obscure. That theme, being the uncertainty of our perceptions and the inability to understand the consequences of our actions, can be seen in how the action unfolds. While there are a lot of sub-themes throughout, one thing becomes clear: Sebastian is faced with a series of choices in which the uncertainty of the outcomes make it difficult to judge what the right plan of action should be. This can be seen in his attempts to negotiate with the Romans and the Uditi who both want him to turn the Anarch Peak over to them. This culminates in Sebastian’s attempt to rescue the Anarch Peak and his wife Lotta from the fortress-like Library which is held by the Erads. It seems that whatever he does in this situation, it will be the wrong thing from both a personal and a moral point of view.

To confuse matters more, Sebastian Hermes begins having dreams and vision in which the Anarch Peak visits him as a spirit and gives him information and instructions. Sebastian has no way of knowing if these are real or hallucinatory, but the Anarch Peak gives him one significant piece of information. He tells Sebastian that he is the most important man in the world. At this point, you can not tell if Sebastian is losing his mind or not. It appears that world events of religious and historical importance are happening all around him and maybe he is some sort of Christ-like figure that has been chosen as a messenger for God. But maybe this is all a delusional compensation for the way he keeps digging himself deeper and deeper into trouble by making decisions that are morally and pragmatically of a dubious nature. He may be somebody with a divine purpose or he may be a complete loser having delusions of grandeur to save his fragile mind from sinking into self-destruction.

What is truly great about this book is the way you see this whole mess from Sebastian Hermes’ point of view. His confusion becomes your confusion and the fact that, despite all his screw ups, he remains a sympathetic character to the end because he is motivated entirely by pure intentions and honesty. What are the ethics of this? Do insanity and honesty cancel each other out? If Sebastian isn’t insane, do his failures cancel out his purity of intent? The story leaves you hanging without any clear answers.

As enjoyable as this book can be, it isn’t one of Philip K. Dick’s major works. The biggest flaw of the book is the inconsistencies of the time-in-reverse premise. While food is disgorged and cigarettes are un-smoked, bullets don’t fly out of people’s bodies and back into guns. The flying cars move forward. People don’t run or walk in reverse. Even worse, when people get shot or blown uo they don’t return to life the way people in their graves do. And how could the plot even move forwards in a world where everything goes backwards? Why can’t the characters even predict what is going to happen next? If you think about this too much you will ruin the experience of the story. It is just better to accept these flaws without dwelling on them too deeply. You actually have to do that if you expect to take anything away from the story.

The idea that we can never know what is real with any certainty and therefore can never know what to do with any certainty is the same theme that animates Philip K. Dick’s earlier novel The Man In the High Castle. He just transplants that idea into a totally different setting and plot line. Counter-Clock World is also a lot more entertaining. The way you can feel Sebastian’s confusion while he maintains a calm and certain exterior is a strong point and the story moves along nicely too, even if the main theme is obscured under all the details. This isn’t one of Philip K. Dick’s most popular novels, but it possibly is his more underrated. 

 

Book Review

The Man In the High Castle

by Philip K. Dick

     In Philip K. Dick’s The Man In rhe High Castle, Nabusuke Tagomi is a Japanese businessman in San Francisco whose consciousness has been changed by the events leading up to a day when he buys a piece of jewelry from an antique store. After contemplating his life while sitting in a park, he walks to the road to hire a pedecab. He is unable to see one even though other people can see them in abundance. He also notices a concrete highway ramp that he has never seen before; when he asks a stranger about it, the man explains that everybody has hated it for a long time because it is so ugly. Tagomi suddenly becomes aware of something that everybody else had known about. But there is nothing wrong with Tagomi. He is like everyone else in that we don’t see everything that is objectively present to us because we aren’t making a conscious effort to see everything. Our perceptions of the objective world come to us in pieces and fragments. We see things that others don’t and they see things that we don’t. Thus this novel poses the question of how we can form a solid moral foundation to guide our actions when our perceptions of reality are haphazard at best.

The story is an alternative history taking place after World War II, examining what American would be like if Germany and Japan had won the war. The USA has been divided into four new countries. The West Coast is part of Japan, the Northeast is part of Nazi Germany, the middle states are what is left of America, and the Southeast is left to rot as a neo-Confederate backwater. Racist hierarchies have been ratified into law and the strictly hierarchical Japanese culture has become the norm on the West coast.

Like Mr. Kurtz in Heart of Darkness, The Man In the High Castle, Hawthorne Abendsen, does not appear until the end. He is the author of a book called The Grasshopper Lies Heavy which is an alternative account of World War II in which he describes what would have happened if America had won the war. So, yes, Philip K. Dick wrote an alternative history novel that revolves around a fictional alternative history novel within the plot. This book is all the rage because most people are familiar with it whether they have read it or not. The irony is that the characters who haven’t read it think they know what happens in the book and they are invariably wrong. This is a brilliant framing device that works on the premise that readers will know how World War II ended before reading Dick’s novel. It takes your mind off into several directions at once and then demands that the reader sort out the mess. This is not literature for shallow people who like being spoonfed entertainment.

But getting back to Mr. Tagomi, the businessman acts as a liaison between two secrets agents, one a Japanese official and the other a German working for the anti-Nazi resistance who has learned that the Nazis have plans to betray their Japanese allies in a catastrophic way. The Nazis are on to the German agent and send some thugs out to kill him in the presence of Tagomi.

The Nazis are also on to a craftsman and businessman named Frank Frink. He runs a fledgling jewelry business with a partner and it is the products they make and sell that act as a link between most of the major characters in the novel. The Nazis want to execute Frink because they think he is an enemy of the state and part of a Jewish plot to dominate the world. In reality, Frink just wants to run a successful business so he can impress his ex-wife and get her to come back to him.

Thus the plot threads are individually easy to follow, but there isn’t one thread that stands out above all the others so saying that there is a plot supported by subplots is a mischaracterization. Even though all the story lines are clearly articulated and the characters mostly cross paths with each other, it is the equal weighting of all the elements that makes the book a bit frustrating to read.

So Frink passes through the life of a store owner named Childan, a dealer in Americana and antiques. Frink comes into the store to alert Childan that some pistols he has in stock are not authentic relics from the Civil War, but are, in fact, forgeries manufactured by a company that Frink once worked for. Frink, the honest businessman, appears to be motivated to sabotage the counterfeit market. Later Childan buys a stock of Frink’s jewelry and sells a uniquely shaped pin to Mr. Tagomi, the same pin that the Japanese man meditates on in the park when his life gets disrupted. Frink’s jewelry is another clever narrative device as the introduction of his products into the collectibles market causes everyone who comes into contact with them to re-evaluate their lives.

Childan carries two important philosophical themes in the narrative. One confronts the meaning of monetary values as well as the value of objects in geenral and the other examines the subjective moral ambiguity a person faces when thrown into an existentially uncomfortable position. Childan and Tagomi play off of each other because they both experience a crisis in their subjective orientation to the world. The former of Childan’s two themes happens when he learns about the counterfeit guns in his store. If a customer believes that a pistol is an authentic artifact from the Civil War, does it matter if that is not the reality? And why would a similar gun made at the same time but not used in the Civil War be of lesser value? The truth is that the value of the item is in the mind of whoever owns it or wants it. The guns have no inherent value of their own and that estimation of their value may be based on illusion, fantasy, lies, or ignorance. So how is it possible to form a moral judgment on how to sell an item when its valuation is based on an inaccurate perception of what it truly is? Philip K. Dick poses this question without answering it.

The latter dilemma involving Childan addresses the issue of maintaining a sense of self-worth in a humiliating situation. When Childan goes to visit some clients, a Japanese couple who are enamored with Americana, he feels as though their attempts to embrace American culture are superficial and patronizing. Even worse, they latch onto aspects of American culture that he despises like jazz. Childan’s problem is that, being American means having lost the war to Japan and Germany so Childan feels ashamed of some things that are authentically unique to America, especially in regards to people who aren’t white. Instead he admires German classical music and opera in an attempt to identify with the Nazis who defeated America. He sees them as being culturally superior because of their victory. The problem isn’t that Childan has any inhrent sympathy for fascism or Nazism; since he lives on the west coast and is subjected to the rigid hierarchies of Japan that have been imposed on California, a small business owner like himself is relegated to a mid-level social status with the wealthier and more powerful Japanese people over him. Because of this he feels humiliated after losing the status he held before the war. In an attempt to compensate for his humiliation, he embraces the cause of fascism in an act of bad faith. He suffers from the dilemma of finding refuge in any available port during a storm. That post just happens to be the Germans. In this way, Dick isn’t justifying Nazism. He is explaining why a confused individual might embrace it under uncomfortable circumstances like during the visit he makes to his Japanese customers’ apartment.

Then Childan agrees to sell Frink and his partner’s jewelry on commission from his store. As the jewelry begins to circulate among the other characters in the book, their perceptions of reality begin to change.

Finally, Frink’s wife Julianna goes on a trip through Colorado to find Abendsen, the author of The Grasshopper Lies Heavy. Simply put, she is on a mission to alert him because she learns the Nazis have hatched a plot to assassinate him. The Nazis in this book are reckless, treacherous backstabbers on a path to self-destruction and possibly the annihilation of the world in their quest for power.

One final narrative device worth considering is the presence of the I Ching, the ancient Taoist book of vaguely worded verses that act as an oracle for all the characters in the story. In a world characterized by uncertainty and unpredictability, they turn to it as a means of guidance. Really it acts as a literary chorus to move the plot along like the witches in Macbeth. It also serves as an explanatory device when there is nothing better to rely on which is a weakness in this book. For example, when Julianna meets up with Abendsen, they consult the I Ching to answer a question of importance to the story. They receive an answer but we are expected to accept it as true because the oracle says it us true and no further explanation is given. It seems that Dick had no further explanation to offer so he just used the I Ching as a means of filling in the gap, rendering the meaning of its answer pointless. This is a form of narrative cheating and something that makes the ending almost irrelevant.

In the end, for a novel with so much to unpack and so many significant ideas, it could have been better. The pacing is slow and laborious. The characters all have flat affects. The plot lines become tangled in ways that make the result look like the end of a frayed rope rather than a cohesive work of writing. The pieces of the story just don’t hang together very well. It is an awkward book written by a young writer whose genius would come out in his later works of fiction.

The Man In the High Castle is certainly worth reading. It presents the abstract concept of what it means to live in a world where morality can never be certain since it based on faulty perceptions of reality. All the main characters exemplify this problem in the way they make choices while navigating through the world. In the end, there is no solution to this problem of certainty other than doing what they think is right even though they risk making costly mistakes in the end. It isn’t one of Philip K. Dick’s best works, but it is still good enough to read at least once. Just be patient as you read.