“A question we had to learn to deal with during the dope decade was, How do you break the news to someone that his brains are fried?” So says the first-person narrator in VALIS, Philip K. Dick’s autobiographical novel of spiritual odyssey, a novel where the narrator begins by laying out the major issues he must deal with as he attempts to gain a measure of sanity along with a sense of purpose and the meaning of life: drugs, a desire to help others, the pull of insanity, suicide and death, time and place (Northern California in the 60s), split-identity (the narrator alternately identifies and disidentifies with one Horselover Fat), God and occlusion (he receives otherworldly messages via a beam of pink light prompting him to explore ancient Gnosticism) – all in all a 60s California-style version of the novels of Hermann Hesse, novels like Siddhartha, Damion and Steppenwolf. What a wild ride. For example, here is a list of what I see as the top ten conundrums we are asked to ponder:One - TheophanyThe narrator explains how a theophany is self-disclosure by the divine, in other words, a theophany isn’t something we do; rather, a theophany is something the divine – the God or gods, the higher powers – does to us. The intense pink beam of light experienced by the narrator’s persona Horselover Fat was just such a theophany. But, then, the question invariably arises: how are we to know if we received a true theophany or are suffering from an illusion?Two - When your theophany goes against the grain of the conventionalOne of the most fascinating and hilarious parts of the novel is the narrator’s therapy session with Maurice, a Hasidic Jew. In his session, Horselover Fat contrasts the ‘true’ God, the God of the Gnostics, the God of his pink ray of light, with the ‘flawed’ God of Genesis. Maurice’s reaction to such an esoteric explanation of the universe makes for lively reading, a highpoint of insight into the rocky spiritual challenges faced by our narrator.Three - When your discover others share your theophanyTurns out, there are a number of other people who have had a similar theophany from the true Gnostic God. Horselover Fat’s encounter with these men and women challenges his very idea of sanity since he observes just how far zealots will go in their zealotry.Four – How to deal with your theophany once it starts to wear offFrom the novel: “They ought to make it a binding clause that if you find God you get to keep him. For Fat, finding God (if indeed he did find God) became, ultimately, a bummer, a constantly diminishing supply of joy, sinking lower and lower like the contents of a bag of uppers.” Darn, if only God were as readily available as drugs.Five – When you encounter the many sides of youAs Harry Haller of Hesse’s Steppenwolf experiences the many facets of his personal identity in the Magic Theater, so, in the course this novel, PKD (yes, again, a very autobiographical work) discovers the many sides of PKD. How many versions are there? Feel free to round to the nearest dozen.Six – The concept of timeIs someone or something playing a board game with time and we humans as mere players? Can time be abolished and transcended? If so, how do we go about it?Seven – Zebra, that is, pure living intelligence, so called by Horselover FatCan an out-of-cosmos intelligence contact humans? This question is related to the possibility of a true theophany.Eight - The presence of evil in the universeIs there an answer to Kevin’s pressing question: What about my dead cat? In other words, why do bad things happen to good cats or why is there evil in the world?Nine – The ExegesisAn exegesis is a critical explanation or interpretation of scripture or a sacred text. VALIS includes many entries from PKD’s thousand page exegesis published as a separate book. The question looms: would PKD have expanded his exegesis to several more thousands of pages had he lived to age 90? My own guess is definitely ‘yes’, since once you start to unravel the mysteries of the universe according to your own schemata, three questions pop up for every answer you offer. Ah, the mysteries of the universe!Ten – What is VALIS?Sure, it stands for Vast Active Living Intelligence System, but where does it fit into the novel? I wouldn’t want to spoil this question by providing an answer. You will have to read it for yourself. Once again, novel reading as a wild magic carpet ride. I recommend you hop on.
CURRENTLY RE-READING VALIS, but this was my initial (vicious, or empathy-free) review."It is about madness, pain, deception, death, obsessive delusory states of mind, cruelty, solitude, imprisonment, and it is a joy to read." quotes The Washington Post on the cover of VALIS. One can only wonder which of Philip K. Dick's books this review blurb was borrowed from. Horselover Fat (a kinky replicant of Philip K. Dick's name) is having woman trouble. He is having money trouble. He is having severe mental health trouble; not a surprise with all the drugs he's swallowing. Sounds like the life of a self-disrespecting writer on planet Earth. But there's a difference. Fat has 'seen the light'. Fat has found God. Or rather God has found Horselover Fat - in the form of a blinding bright pink laser beam of cosmic information. Sounds like a good premise for a good book, right?VALIS hails from the critically-acclaimed golden era of Philip K Dick's 30-year writing output, alongside his books The Three Stigmata Of Palmer Eldritch and A Scanner Darkly. I'd been trying to get hold of a copy of VALIS for a few years already. I finally got a copy and the book is shit. Well, the first 48 pages are truly stagnant, let's say. A brave editor would have insisted VALIS started on the second paragraph of page 48, "Fat had never been locked up before." as that's where the actual story (if you can call it that) seems to begin. It's the same thing with the way Dick confesses early on that Horselover Fat is as an externalised aspect of himself. It breaks the agreement with the reader that he is here to read something truly mind-blowing. Already you've crushed all confidence that Dick can deliver. The book has already failed. Disbelief has been cruelly suspended. Dick is admitting that this isn't an entertainment as are most of his other books. Dick is confessing that he's burnt out. He has nothing more to say. He is over as a human being and as a writer. Spent. A cranky dry husk.But read on and you'll be further disappointed that the 'story' actually goes nowhere. There's nothing to say other than Philip K. Dick went a bit mad eventually and thought writing it all down would be a good idea for fans of his fiction. Throughout this turgid purgatory of a book, detailed reference is made to Horselover Fat's scientific/ religious 'Exegesis' - this is actually a notebook Philip K. Dick had been adding to for the last ten years as well as writing about 20 books. From the examples delivered here, one can only estimate how utterly tedious that 8,000 page tome is gonna be.Both are a criminal case of the writer getting in the way of his writing - it's about too much thought going into what is usually (or so it seems for Dick) a truly spontaneous, creative process. Let's just say Dick is lucky VALIS is not this reviewer's first experience of his writing style or many great books would have been needlessly neglected. Looking at the (familiar) cover art again, I remember now that I'd tried to read this unforgivably boring book about 15 years ago and didn't get very far into it back then. I got further this time but the work hasn't mellowed with age, it's just got more painful. As a side project I'd recently thumbed through Emmanuel Carrere's I Am Alive And You Are Dead : A Journey Into The Mind Of Philip K. Dick, and was far more entertained by that external rendering of Dick's fateful life than VALIS' internal outpouring from the horse's mouth (so to speak). But there are (with classic PKD irony) a couple of laughs here and there along the way in this dire tale of a human life gone wrong hence this charitable score.
What do You think about VALIS (2004)?
You can see that Horselover Fat is based on PKD himself within the first few lines which gave me a lot of hope for this book as he did some of his best writing when he was out of his head. I can pretty much say I was let down. I don't mind a difficult read but this was painful at times and there were parts of PKD's psyche I really didn't want to see. I'm also not always enamoured of author's spiritual journeys disguised as something else even if the journey is into madness. Despite this he can still write and write well. He draws his characters well with his prose and at times is still able to build the tension he could easily master in his older works. It just didn't help save this in my opinion.I'll read the other three in the trilogy eventually as I've wanted to read all his works good or bad but I think that will be in a distant future.
—Zorena
I'm a PKD fan but didn't like this one at all. Yes, it has an interesting structure and the fractured POV of the protagonist/narrator is a pretty nifty device. Yes, it is semi-autobiographical and was written as a way for him to deal with what was perceived as an encounter with some higher form of life but was most likely the manifestation of a psychological breakdown. Unfortunately, much of the book is an utterly incoherent mish-mash of Dick's various philosophical ponderings from towards the end his life. These are hung as required upon the barest of actual plot and character progression. Dick was at his best in works where he used genre fiction as the mechanism to explore his philosophy and paranoia, such as The Man in the High Castle, Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep and A Scanner Darkly. He simply did not have the skill as a writer for the more direct approach used here. It is worth a look for PKD completionists and those interested more specifically in the period leading up to his death, otherwise I would recommend readers look elsewhere in his body of work.
—Ben Newton
If someone were to make the “You seem to like Philip K. Dick, and I want to maybe give him a shot, but I don't know where to start because he's written dozens of novels” statement my instantaneous response would be, “NOT Valis!” Then I would add I've only read five or six of PKD's novels and I'm giddy with the prospect of reading further into his catalog. But no, no, don't start with Valis, or else you may never pick up another PKD book and you'd miss out on his masterpieces.PKD wrote Valis late in life. From what I can tell, it's one of his most autobiographical and, in turn, over-the-top works. PKD's life was, ahem, rather interesting, and this novel, unfortunately, will read weird if you don't know the author's backstory. It'll read weird anyway. What appear (and could very well be) the near-incoherent ramblings of an intelligent, well-read writer recovering from decades of drug-use and mental illness comprise significant chunks of the text. The narrator and his, uh, alternative personality, along with a couple friends, bounce around conspiracy-esque theories of reality and spirituality and eventually act on them when they see an art film they think includes clues to how select others perceive reality in similar ways. The novel's strength and traction emerge in the narrator's meditation on pain, sadness, and psychological health. These passages are near-brilliant. The former crazyass passages are bold-printed, at least in the edition I procured from the library, and when I saw one coming I readied my skimming skills. Valis shines in bursts, but I can understand avoiding the book because you have to wade through so much mud to find the gems. Fans only. Fans with good skimming abilities or a lot of patience.
—RandomAnthony
