The VALIS trilogy - Philip K. Dick

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.