A deep and crazy book that makes the reader wonder about religion and about the nature of reality. Along the way you will wonder about the author's sanity and maybe even your own.
I read Philip K. Dick's book Flow My Tears, The Policeman Said many years ago and was tripped out by it: you get to the end and you realize that the entire reality of the book was a construct, a type of Matrix that was never real in the first place. The movies Total Recall (based on his short story We Can Remember It For You Wholesale) and Blade Runner (based on his novel Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?) also toy with what experienced reality means: if you implant perfectly believable memories into someone, is that "reality" to them? How would they know otherwise?
Valis goes even deeper, reaching into domains of psychological sanity, philosophy, religion and creation, and the reader is often wondering "Is this deep? Or is it just crazy?" I think this is part of the pleasure of reading PKD.
Dick was likely on the spectrum of insanity at different points of his life, and in Valis he puts himself in the book as two split personalities of the same person: one character named "Phil" and the other character named "Horselover Fat." They are the same person but not quite: Horselover Fat is an alter ego that "split off" during certain periods of extreme psychological stress. The two characters talk to each other, observe each other, even bitch and complain to each other. I thought of it as an interesting meta-commentary on the nature of sanity: if you can write sanely about your own insanity--does that make you sane or insane?
PKD isn't a great writer, but no one reads him for his writing. You read him to be challenged with all the fascinating ways he plays with psychological reality.
Dick aficionados[*] also read him for the warped eclecticisms of his mind: Valis teaches a reader, quite comprehensively by the way, about Gnosticism (a generous gift in and of itself). You'll read about the fragments of Xenophones, about Giordano Bruno and Meister Echkart. You'll read about novel ways to think about religion and why it has more explanatory value than it may appear to moderns besotted with the modern era's "scientific progress."
And yet (and this is the intrinsic pessimism of PKD's works that some readers love and some readers hate) you realize that there's not a lot you can do about the system. "To fight the Empire is to be infected by its derangement. This is a paradox; whoever defeats a segment of the Empire becomes the Empire; it proliferates like a virus, imposing its form on its enemies. Thereby it becomes its enemies." In a way this quote encapsulates the paradox of modern politics, of modern government systems, of modernity in general: it runs us, we don't run it. Quite an interesting quote.
Finally, holy cow on the vocab in this book, it sent me sprinting to the dictionary more than any book I've read in years:
Hylozoism: the idea that all matter is alive
Hypostasis: the underlying reality or the underlying essence of something
Entelechy: the realization of potential; that which takes something's potential and makes it actual
Abreaction: the expression and consequent release of a previously repressed emotion, achieved through reliving the experience that caused it
Irruption: to burst in, contrasted from "eruption" which is to burst out
Kerygma: a proclamation, usually religious
Anamnesis: the loss of forgetfulness (in the Jungian sense of recalling formerly lost knowledge of your forebears or of your species, etc.)
Reading list:
Theodor Reik: Listening with the Third Ear
Mircea Eliade: A History of Religious Ideas [3 volumes]
Tobias Churton: The Gnostics
Giovanni Filoramo: A History of Gnosticism
Thomas Disch (science fiction author)
The works of Meister Eckhart (German Christian mystic)
[*] Yes, yes, I wrote that on purpose.