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A review by batbones
VALIS by Philip K. Dick
4.0
My thoughts upon seeing this book's goodreads page: 'God help us, it's a trilogy!' + 'I'm baffled that it won an award even though at the same time I can understand why it did.'
Philip K. Dick and Umberto Eco have too little in common to be cited in the same sentence other than, I'm beginning to notice, their obsessive interest in stray religious dogma, secret societies and excruciatingly dense metaphysical theories of human civilisation, gods and origin. One more and there will be a trinity of cult conspiracy theorists.
In VALIS, the protagonist Horselover Fat is unable to prevent the deaths of two suicidal female friends. Depressed, his brain fried by drugs, agonised by the departure of his wife and son, his sudden mystical experience of 'God' (or as he calls it, Zebra) shooting a bolt of pink light into his brain causes him to write a casebook of hyper-vivid metaphysics drawn from Judea-Christian religions, Zoroastrianism, Buddhism, Wagner's Parsifal, and a plethora of stray mystic beliefs. VALIS, or God, or Zebra, is apparently an outer-space computer/AI - but time and space are one and the same and what differences are inconsequential - beaming messages and revealing itself to people on Earth, some of whom are apparently also from outer space and a long time ago. The Roman Empire has never died. The Christian apostles have never died, they are in fact immortal and live forever by embedding their consciousness in the space-time fabric of world history to be 'activated' by the right words and/or events. VALIS spectacularly turns the drama of self-loss into soul-loss and into world-loss - that is a religious schema that perhaps anthropologists and students in survey courses of religion will recognise. Even though the narrator-protagonist speaks of him in third person, Horselover Fat is a projection of the 'I' who maintains that distance in an attempt to be objective about his experience. Horselover Fat's real name is Philip Dick.
Someone who could write this book (and presumably 2 more of the same kind) was either a genius, insane, or on drugs. From the themes in VALIS, one hazards a guess of all three. Readers of the original Blade Runner, 'Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?' are familiar with Dick introducing a strange religion to his characters (a corruption of Christian and animistic worship) that apparently has almost nothing to do with the main plot. Dick's propensity with strangeness is not a factor of plot, it embeds itself in the fabric of his prose, which twists and dances. His style does not just carry the story, it is the story, the language in which his world is created and moves. Some passages are astonishingly beautiful, if bleak. One feels to be in the presence of a master; after writers like Dick, other writers are just writers.
What he did not know then is that it is sometimes an appropriate response to reality to go insane. To listen to Gloria rationally ask to die was to inhale the contagion. It was a Chinese finger-trap, where the harder you pull to get out, the tighter the trap gets.
'Don't kill yourself,' Fat said. 'Move in with me. I'm all alone. I really like you. Try it for a while, at least. We'll move your stuff up, me and my friends. There's lots of things we can do, like go places, like to the beach today. Isn't it nice here?'
To that, Gloria said nothing.
'It would really make me feel terrible,' Fat said, 'For the rest of my life, if you did away with yourself.' Thereby, as he later realized, he presented her with all the wrong reasons for living. She would be doing it as a favor to others. He could not have found a worse reason to give had he looked for years. Better to back the VW over her. This is why suicide hotlines are not manned by nitwits.
Philip K. Dick and Umberto Eco have too little in common to be cited in the same sentence other than, I'm beginning to notice, their obsessive interest in stray religious dogma, secret societies and excruciatingly dense metaphysical theories of human civilisation, gods and origin. One more and there will be a trinity of cult conspiracy theorists.
In VALIS, the protagonist Horselover Fat is unable to prevent the deaths of two suicidal female friends. Depressed, his brain fried by drugs, agonised by the departure of his wife and son, his sudden mystical experience of 'God' (or as he calls it, Zebra) shooting a bolt of pink light into his brain causes him to write a casebook of hyper-vivid metaphysics drawn from Judea-Christian religions, Zoroastrianism, Buddhism, Wagner's Parsifal, and a plethora of stray mystic beliefs. VALIS, or God, or Zebra, is apparently an outer-space computer/AI - but time and space are one and the same and what differences are inconsequential - beaming messages and revealing itself to people on Earth, some of whom are apparently also from outer space and a long time ago. The Roman Empire has never died. The Christian apostles have never died, they are in fact immortal and live forever by embedding their consciousness in the space-time fabric of world history to be 'activated' by the right words and/or events. VALIS spectacularly turns the drama of self-loss into soul-loss and into world-loss - that is a religious schema that perhaps anthropologists and students in survey courses of religion will recognise. Even though the narrator-protagonist speaks of him in third person, Horselover Fat is a projection of the 'I' who maintains that distance in an attempt to be objective about his experience. Horselover Fat's real name is Philip Dick.
Someone who could write this book (and presumably 2 more of the same kind) was either a genius, insane, or on drugs. From the themes in VALIS, one hazards a guess of all three. Readers of the original Blade Runner, 'Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?' are familiar with Dick introducing a strange religion to his characters (a corruption of Christian and animistic worship) that apparently has almost nothing to do with the main plot. Dick's propensity with strangeness is not a factor of plot, it embeds itself in the fabric of his prose, which twists and dances. His style does not just carry the story, it is the story, the language in which his world is created and moves. Some passages are astonishingly beautiful, if bleak. One feels to be in the presence of a master; after writers like Dick, other writers are just writers.
What he did not know then is that it is sometimes an appropriate response to reality to go insane. To listen to Gloria rationally ask to die was to inhale the contagion. It was a Chinese finger-trap, where the harder you pull to get out, the tighter the trap gets.
'Don't kill yourself,' Fat said. 'Move in with me. I'm all alone. I really like you. Try it for a while, at least. We'll move your stuff up, me and my friends. There's lots of things we can do, like go places, like to the beach today. Isn't it nice here?'
To that, Gloria said nothing.
'It would really make me feel terrible,' Fat said, 'For the rest of my life, if you did away with yourself.' Thereby, as he later realized, he presented her with all the wrong reasons for living. She would be doing it as a favor to others. He could not have found a worse reason to give had he looked for years. Better to back the VW over her. This is why suicide hotlines are not manned by nitwits.