The Simulacra - Philip K. Dick

Whenever I wanted a new Philip K. Dick title, I would typically get a cheap second-hand copy from the late, great Mike Don and his Dreamberry Wine listing, who would mail it on trust of receiving a cheque by return, for the price of the book plus the value of the stamps.
 
On this occasion, I happened upon one that I hadn’t read at a book stall at Wat Buddhapadipa, a full-blown Thai Buddhist temple in the leafy suburbia of Wimbledon, an incongruity that I am sure Dick (and Mike) would have admired.
 
And yet, on rereading it thirty years later, I find it’s just not very good. The plot’s uninspiring (although the prospect of Hermann Goering’s reappearance got my pulse racing for a while); the characters, such as the paranoid psychokinetic pianist, Kongrosion, are difficult to like, the disparate groups and players and ideas don’t hang together and the novel’s brought to a hurried, unsatisfying end.
 
But what can I say? It’s still Phil Dick. I enjoyed it well enough along with all the others way back when and it constitutes another brick in The Wonderful World That Dick Made. It features the adorable empathic papoola and the brilliant idea of adverts that torment and fight a way into your home where you have to splat them like the pests that they are.
 
I remember that after the meditation session at the Wat Buddhapadipa, everyone except me filed out to go and have tea and talk about it. I was left behind, unable to move my stiffly locked legs after sitting in lotus position. Eventually, I toppled myself onto one side to slowly, painfully extend my limbs and get to my feet. Then wandered home clutching my Dick.