The two narrative voices are of Phil Dick himself as a true-to-life character, and of his fictional friend, Nicholas Brady, who is in fact Dick’s alter ego.
We have a US president, supported by Russia, who is dictatorial, ruthless and a threat to his own people and democracy. Freemont embodies authoritarian hostility to freethinking, empathy and charity. “The Soviets backed him, the right-wingers backed him…” President Fremont was modelled on Nixon. I’m not sure that even Philip K. Dick would have dredged up the monstrosity that is Trump from the pit of his imagining. Brady’s experience of receiving extraterrestrial transmissions via condensed information-rich beams of pink, phosphene light is no less than Dick’s in real life: which he knows is a lot to take at face value! And so, by the device of making himself a character in the book, he seeks to take us along with him from scepticism to the realization of belief. The shift in his viewpoint as the story progresses makes it a delightful ploy. “… although I was a professional science fiction writer, I could not really give credence to the idea that an extraterrestrial intelligence from another star system was communicating with him; I never took such notions seriously… Nicholas, I decided, had begun to part company with reality… This was a classic example of how the human mind, lacking real solutions, managed its miseries.” Dick’s, then, is the voice of reason. His fiction is just that, he makes clear. As Brady says, “Your books are so—well, they’re nuts.” Until the denouement, the easy mood and self-deprecatory vein lend the narrative a certain charisma, and that it lacks the madcap scheming and complexity found in other works by Philip K. Dick helps to make Radio Free Albemuth a neatly balanced read. A lightheartedness comes across in such comments as “the US intelligence community, as they like to call themselves.” When the iron hand of the evil empire does strike, its savagery is shockingly efficient and effortless, almost casual. The ease with which the light of civilization can go out is the warning of this novel. Phil’s (the character’s) reasonable take on things, his sensible rationale and healthy scepticism, which the reader naturally goes along with, will be won over by evidence and events and, ultimately, by incontrovertible violence. Along the way, Dick shares deeply personal insights and the story acquires depth in his treatment of VALIS and divinity, perception and illusion, the nature of time, the meaning of the Orphic mysteries—and acquires urgency, since their lives are at stake. Set against Fremont’s tyranny is a force that anyone with an insular view of science fiction may find surprising, because it is love. That is what Brady experienced VALIS to be: the Vast Active Living Intelligence System that for him (and Dick) was synonymous with God. A vital theme in the novel is awakening, or anamnesis. Waking up to our true nature as well as to the baleful threat of the adversary, which all too easily wins out. Its oppressive power is great and, indeed, “the darkness closed over us completely.” It is happening again and always. [The image is a 1985 first edition]
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In 1974, after years of writing Science Fiction novels and stories that featured counterfeit and parallel worlds or histories, Philip K. Dick experienced a series of transformative visions that led him to believe that the familiar universe may be one of multiple, alternate versions that overlie each other, and that the one where he was truly himself was still first century Rome, at an imminent second coming of Christ.
From this epiphany onwards, his novels would be a working out in fictional form of how such a truth could possibly be and what it might mean. While he was self-aware enough to acknowledge that his visions and impressions could have been hallucinations, following not infrequent drug-taking or anaesthesia, having had an impacted wisdom tooth removed, Dick subjectively felt them to be compellingly real: not delusions mistakenly perceived as mystic happenings, but an authentic “divine invasion.” His treatment of the experiences (which might well be classed among William James’s Varieties of Religious Experience), expanded into his Valis trilogy. The first two books (Valis & The Divine Invasion) maintain an element of SF insofar as a satellite beaming down information is involved, but they are first and foremost profoundly philosophical novels. Dick speculates on a hidden reality that he believes he accessed, the forces of darkness maintaining the fiction of this version of reality, his sense of having been contacted, and a radical reinterpretation of Christ’s teachings. The third novel (The Transmigration of Timothy Archer) is remarkable in laying out all manner of interconnected theological, ontological and scientific ideas in such a way that they move along the plot without ever seeming forced. The story is narrated by Bishop Archer’s daughter-in-law, Angel, who Dick declared was “smarter than me.” The same core elements are all there in an earlier book, Radio Free Albemuth, which Dick didn’t publish himself, possibly because he considered it the shorthand version of a complex truth that only three novels could expound (his notebooks on the subject ran to thousands of pages). However, its very lack of complexity and lighter touch on exegesis make it such a well-balanced read that I prefer it to the trilogy. Radio Free Albemuth will be my next review. I wonder if nostalgia may be the memory of something that never happened, a glimpsed world that never was. Or the lost and now inaccessible memories of fleeting moments? A desire and affinity for a world that never really was, but that you’d give your eye teeth to have known, or at least to have existed.
Laurie Lee ‘s semi-autobiography of growing up in the company of a sweet mother and fussing sisters in a bucolic, post-WWI England is all evoked with a poetry that comes naturally to him. To write like this, it had to have been real in its essence, flowering years later in the rich soil laid down by formative years of loving upbringing in a dependable, hopeful world. It’s not all sweetness and light and, like all good things, Lee’s English idyll comes to an end with the passing of a particular generation and the arrival of motor vehicles––but there’s never any real trauma or disturbing ugliness, and the predominating atmosphere that we are invited to revel in is a childhood in timelessness countryside and the reassurance of family and home. I’m sure that you will have your favourite book of this kind. For me, more than Gerald Durrell’s light-hearted “My Family and Other Animals,” this one tugs at the heartstrings. You can, I found, enjoy and share someone else’s nostalgia as if it were your own. I don’t know about you, but formal education instructed me to consider the proper subject of poetry to be elevated ideas and lofty sentiments, self-reflecting melancholy, metaphysical exposition, even, often constructed with abstruse cleverness. But what is grander than life’s earthiness? That you can grab in handfuls, throw into the air and watch fall?
Give me poetry that leaves the intellect for dust and sings another song: Dylan Thomas’s kind of truth, for example, down-to-earth and unaffected, able to conjure private worlds out of the communal dreaming dark in bold metaphor and be life’s very music. Under Milk Wood gives you this in spades. Sonorous, lyrical poetry of the everyday, clothed in tragic-comic rags, a celebration of small-town folk, their dreamworlds, hopes, fears, desires, nostalgia and sad humour. Thomas’s drama for voices is a single poetic whole making, like Baudelaire, gold out of the mud. It is a play of passions, a paean of love for a town and its people that does and does not, of course, exist. Richard Burton’s rendition is one of Wales’s glories. Less dramatic yet even more evocative to my ear are the opening lines in Michael Sheen’s penetratingly mellow delivery in the BBC Wales production, which is enacted by a wondrous array of actors. You can hear and see the whole piece on youtube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=osOLGHlvzW8 Better than a breath of fresh air in the anodyne stuffiness of Literature is a lungful of lusty pungence. The author is one big, erect I, out to enjoy life and immensely so. More abundant life, in all its carnal honesty. He shows up hypocrisy in human dealings without compunction. Of course: why should he have compunction?
I picked this book up in Boston before a road trip from coast to coast, dipping one hand in Boston harbour and the other in the Pacific on arrival in San Francisco. The journey and the book would have wrought some change in me, you might think, but I was too goddamn obdurate to let it at the time. That doesn’t mean I didn’t get a vicarious kick from the sexual abandon that Miller delights in. I was a young man, after all. But I’d have to wait for Spain to find the kind of affirmative sexuality that underpins healthy life. That I had largely missed out on and didn’t want to anymore. Miller’s uninterest in work in corporate America made me laugh because it matched my own in England. His outright indifference to making money struck me as a basis for a cheerful, freewheeling way of life. “Why should I give a fuck about what anything costs? I’m here to live, not to calculate.” It was this carefreeness that I envied and had always aimed for myself. “It was a beautiful Sunday and as usual I had about a quarter in my pocket.” This way of life wasn’t a freedom, or even authentic, and certainly not in my best interests, leaving me time and again to start again from scratch, but hey-ho. In 1980s London, you could still get away with it, if you didn’t mind living squalidly a while. It’s not a creed to live by: but I will always admire Miller for that vigorous, humorous style of his and utter candour. This slim volume is distilled Vonnegut––and there is no one else quite like him. I have always thought of Kurt as a people’s champion: for having the wit to clear away the damage of lies, for deep, dark humour, for kindness.
He points out how humanity is racing to its own extinction and shrugs, knowing we are too foolish to halt our self-destruction. The best hope, he seems to say, is that we have some fun along the way, in which case we might just forget what we were doing and leave off the madness. And if not, well, “so it goes.” Once school had put me off Shakespeare, it was years before I read King Lear and realized what all the fuss was about.
I became properly reconciled with Will (it wasn’t his fault, after all) on going to see A Midsummer Night’s Dream in a production that gave a hint of how it might have been staged by the man himself. In the early nineties, a troupe of travelling players pitched a high marquee in Madrid and acted it out there, with plenty of gusto and their kids running up and down the aisles. I’ve still got their magical poster. Thirty years on, I see that the Footsbarn Theatre is still up and running and touring: good on them! One of Dick’s finest is a flawed favourite of mine.
Once, around the age of thirty, I discovered Philip K. Dick, I was blissfully fixated, reading one title after another, knowing that any book with his name to it would delight me, a sensation I hadn’t known since I was a kid and read The Famous Five or the Three Investigators, and wouldn’t again until I came across Patrick O’Brian’s Aubrey & Maturin multi-book epic. Unlike these, Dick’s books weren’t a series. Instead, they were conjoined by one man’s voice and vision and common to them all was a pace and an intrigue carrying the story along, and an empathy for his protagonists which meant that that their fate was taken seriously no matter how outlandish their predicament. There was also a wave of humour that passed through the narratives like the sweep of a radar and caused them to sparkle and smile in places. This one was different. Dick’s characteristic weirdness and its accompanying comic element are absent, for he is considering an alternative fate of our world that would have been no laughing matter. After a cursory look at the blurb, I remember opening The Man in the High Castle hungrily at page one and starting to read. Here, as usual, we were in Dick’s 1950s/60s California––only it was unusual. There was something odd about the writing that I couldn’t put my finger on: and then it clicked. His American store owner was speaking and thinking with Japanese speech patterns and inflection. In this version of history, the Allies lost World War II, after which the western half of the USA was allotted to the Japanese and the eastern to Germany. The colonizers’ cultural mores have become established in the Pacific Sates of America and Mr Childan bows spontaneously to his high-ranking Japanese customers. The plot thickens nicely until the denouement, which I found inexplicably weak and disappointing. Later, I think I discovered why. Dick’s imagined history manages to be both entertaining and chillingly thought-provoking. Africa is referred to as a “Nazi experiment” which went too far even for them and does not bear speaking about in detail. A Rosenberg pamphlet regrets, “Unfortunately, however ––”: and leaves it there. “That huge empty ruin” is the stark image that we are given. History, of course, could well have gone the other way. In which case, my Royal Navy father wouldn’t have survived and I wouldn’t be here writing this. Had the Germans wiped out the British Expeditionary Force at Dunkirk and Britain sued for peace (as it very nearly did: Lord Halifax, the Foreign Secretary, was all for it), Hitler’s war machine may have grown invincible. The eponymous Man in the High Castle, Hawthorne Abendsen, has written an alternative alternative history, The Grasshopper Lies Heavy, in which the Axis powers lost. That it didn’t quite turn out the same way as our own history goes to the heart of what Dick is exploring in the novel: the idea of a multiverse in which parallel realities coexist, or of a fictional reality that we inhabit unknowingly. What makes Abendsen’s proposition fascinating is that it turns out to be true. What makes it fall so terribly flat is the way that the ending is handled. Hawthorne’s character (apathetic, “not sure of anything”) is insufferably feeble and so is the novel’s culmination. Dick’s boldness and deftness of touch desert him at the worst possible moment. The Chinese I Ching plays a mystical, oracular role in the narrative. Dick justifies its presence in Japanese culture by smuggling in an animist Shinto idea: “Spirit animates it”, but it’s ultimately out of place. It seems that Dick, like the fictional Abendsen, wrote his novel casting the I Ching to determine the outcome of events and this whim is, I suspect, is what let him down. If he had trusted his own nous rather than the oracle, I am sure that the ending would have been immeasurably stronger. As it is, faced with the reveal and its huge implication, Abendsen is blasé, heedless of danger, and the novel simply peters out. A physicist from an austere, industrious, anarchist society on a moon descends to the planet that the satellite orbits, where he is ushered into a world of private property, capitalist divisiveness, and sybaritic amorality. Finding himself cut off from the seriousness of purpose and boundaries that defined his world, Shevek seeks to refocus on his mission and his true being.
The questions and reflections on reality and ways of living that occupy Shevek are rooted in the very scientific discoveries that he is making about time and simultaneity. A born freethinker, he is unafraid to critique whatever he encounters. The contrasting social philosophies of Anarres and Urras, he notes, are reflected in the differing structures of language of the two worlds, which not only reinforce social prejudices but create or dispel error in perception. Me and mine contrast with the interactive collective and the all. Written in the spirit of the Tao te Ching––which she also translated– Ursula Le Guin’s masterful novel examines how true freedom can inform human experience. Her imperfect “ambiguous utopia” is the closest depiction of a workable anarchist society that I have ever read, although the story is anything but a political tract. At the heart of the story lie Shevek’s personal struggles and the difficulties interposed in his relationship with Takver, movingly and skillfully portrayed. It is ultimately fitting that Shevek meets representatives of the Hainish culture that Le Guin proposed in a number of her books. This interplanetary confederation is based upon a principle that is the only possible outcome for humanity if we are to survive in the long run: that of peaceful cooperation and the tolerance of differences. Like The Left Hand of Darkness, the depth, intelligence, compassion and hope of The Dispossessed spoke to my mind and my heart. It is one of the great books of my life. What Bradbury was standing up for here was the right to think differently. He was reacting to McCarthyism, but it could be almost any era.
Seventy years on––he published this short novel in 1953––books are still being burned, banned, censored and butchered, and they always will be. Unless anyone really believes that we will eradicate fear and intolerance, there will always be books that so challenge some people’s worldview that they cannot allow them to exist. The Inquisition may no longer burn freethinkers, but authors can find themselves hounded, oppressed, physically attacked and thrown into jail. So it goes! Anyhow, this little book represents a trumpet call for the freedom to imagine, without which humanity is a lost cause. The image of the self-exiled drifters who memorize books––“I am Plato’s Republic”––is unforgettable. |
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