Book Review – Miracles of Life by J. G. Ballard

Miracles of Life is J. G. Ballard’s recently published autobiography. I did not expect JGB to write an autobiography, and possibly he himself did not either, but the news that he was suffering from terminal prostate cancer changed his mind. I was very eager to read this book, and I am somewhat disappointed to say that it failed to live up to my expectations. JGB must surely be one of the greatest English writers of the 20th century – his novels The Atrocity Exhibition and Crash are close to the greatest novels of the century, as are his lesser known The Unlimited Dream Company and High-Rise. But Ballard, in his old age, has been in declining as a writer for something like fifteen years now. I found his later novels, Cocaine Nights and Super Cannes, to be of middling quality, and I have neglected to read Millennium People, and neglected even to purchase Kingdom Come. Ballard is, quite simply, past it, which shouldn’t come as a surprise, given his age. To put his life in perspective, Ballard was born only two years later than Philip K. Dick, who died (of course) in 1982. Ballard will probably live to seventy-nine or eighty, which must seem like a reasonable innings.

OK, so what did I find disappointing about Miracles of Life? It is a combination of things. Firstly, there is nothing here that an avid JGB enthusiast (as I am) would not already know. Several sections read very similarly to things Ballard has said over the years in interviews. It is almost as if he has a ‘party line’ on his own life, and is quite content to reel it out. There is very little that is confessional, startling, or even particularly interesting here. There’s also a sort of veil of depersonalisation here. Ballard writes about his life so vacuously that it’s hard to imagine it meant much to him. He does come to life on a few issues: namely his time in the Lunghua prison camp, and in describing his apparently blissful relationship with his own children. But most of the rest of this reads quite limply indeed. It’s a shame, because this is pretty much the final word we’ll hear from Ballard, I suppose.

I’ve ran out of things to say. I’m sure that others will appreciate this book more than I, especially those who perhaps have not studied JGB’s life as closely as I have, but my reservations remain. Goodbye, James Graham Ballard. You are a truly great writer, and you will be remembered.

My New Reading List

I went on a bit of a book jaunt yesterday and picked up a few things. Therefore I will be taking a break from writing more PKD reviews for a while. These are the books I bought.

Miracles of Life – JG Ballard – his autobiography

Voices from Chernobyl – about the survivors

Cannibals of the Fine Light – Simon Brown – a book of stories by a WA SF writer, published by local outfit Ticonderoga

Channelling Henry – Bruce Russell- another book by a WA writer, published by Fremantle Press

Roderick – John Sladek – I picked up a first edition hardcover of this for $2!

Hal Spacejock series – Simon Haynes – I’ve recently been in contact with Simon and he’s sending me one of his books to read.

So look for reviews of these titles in upcoming weeks.

Book Review – Humpty Dumpty in Oakland by Philip K Dick

Not everyone likes PKD’s mainstream novels, almost all of which remained unpublished in his lifetime. They are often criticised for being bleak, dull or meaningless. There are plenty of people who say that they love PKD’s SF, but hate his mainstream works.

I am not one of those people.

I have been, and remain, fascinated by the worlds PKD created, either SF or mainstream. For me, his mainstream novels have a sort of ’slow burn’ that complement rather than contradict his zany SF worlds. Humpty Dumpty in Oakland is not the most well known of these mainstream efforts, most of which were written in the fifties, nor is it the best. It is, however, the last PKD would write. After this, in 1960, PKD would write The Man in the High Castle, the book which won him a Hugo Award and a sense that he could merge his mainstream and SF interests into one career. So Humpty Dumpty in Oakland represents the end of the line for PKD’s mainstream career.

The first few pages are so similar to the opening of Voices from the Street that I wondered whether it was a recast of that earlier book. I am both right and wrong in this assertion. Humpty Dumpty in Oakland does feature a character by the name of Jim Fergesson, same as the earlier novel, but here his trajectory is very different from that of Voices. There can be no doubt, however, that PKD cannibalized the opening scene of Voices for Humpty Dumpty in Oakland. There are several things that are virtually identical in both books: the Negro as an ‘early morning street sweeper,’ Fergesson ‘killing the nightlight with his hand,’ and the health food store across the street. There’s one important difference, however: now Fergesson runs an Auto Repair shop, not a TV & Radio store. And there is no Stuart Hadley working for him, although Humpty Dumpty in Oakland’s other main character, Al Miller, might be a recast of Hadley. No, it seems that Humpty Dumpty in Oakland is in fact a recast of a lost novel called A Time for George Stavros (according to Lawrence Sutin’s essential biography of PKD). But elements of Voices remain. Those two novels stand at opposite ends of PKD’s fruitless mainstream career: Voices from 1952-3 and Humpty from 1960.

There are other important differences between the novels discusses above. Humpty Dumpty in Oakland is set in Oakland, California, and Fergesson (who has aged a decade since we last saw him in Voices) is selling his shop, not buying another. His relationship with Al Miller is an unhappy one: the younger man rents a section of the old man’s lot for ‘Al’s Auto Sales.’ Unfortunately, Al’s cars are wrecks, and Al himself is an unlikable con man. Al Miller doesn’t exactly work for Fergesson, but the relationship is a parasitic one. PKD alternates chapters between Fergesson and Miller, although he isn’t adverse to sticking with one character for a few chapters when the need arises. Here, again, we see PKD’s genius for weaving the lives of his characters together. A third major character, Chris Harman, is introduced subtly. Harman is a businessman of some kind who comes to Fergesson to get his car looked at. But it seems that Harman is also the producer of ‘dirty records,’ a fact Miller seeks to exploit through blackmail.

Meanwhile, Harman has a proposition for Fergesson. Fergesson has already sold his auto repair business for around $40,000 (which must have been a tidy sum in 1960) and he’s planning on retiring, as his health is failing him. But Harman convinces him to invest his money in a new repair business in the newly-developed Marin County (where PKD himself lived during this time). Thus we have a situation where Harman is trying to sweet talk Fergesson, while simultaneously Miller is trying to blackmail Harman. It’s an elegant setup, and one PKD runs with for all it’s worth. I noticed at this point that there is an awful lot of interior monologue in this book. We are privy to the innermost thoughts of Fergesson and Miller, which mostly consist of various plans and concerns and (for Miller) get rich schemes.

Chapter Six is probably the highlight of Humpty Dumpty in Oakland for me. Here we see Fergesson driving out to Marin Country to investigate the location of the proposed new business. He drives through an unearthly maze of freeway constructions (which remind me of the developments I have seen here in Perth in the 1990s and 2000s) until he finally reaches Marin Gardens. We get a sense that there is a terrible void opening up beneath Fergesson. His heart is labouring, his palms are sweaty, and he might not live out the day. But when he reaches his destination, he meets a young salesman who seems to want to discuss science fiction, not business! The young man is reading Anderson’s Brain Wave, a once famous but now obscure novel. When Fergesson finally convinces the salesman to show him around, the old man takes a tumble. Sensing his own mortality, he gets back in his car and heads home. For a man of 32 or so, PKD sure knew how to imagine the fragile life of an older man on the brink of a heart attack. We feel Fergesson’s condition viscerally, as it is ourselves who are dying.

Meanwhile, Al Miller’s scheme for blackmailing Harman appears to have backfired, and in a strange twist, Miller ends up working for Harman’s Teach Records. Initially, it seems he is to manage a new classical music line, but then it appears that his job is to travel around California looking for a new barbershop quartet. I kid you not. Miller is happy enough to go along with this, as is his long-suffering wife. Unfortunately, Miller is a complete fuck-up. He’s actually insane, in a calm way. He does appear to be able to ‘level’ with anyone. As Harman eventually realises, he’s a bullshit artist, not a real man. Even more scathingly, Miller’s friend Tootie Dolittle calls him ‘Humpty Dumpty,’ in the sense that he just hangs around on his wall, waiting to fall off. And fall he does. Eventually we come to a scene in which Miller is at Harman’s extravagantly-built house, about to head off to look for that barbershop quartet. But then Jim Fergesson arrives in a terrible state; by this stage he is so ill that he can barely speak. And then sparks fly.

The antipathy between Fergesson and Miller is pretty much the main core of this novel, and here it comes to a head, to the detriment of both parties. Harman says something about not mixing business with friendship, but it is too late. Inexplicably, Miller commits a kind of professional suicide by admitting that it was he who tried to blackmail Harman (Harman thinks there is a Negro conspiracy against him). Furthermore, Miller claims to be an agent of some shadowy organisation out to get Harman. This is just insane stuff, and Miller fails in this strategem. But not before old man Fergesson dies of the heart attack he so feared. In a complex resolution, Fergesson’s widow Lydia appeals to Miller for help: she wants to stop the check that the old man had written to Harman just before his death. Miller succeeds in this aim, but becomes a targeted man as a result. His only valuable car, a 1932 Marmon (whatever that is or was), is smashed up by unknown assailants. Then Lydia, seeing this, offers to pay Miller $2000 for the car, as a way of saying thank you. Miller is happy to take the money, and begins to plot his escape.

And so Miller and his wife get on a Greyhound bus and get the hell out of California. They don’t get far. It isn’t long before his wife (I’ve forgotten her name and can’t be bothered going into the other room to get the novel) decides to leave him for good. Miller is arrested shortly after by the police in Salt Lake City, and returned to Oakland. His crime? Swindling Lydia Fergesson out of $2000 and then leaving the state. He is forced to pay the money back, and then receives an unexpected visitor: Chris Harman. Harman, far from seeking to finish Miller off, instead offers him a reprieve, and a job. Miller is happy to accept, but he is a broken man. His friend Tootie tells him so, and then we find Miller in an abject state at his car lot, filling a bag with sand. It is like this that the Negro realtor Mrs Lane finds him. She recognises that he is in a poor state, and offers to drive him home. The end.

It’s hard to imagine a less satisfactory resolution to a book than the last third of Humpty Dumpty in Oakland. The two ‘protagonists’ (if they can be called that) are petty and mean. One of them dies of a heart attack, and the other has his dreams broken. There’s very little sense of redemption here. No, this is a bleak and dark book, and it’s no wonder that the publishers of the day were not interested. From looking at Dave Hyde’s extremely useful PKDweb (http://www.philipkdickfans.com/pkdweb/) I discovered that the publishers were able to sum up Humpty Dumpty in Oakland’s failings thus: “One is left asking, at the end, what the book has really been about, what the author is trying to do and say in it. As with earlier Dick novels, it simply doesn’t add up to enough.”

And that’s fair enough. As I said before, this novel reads like a dead-end. But PKD’s next book, The Man in the High Castle, would prove to be an extraordinary new beginning. A note on publication. I am a proud owner of the (admittedly ex-library) first edition of Humpty Dumpty in Oakland, which was published in the UK in 1986 by Victor Gollancz. There have been a few UK editions over the years, but none in the U.S. until now. In November ‘07, Tor released a new hardcover edition of Humpty Dumpty in Oakland, which I believe to be the first American edition. If you’re a PKD fan, and you haven’t read this book, then here’s your chance.

Book Review – Voices from the Street by Philip K Dick

This book represents an impossibility: a new novel from a man who died in 1982. But here it is, Voices from the Street, a novel PKD wrote in 1952-3, when he was around twenty five years old. This is not the earliest surviving PKD manuscript; that honour goes to Gather Yourselves Together, which must surely be the great man’s earliest and most obscure work. Even I haven’t read it, given that it was published by an obscure small press in 1994. Voices from the Street is the last of PKD’s manuscripts to be published. As of now, everything PKD wrote that still survives (and there are apparently at least three early novel manuscripts that have long since disappeared) has been published. This represents, as one reviewer said, PKD’s belated induction into the American literary canon.

So what is Voices from the Street about? It isn’t a SF novel, for a start. No, it’s about a young man called Stuart Hadley who works in a TV store. This is 1952, in a small town called Cedar Groves, California. Given this novel’s vintage, that fact is interesting in itself. Here we get an insight into a world that must surely now have been buried under the nightmare of modern Californian life. In fact, I have often thought that the California of the 50s PKD describes is not altogether unlike the Perth, Western Australia I grew up in from 1990-2003. Hadley works for a man named Jim Fergesson, a middle-aged worry wart who plans to expand his business to a second store. This relationship is based on PKD’s own relationship with a man called Herb Hollis, whom PKD worked for the in late forties and early fifties. Hadley is married to a young woman called Ellen (perhaps based on PKD’s then current wife, Kleo). At the beginning of the novel, Ellen is pregnant with their first child. Hadley has it all: a wife, a child, a job, and yet he has nothing.

When we first meet Hadley, he’s in a jail cell, having gone on a bender the previous night. We soon learn that Hadley is well and truly going off the rails. He doesn’t apply himself in his job, he isn’t very nice to his wife (he loses money and stays out all night drinking), and he complains about pretty much everything. In fact, it’s hard to feel a great deal of sympathy for him. Herein lies the novel’s first weakness: the protagonist is a whining asshole. Voices from the Street represents a divergence from PKD’s usual sympathetic (although often pathetic) protagonists. The PKD of this novel is an angry young man indeed, and there’s precious little to smile about here. PKD would make the ‘quest for the human’ his mantra, and yet Stuart Hadley represents nothing if not the ‘inhuman’ android personality of PKD’s ‘dark-haired girls.’

This novel starts out bleak and goes downhill from there. By page 124, I found that I hated Stuart Hadley. He is an absolute prick to his wife, his boss, and his friends. Astonishingly, there’s a fair bit of racism in this book, and I’m not sure it can be said to be dis-endorsed by PKD. Hadley thinks of his friends, the Golds, as sub-men (they are Jewish). He describes them as dirty, pathetic and dwarf-like. Later, he calls them kikes. There is a black preacher called Theodore Beckheim, who is part of the Watchmen of Jesus, whom Hadley goes to see speak. Later, when Hadley discovers that Beckheim is sleeping with a white woman, Marsha Frazier, he calls him a ‘big black nigger.’ And there are some neo-Nazi types in the book, too, who are treated with ambivalence. In other words, it’s hard to me to understand how the PKD I know – the man who had a black spaceship captain in his first novel Solar Lottery, the man who said evil was ‘actual, like cement’ in reference to the Nazis in The Man in the High Castle – could have written Voices from the Street.

There is so much hatred and angst in this book. Hadley has a sister called Sally, for whom he apparently has (or at least once had) incestuous feelings. Sally is described very sensuously, in much more loving detail than Hadley’s wife, Ellen. In fact, the baby growing inside Ellen is compared to a tumour, and her pregnant condition is said to be ‘obese.’ Sally’s husband is even more offensive than Hadley himself. But his greatest crime would appear to be that he has taken Sally away from her brother. Characters are considered to lack their own reality: they are in fact projections of certain parts of Hadley’s personality (at least according to Hadley himself). There’s an awful tumult in this novel, one so searing that it made me feel ill reading it. The second half of the book focuses on Hadley’s relationship with Marsha Frazier, a thin thirty-ish woman who edits a fascist, anti-Semitic magazine called Succubus. Hadley does in fact rail against Frazier’s anti-Semitism, but this doesn’t stop him from considering himself part of a higher race than the likes of the Golds.

It’s not all bad, however. One of the strengths of this book is in the physical description of the TV store Hadley works in. This a real, concrete location, a solidity against the terrible flux of the world at large. But Hadley is so bored of his life that he is susceptible to virtually any kind of fad or scam: hence his interest in the Watchmen of Jesus. There is a section in which Marsha takes Hadley up the coast to meet Beckheim, his idol, but the meeting disappoints him. Hadley tries to submit to Beckheim and/or Marsha herself, but finds himself back at home, late at night, ripping up his membership card for the society. At this point I wondered if Hadley’s angst was based on some kind of sexual repression, but the novel seeks to defeat such speculation. When Hadley finally does cheat on his wife with Marsha, the outcome is shocking.

Hadley’s fall in the final third of the novel is piteous and horrifying. Time for a big spoiler alert. IF YOU DON’T WANT TO KNOW WHAT HAPPENS, STOP READING. Here is my summary of the events of the final third: Hadley takes Marsha to a hotel to sleep with her, but he ends up raping and beating her brutally. At one point, Marsha’s pathetic submission is compared to that of a small child (when he forces her to drink some bourbon out of a paper cup). This is quite shocking to me. Today, such behaviour would be termed aggravated sexual assault. Hatred flows outward in all directions, and Marsha becomes Hadley’s victim. He steals her car, leaving her at the hotel, and goes home. But it isn’t over. No, Hadley then proceeds to snatch his infant son from his cot (Ellen is fast asleep) before going on the mother of all benders. Then he gets horribly drunk, ends up in a fight or perhaps a series of fights. He calls his friend a kike, tries unsuccessfully to see Beckheim again (he isn’t allowed into the meeting as he’s ripped up his membership card) and stumbles around. During this time, Hadley’s son Pete is still in the stolen car. Hadley goes to the TV store late at night, where Fergesson is playing cards with some friends, and demands the $100 he is owed. He gets the money, gets himself fired, and goes out drinking again. This goes on for several hours. Eventually Hadley ends up at a gay bar (!) but he resists the overtures of the ‘fairies’ who try to care for him. Eventually he is hit by a car, taken in by some kindly Germans, before escaping and checking into a cheap hotel with the last of his money. Hadley goes back to the stolen car, finding that the window has been smashed and the baby removed. Then he goes to a car yard, tries to buy a car (but he has no money) and then decides to steal several hundred dollars from his now ex-boss.

The final scene of destruction is incredible. This is, in fact, powerful writing. Hadley goes to the TV store, finds that Fergesson has changed the lock, and sees Fergesson in the upstairs window. Then we switch to the older man’s point of view for the finale, in which Hadley basically uses his body as a human battering ram to get into the store. First he throws a brick through the window (at which time Fergesson calls the police) but he can’t get through. So he smashes his way through the broken glass, to the horror of all concerned. At this point, Hadley is little different to the machine in Terminator 2. He’s no longer human, and nothing will stand in his way.

Then we get the aftermath. It’s several months later and Hadley is in poor shape. He’s horribly disfigured and is now blind in one eye. Incredibly, Ellen has taken him back, and they are moving in to an extremely small and filthy dungeon of an apartment. Hadley is too weak to work so Ellen gets a job, and Hadley putters around the apartment, fixing the place up. He is calm now. But something terrible has happened to him. Hadley is still technically alive, but his soul is dead. He’s an android, devoid of emotion, operating with only half of his brain (the other half is said to be silent). The book ends with Hadley planning to open a new repair business.

I don’t think I’ve ever read as disturbing (and disturbed) a novel as Voices from the Street. It’s a distillation of hatred, fear and misery, and comes as a complete surprise to me. I’ve read something like 50 books by PKD, and not one of them comes close to being so terribly inhuman. It’s almost as though this book served as some kind of purgative for the youthful PKD. He wrote all of his rage, all his racism and violent tendencies, into this novel. This is not the PKD I know. This is a disturbed young man whose demons overcame him. Never again would he write something as awful as this. I’m glad to have read it, as it does shed some (unflattering) light onto the young PKD, but it’s disturbing nonetheless. It’s a good job PKD never got this published during his lifetime, nor, I expect, would he have wanted to.

Voices from the Street does have a sort of strange second life, however. Upon completing it, I went to my PKD bookshelf and picked up another of PKD’s mainstream novels, Humpty Dumpty in Oakland. Written in 1960 and published posthumously in 1986, it is the tale of one Jim Fergesson. I read the first three pages, and was astonished to discover that it contains virtually the exact same opening as Voices from the Street. Several phrases are identical. I propose to re-read Humpty Dumpty in Oakland in order to discover just how close the two novels are. Given that Voices from the Street was written in 1952-3, and Humpty Dumpty in Oakland in 1960, it seems obvious that PKD re-cast the former novel in the form of the latter. There’s nothing unusual about a writer doing this with one of his early, unpublished manuscripts (I’ve done the same myself) but it does surprise me that no one has mentioned the similarities between the two books. More on this later.

Book Review – Now Wait for Last Year by Philip K Dick

I like to think of Now Wait for Last Year as the quintessential PKD novel. Not many people would regard this as an ‘essential PKD novel’ and yet most PKD fans regard this as a ‘good’ book. I like to think of the book as being at the top of the second rank of PKD novels. Just to be clear about what I mean, these are the books I consider to be ‘first rank’: The Man in the High Castle, Martian Time-Slip, The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch, Ubik, A Scanner Darkly and The Transmigration of Timothy Archer. My Top 5 PKD novels I am certain of (exclude TTA from the above list) but my Top 10 is more problematic. There are a number of works that could be considered, including Now Wait. Other possibilities are A Maze of Death, Dr Bloodmoney, Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?, Flow My Tear, the Policeman Said, Time Out of Joint, Eye in the Sky, and even a couple of mainstream novels such as Confessions of a Crap Artist or even Mary and the Giant.

OK, but we’re getting off topic. Back to Now Wait for Last Year. I’ve always had a special liking of this book. I’ll try to explain why. Firstly, the setup is both classic PKD and yet interestingly unique: a guy called Eric Sweetscent is an ‘artiforg’ surgeon (short for ‘artificial organs’ – one of PKD’s better neologisms) who works for Virgil Ackerman, head of a company called Tijuana Fur & Dye. Eric has a wife called Kathy, who appears to be a thinly-drawn portrait of PKD’s third wife, Anne. There is an interstellar war going on between Terra, the ‘Starmen of Lilistar, and the buglike reegs. The war aspect is the least interesting and least inspired aspect of the book. PKD clearly had little interest in trying to imagine a real interstellar war. He still speaks of ‘fronts’ in a way that seems terminally mired in the Second World War. What is interesting, however, is the head of the Terran defense, a man called Gino Molinari.

Now Wait for Last Year is nothing if not uneven. The beginning of the novel is not especially promising, featuring a conversation between Eric and some of his associates. Here we see PKD the stylist in full ‘overblown’ mode, replete with overly long sentences and verbose descriptions. It’s fairly whimsical and trivial stuff. There’s something about ‘Wash 35,’ which is a mini-reality constructed from the trinkets of the past to simulate Washington from 1935. This seems to prefigure The Truman Show. But PKD doesn’t spend much time on this, and the promising idea is all but forgotten (to be picked up again in later novels, to be sure). Now Wait for Last Year doesn’t really get going until Chapter Four, which consists of a wonderful conversation between Eric and Gino Molinari. The subject? Eric’s marriage to Kathy Sweetscent. Now we’re getting somewhere.

This conversation feels like one of the true ‘genuine’ things in this novel, and one is sorely tempted to attribute this to the fact that it serves as a cipher for Phil’s then-rocky relationship with his third wife. I won’t try to recap the content of this conversation, but suffice to say that it is written with real feeling. By this stage of the novel, Kathy has already tried the new drug JJ-180, the effects of which will basically drive the rest of the novel. One of the ‘great’ aspects of this book is the depiction of Terra’s ailing leader, who is painted as stern but human, fallible and yet wise. It turns out that Molinari’s strategy for avoiding having to deal with Terra’s ambiguous ally, the ‘Starmen, is to become so ill that he can’t negotiate the ‘Starmen’s covert takeover of Terran industries. This is where PKD’s talent for weaving apparently unrelated factors comes into play. We have an ailing leader, an ‘artiforg’ surgeon, an interstellar war and a drug which sends its users into a multiverse of futures. By the end of the book, these four factors will have become interminably intertwined.

The second half of the novel basically consists of first Kathy, and then Eric Sweetscent descending into the drug world of JJ-180. What this consists of is multiple trips into alternate and contradictory futures which resemble nothing if not the Back to the Future films. This serves to highlight how prevalent PKD’s vision would become in the years after his death. In some universes, the war is going better than in others, and some realities see Terra allied with the reegs, not fighting them. Eric’s immediate goal is to find a cure for the extremely addictive JJ-180, which he eventually does. PKD uses a somewhat lame device, that of the talking taxi cab (“I’m Johnny Cab,” anyone?), to facilitate the plethora of confusing realities. What I’m saying is that there’s a fair bit of telling, not showing. But perhaps it can’t be helped. It turns out that there are a whole heap of alternate Molinaris from different universes, some of which never became Terra’s supreme leader, who end up being used in our own universe. The novel ends on an optimistic note, with Terra trying ally with the reegs, and Eric vowing to stay with his drug-wrecked wife.

And that’s the end. This is a rollercoaster ride of a novel, teetering on the edge of incomprehensibility. But PKD manages to pull it off in a way I believe he failed in books such as The Simulacra. Time travel stories offer plenty in the way of time paradoxes, but PKD manages to run roughshod over these concerns with admirable panache. A note on the two covers shown above. The one of the left is a truly horrid Panther cover from the UK in the 70s. I happen to own this edition. This must go down as one of PKD’s worst novel covers (and there were some contenders all right). The one of the right is the ‘Millennium Masterworks’ edition from 2000. This, more than anything else I could say, should serve as a indication of how rapidly PKD’s star has risen in the years since his death. Isn’t it ironic that in death PKD is providing much better for his wives and children than he ever could in life? It’s tempting to label the whole subject phildickian.

Map of The Kingdom of Four Rivers

Here is the map my wife Georgie drew for The Kingdom of Four Rivers. I am a little ambivalent about having a map for my novel, as it probably makes KoFR seem more like a fantasy novel, which it certainly isn’t. However, I liked the map Georgie drew so I decided to include it. It makes the story of the novel seem a little more real somehow.

Anyway, I have almost finished line-by-line revision on my manuscript now. The ms. is currently down to around 87,000 words, down from 91,000 in the second draft and 97,000 in the first draft. I have new scenes to write, however, which will hopefully bring the final word count up to around 90,000 words. Interestingly, I have found that I haven’t needed to cut as much out of this manuscript as I did with previous novel attempts. I used to routinely write manuscripts of perhaps 75,000 words, which would be cut down to 55,000 in the second draft. This time, I am finding that there is less need for deletions. I am hoping this means that the book is good…

The entry form for the 2008 TAG Hungerford Award has been released now. I’m hoping to finish working on KoFR and enter it by the end of April. Fingers crossed!

Line-by-line revision on my novel

Well, here it is: my prologue in all its edited glory. I read somewhere recently that you should read your manuscript aloud to yourself to in order to improve the flow of writing. I knew this already, but I thought that I didn’t need to go through this process on The Kingdom of Four Rivers. I was wrong. I’m about 1/3 of the way through editing by ms. by reading it aloud and making changes on the page, and I’ve been making 5-10 alterations per page. So it’s definitely a useful editing strategy.

Hum, I suppose I’d better get back to it then…

Book Review – What If Our World Is Their Heaven?

Reading this book – which is basically a transcript of a long interview with Philip K. Dick – is like catching up with an old friend. These interviews, which were recorded by Gwen Lee, have the distinction of being the last interviews in Philip K. Dick’s life. That’s this book’s first claim to fame. The interviews were recorded in January 1982, just six weeks before PKD’s untimely death. That’s strange, because according to the blurb on the back of this edition, the interviews took place from November 1982 onwards. It’s a typo, obviously, but definitely a phildickian one. I have been meaning to get this book ever since it was first released, but it wasn’t that high on my list of priorities. Having now read What If Our World Is Their Heaven?, I have satisfied my curiosity, but I don’t really feel like I’ve learned much that I didn’t already know about PKD.

This book’s second claim to fame is that it contains pretty much the only discussion on PKD’s unwritten SF novel The Owl In Daylight. Owl would have been an interesting novel, had PKD lived to write it. It was to be a story about first contact between an alien species and our own. The catch is that the aliens are totally deaf (and yet regard our music as heavenly) and we are ‘deaf’ to their sense of colour. The novel was to be a Faustian tale involving biochip technology (and apparently nanotechnology) as well as a hack composer who becomes a genuis. I’m not doing a good job of describing it here. If you want to know about Owl, then you need to read this book.

Much of the rest of What If Our World Is Their Heaven? deals with PKD’s reactions to what he had been shown of the then soon to be released Blade Runner. PKD had a love/hate relationship with the filmmakers, but he is in ‘love’ mode here. His description of Blade Runner’s beginning reminds me how powerfully it affected me when I first saw it. This section is interesting, because it’s a great shame that PKD died before the film was released. There’s a real ’sense of wonder’ about PKD here; he’s bewildered that someone could go to so much effort to flesh out one of his novels like this. If you are interested in Blade Runner, you will appreciate these details.

Other topics in this book include PKD’s ‘Exegesis,’ the experience of ‘2-3-74′ and discussion about the book that turned out to be PKD’s last, The Transmigration of Timothy Archer. I am an ardent supporter of TTA, and thus I was interested to read that PKD had found the book extremely difficult to write, and that he questioned its value. There’s an interesting point to be made here. When we think about the lives of dead people, we tend to want a ‘beginning, middle and end.’ TTA is such a beautiful novel that it seems an ideal final testament to PKD’s life, and yet here we have the man himself, six weeks before the stroke that would kill him, planning another book and working himself into the ground. And he knows it. One wants to scream out across these pages: “STOP IT, PHIL! JUST RELAX! DON’T THINK ABOUT WRITING!” But, of course, it’s too late. Philip K. Dick died on March 2, 1982, which is now twenty six years ago. I was born six months before his death, and those 26 years certainly seem like a long time to me. To put PKD’s life into perspective, another great writer, J. G. Ballard, was born only two years later (in 1930) and is only now seeming to be on his last legs due to prostate cancer. PKD fans tend to have accepted the master’s death by now, but this book brings it back into shocking focus.

There’s a lot of PKD’s personality here: his sense of humour, his flirtatious nature, his wide-reaching imagination and extraordinary intelligence. What we find here is a literary genius at work, albeit slaving away at a doomed task. I’ve often felt that PKD threw away enough ideas for someone to make their own career out of. I doubt that anyone will ever be able to reproduce The Owl in Daylight from these conversations (even if they had permission), but this stuff sure is instructive. PKD often spoke about the information he felt was being fired into his brain. Well, he spent a fair bit of time firing information into the brains of those around him.

I’ve talked myself around. I started off trying to say that What If Our World Is Their Heaven? wasn’t worth the bother, but now I’m not sure I agree with my own assertion. I will need to re-read this carefully. The only real downside to this book is it’s length. It’s been padded with wide margins and a large font, as well as blank pages, a foreword, an introduction, and a fairly redundant bibliography, and it’s still only two hundred pages. But it’s worth it all the same. This is hardly an essential PKD book for everyday readers (I would rate Paul Williams’ book of interviews, Only Apparently Real, ahead of this one) but it’s an essential book for the hardcore PKD fan.

Book Review – VALIS by Philip K. Dick

I fell out of love with VALIS by degrees. When I first read it in 1999, at the age of eighteen, I was entranced. I distinctly recall starting to read it late in the evening and continuing almost until dawn. But over the years, on subsequent readings, I have grown increasingly uneasy with the status of VALIS as one of PKD’s best novels. Now, on perhaps my fifth reading, I cannot say that I share the high opinion many other PKD-philes have of this book.

What is VALIS about? Herein lies one of the problems. The ‘plot’ (what little of it there is) goes something like this: during the 1970s, a man by the name of Horselover Fat has a strange experience, in which he is bombarded by a pink beam of light. Fat spends years trying to work out what has happened to him, spinning outlandish theories with his friends Phil Dick, Kevin and David. During the course of the novel, we are treated to some stories of Phil Dick/Horselover Fat’s unsuccessful attempts to save the suicidal Gloria and terminally ill Sherri, as well as the aftermath of his own suicide attempt. Eventually, the four friends go to see a film called “Valis,” which seems to corroborate much of what Horselover Fat experienced during March 1974. After this, the four friends go to meet the filmmaker, Eric Lampton, and his wife Linda, who claim to be beings from another star. They also claim that their two year-old daughter is a Saviour in a line that includes Elijah, Jesus Christ and a few others. Phil Dick and Horselover Fat realise that they are one individual, not two, and the three friends return to their homes, whereupon they learn that the two year-old Saviour has died. There’s more to it than that, of course, but that’s the bare bones of the actual plot.

In many respects, VALIS picks up where A Scanner Darkly leaves off. Both novels are about the after-effects of the sixties drug subculture, and both address the themes of suicide and despair. Crucially, both books also detail a ’splitting of personalities:’ whereas in A Scanner Darkly, Bob Arctor ends up narking on himself, in VALIS, Philip K. Dick himself splits into two personalities, one rational and the other deranged. In fact, there is a novel that comes between these two in terms of composition: Radio Free Albemuth, which PKD originally called “Valisystem A.” That book (which wasn’t published until 1985) also addresses the theme of split personalities, although it does so in a slightly different way. Thus I find it useful to speak of a ’split personality trilogy’ – A Scanner Darkly, Radio Free Albemuth and VALIS.

In VALIS, PKD seems to be spinning a metafictional web that appears, in some respects, to take the form of quasi-autobiography. After all, those who know PKD’s life will be aware that he had an incident with a ‘pink beam of light’ in February and March of 1974. Many of the characters in VALIS appear to be based on real people in PKD’s life: Beth is based on PKD’s fifth wife Tess; Kevin is K.W. Jeter; David is based on Tim Powers and so on. But PKD has presented VALIS as fiction, and thus I will read it as fiction. Therefore, I will not make any further attempts to align events in the novel with events in the writer’s life. Crucially, PKD has created the alter-ego of Horselover Fat, whom he uses as a speaker in the third person to gain “much-needed objectivity” (p 11). I’m sure that PKD enjoyed blurring the boundaries between fictional worlds and ‘real’ ones.

The bulk of VALIS basically consists of a series of conversations and interior monologues on the nature of the divine. This is in response to the ‘pink beam of light’ incident. All of this is quite interesting, but it’s not really a novel in the normal sense. What few events there are have taken place in the past, mainly dealing with the consequences of suicide and attempted suicide. It’s not until around 150 pages into the book that we get the first forward movement in time: namely the watching of the film ‘Valis.’ Previous to this we get a number of bizarre and outlandish theories. “Every day he developed a new [theory], more cunning, more exciting and more fucked.” (p 36) Most of VALIS basically consists of extended discussion on these theories, which include but are not limited to: the universe as information; the universe as a hologram; a two deity cosmology in which an inferior creator wreaks havoc on the world while the superior deity tries to fight back; humanity as descended from a race of three-eyed beings from Sirius; two realities interposed – one being Rome circa 70 C.E, and the other the U.S. in 1974; a notion of the universe as a ‘Black Iron Prison’ from which we cannot escape. All of this is very interesting, rather bewildering, and ultimatly (for me anyway) less than enlightening. And I suppose therein lies the crux of my argument against VALIS.

At one stage, there is even mention made of the fact that Horselover Fat’s theories about the universe tie in with PKD’s own primal loss: that of his twin sister Jane, who died at six weeks of age from malnutrition. This is interesting, as it helps to unravel the complexities of PKD’s theories. One strength of the early part of the novel is the juxtaposition of these outlandish theories with the terrible realities of life in the ‘Black Iron Prison.’ There is one moment early on where Fat is drawn back from his world of ideas by a woman trying to retch into a tub in front of him. This is in a psychiatric ward. This juxtaposition of the high and low is further reflected in the relationship between Horselover Fat, the creator of wild fantastical ideas, and Phil Dick, the skeptical science-fiction writer. This is an effective technique and may serve as a kind of ’self-interrogation’ of PKD’s mind. One might speculate that this inner dialogue might be seen to represent the two hemispheres of the brain: one rational, the other deranged; one grounded in a mundane reality, the other residing in a higher world of ideas. But of course, with PKD, the question always becomes, “How can I tell whether any of this is real?”

What can we take at face value in VALIS? It’s really hard to say, as PKD as an authorial voice never confirms nor denies the truth of what is described. For example, there is an extraordinary conversation between Horselover Fat and Dr Stone, a psychiatrist at the mental ward. This conversation covers a vast number of highly eclectic and intellectual topics relating to the nature of Gnosticism and reality itself. It’s a stunning piece of work, but it places several demands on the reader in terms of ’suspension of disbelief.’ Are we to believe that this conversation actually took place as written within the world of the novel? Are we to interpret it as the deranged fantasies of Horselover Fat? There is, of course, no way of telling. Herein lies PKD’s greatest strength as a writer and possibly one of the weaknesses of VALIS. We simply don’t know what to believe. Now, a young and very enthusiastic PKD reader, such as I was at the age of eighteen, is inclined to accept even the most outlandish of ideas as feasible, but an older and more tempered PKD reader is given to wonder. What the hell is VALIS about, anyway?

What I am trying to say here is that I now have some reservations both about the usefulness of the ideas presented in VALIS and also about the quality of the novel as work of art. In VALIS, PKD has almost but not quite abandoned the vehicle of fiction itself as a means to present his ideas. Much of what we have here could just as easily be presented in essay form. There’s precious little plot in VALIS, virtually no attempt at characterisation or description of settings etc. Now I know that many PKD acolytes are inclined to claim that PKD was ‘beyond’ the realms of proletarian fiction by this stage of his life and career, but I remain skeptical. PKD wrote this as a novel because that is what he did for a living. As a novel, I’m not sure that VALIS can be deemed a success. As a snapshot of PKD’s mind, however, it is fascinating. This is both an attempt at autobiography and a ’selection from the exegesis,’ long before Lawrence Sutin’s In Pursuit of Valis.

My sense of unease with VALIS is reflected in my attempt to write about it. Am I stupid to question this book? Am I unable to think on the level required? But the book itself seems to question its own findings: “Fat’s encounter may not have been with God, but it was certainly with something.” (p 120) As proof of the ‘reality’ of VALIS (or God, or Zebra), PKD cites an experience from his own life: his miraculous diagnosis of his infant son’s serious medical condition. We are on uncertain ground here. How much of this is to be believed? Even if we do believe it, we are being asked to consider something beyond the scope of the book itself, i.e. Christopher’s condition and subsequent recovery. This seems perilous to me. The notion of three-eyed invaders from Sirius is particularly difficult to swallow. This reflects nothing if not Kurt Vonnegut’s time-defying Tralfamadorians from his novel Slaughterhouse Five. There’s only one difference: Vonnegut was joking; PKD, apparently, isn’t: “We are talking about Christ. He is an extra-terrestrial life form which came to this planet thousands of years ago.” (p 125)

At long last, the ‘plot’ actually gets going when Horselover Fat, Phil Dick, Kevin and David go to see the film ‘Valis.’ This psychadelic film seems to corroborate much of Fat’s ravings, and suggests that the U.S. circa 1974 is in fact a ‘Black Iron Prison’ which God is trying to reconquer. (As a small aside, the U.S. circa 2008 seems to reflect nothing if not a Black Iron Prison. Most of PKD’s fears have been confirmed.) After the film, the four friends go to see the filmmaker Eric Lampton and his wife. It turns out that they believe they are God-like aliens. Furthermore, their two-year old daughter is in fact a Saviour in a line including Jesus Christ. At least, at this late stage, the novel starts to question the veracity of these wild claims. Horselover Fat and Phil Dick merge back into one entity, and the (now reduced) group of friends retreats back to their homes. Not long after, it transpires that the infant Saviour has died, which seems to cast the entire framework of ideas into doubt. And then Horselover Fat makes a late re-appearance, leaving California to search for the next Saviour around the world. He sends postcards.

I like something that Phil Dick says to Horselover Fat so much that I will transcribe it in entirety here: “‘There is no ‘Zebra’, I said. ‘It’s yourself. Don’t you recognize your own self? It’s you and only you, projecting your unanswered wishes out, unfulfilled desires left over after Gloria did herself in. You couldn’t fill the vacuum with reality so you filled it with fantasy; it was psychological compensation for a fruitless, wasted, empty, pain-filled life and I don’t see why you don’t finally fucking give up.” (p 245) I guess here we are getting down to my beliefs, not PKD’s: I am more inclined to believe this ‘version of events.’ But I suspect that VALIS is as much a book the reader helps to create as any other. You can take or leave anything you find here.

Wow, I’m a little shocked that I’ve done what is essentially a hatchet job on this novel. I hope I haven’t offended anyone. It’s not that I think that PKD had lost his mind, nor had he lost his abilities as a writer. His last novel, The Transmigration of Timothy Archer, serves as a testament to that. The latter novel is beautifully written, sombre, searching and controlled. VALIS, on the other hand, is unruly. The character of Phil Dick himself admits at one stage that the material is starting to get the better of him. It’s this lack of control and lack of shape that troubles me. Well, there it is: I’ve said what I wanted to say about VALIS. I would appreciate your comments, but please be kind. Don’t flame me for daring to doubt the genius of Philip K. Dick.