The Transmigration of Timothy Archer

Author - Philip K. Dick ... [Goo?] [Posters]

This Paperback Book item from Vintage was reviewed on 7-Oct-2008.

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1) Paperback Book The Transmigration of Timothy Archer by Vintage. Considering how the strange the title is (calling to mind, at least for me, "The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch" for some reason) this is a surprisingly normal book. The last book that Dick published while he was alive, and nominally part of the final trilogy of his novels, it is probably the most normal thing I´ve ever read from him. Like the previous two novels it deals with issues pertaining to the nature and existence of God (or an entity that could be described as "God") but unlike those novels more or less dispenses with science-fictional or fantastical elements in an attempt to just be straightforward about it. There´s no mystical weird satellites or colonies on other planets or anything like that. It could take place in this world, and for the most part does (there´s one nod toward the surreal toward the end but you could interpret that in a few ways) which lends it a kind of weight that the more psychedelic stories can´t always manage when they start to spin off into the places where our minds can´t follow. The story is narrated by Angel Archer who was married to the son of Bishop Timothy Archer. The Bishop is engaged in a quest to puzzle out the nature of God, a quest that starts to become more important as the personal tragedies start to pile up and questions like "where do we go?" and "what happens when we do?" take on an urgent nature. Dick´s characterizations are at his best here, the narrator Angel is by turns numbed and stubborn, raw and sensitive, dancing around the topics even as she´s trying to face them head on. It´s a bleak story, with nobody really seeming to find what they want and characters sort of fading away as they wonder if there is a meaning to anything. In the center of it all is Bishop Archer, who is constantly questioning, even when the questions aren´t really that pleasant (or even that relevant sometimes), pushing out in quest after quest to try and understand what nobody else really can, because he has to, because it may be the most important and impossible thing in the world. Archer´s questionings may be futile or may eventually lead to a small insight into the grand fabric of things, but at least he makes the attempt, even if he goes about in the wrong way at some points. Being a late-period Dick novel it does suffer a bit from his attempts to blend different philosophies and religions together, leading to several scenes where people just quote obscure stuff at each other in lieu of making an actual point. It wasn´t too bad this time out (or maybe I´m just getting used to it) or it may be helped by the fact that for once he has a genuinely touching narrative surrounding all the arguments so even when the plot takes a break to make room for philosophizing, it feels like a natural extension of things. But Archer´s dogged persistence into finding the truth, if one really exists, is both hopeless and inspiring and perhaps mirrors Dick´s own thoughts. A good summation of where his head was at the end of his life, it´s not the one you turn to when you want your mind bent but it does bother to ask some questions that even today we don´t have real good answers for.¤

2) Paperback Book The Transmigration of Timothy Archer by Vintage. I first stumbled into Phillip Dick´s fascinating visions more than thirty years ago, and the powerful attraction of his work has not faded. Dismissed by many during his short life as a science fiction writer (though "speculative" is a more accurate label), his novels have gradually gained a wider readership. We devotees place him with Vonnegut, Pynchon or Robertson Davies, writers who ride the whitewater of belief and the meaning of existence with black humor and a sense of the absurd. The Vintage Books´ reissuance of his titles a decade after his death provided assurance his fame would grow, and today it has all the trappings of a cult following. TIMOTHY ARCHER is loosely based on the life of Bishop James Pike and comprises the tale of a renegade Episcopalian Bishop whose scholarly investigation of newly discovered scrolls predating Christ by two centuries thrust him into a crisis of faith. A man dependent upon words, books and learning, formerly a lawyer, and skilled in the splitting of doctrinal hairs, he finds himself adrift and finally alone on the Dead Sea Desert. Characteristically, Dick´s telling of what might seem to involve dry scholarship is hugely funny and fun, taking wide swipes at fatuity, prescription drug abuse, gurus, booksellers, established religions, pop music, diagnosis of mental illness, think tanks, Red Baiting, restauranteurs, the news media and God. He also nudges the reader to question the nature of belief itself, why faith may be imperative, and with a sprinkling of disease and suicide keeps the levity down to a dull roar. Strong stuff, well told.¤

3) Paperback Book The Transmigration of Timothy Archer by Vintage. --So ´believably written´--outlandish/stimulating ideas anchored in literate articulate but fallible-foibled characters who jump off the page with roman-a-clef warmbloodedness, this was PKD´s 1st book to not bother me: the ´Sci-fi´ angle and cutely-named characters in previous attempted reads proved ´soft-off´ers, but this! -One of the best novels I´ve ever read...prescient, compassionate, unpredictable, rich! --The poor genius! who like Kerouac must be guffawing major-league en el otro lado...¤

4) Paperback Book The Transmigration of Timothy Archer by Vintage. I got interested in this Author after seeing the film Through A Scanner Darkly. This isn´t so much science fiction as it is a feast of ideas. I like that it´s in first person and that the main character is a woman. I found the writing very masterful. Also, being a sort of biblical history buff, found the subject matter very intriguing. I´m definitely going to check out his other titles.¤

5) Paperback Book The Transmigration of Timothy Archer by Vintage. Angel Archer is in distress. The three people she has loved the most in the world are all dead: her husband Jeff, her father-in-law Timothy, her best friend Kirsten. At a lecture given by Edgar Barefoot (a character based on that of Alan Watts) she reflects:"It costs a hundred dollars to find out why we are on this earth. You also get a sandwich, but I wasn´t hungry that day. John Lennon had just been killed and I think I know why we are on this earth; it´s to find out that what you love the most will be taken away from you.." Barefoot later tells her that the point is to eat the sandwich, the rest doesn´t really matter. Philip K Dick´s book is the story of how Angel comes to the point where she can eat that sandwich.

Angel is disillusioned by many things. By her education ("I graduated from Cal. I lived in Berkeley. I read The Remembrance of Things Past and I remember nothing.") By concepts ("Like the medieval realists, Tim believed that words were actual things. If you could put it into words, it was de facto true. This is what cost him his life.")

Timothy is the opposite. He knows things. He knows the Holy Ghost is the Hebrew ruah, the female spirit or breath of Yahweh. He knows ´If I have all the eloquence of men or angels but speak without love I am just a gong sounding or a cymbal clashing´. He knows he can hold heretical beliefs and take a mistress and get away with both. The charismatic bishop gives life to all the people around him. But as the newly discovered Zadokite documents are published and translated, the cornerstone to his assurance, his faith, is lost. He believes that if the sayings of Jesus are merely quotations from the sayings of another teacher who lived 200 years earlier, then Jesus cannot be the son of god, the gospels cannot be inspired literature and the Christan church cannot be the one true faith. His faith is built on concepts: once one falls, the rest fall too, like a house of cards. Desperately, Timothy seeks another faith to fill the gap. For a while he becomes a spiritualist, believing he has been contacted by his dead son Jeff. Then he believes that if he can find the anokhi, the process whereby the early Christians partook of the Eucharist and became one with Christ, he will find answers which will resolve his doubts. The Zadokite Documents imply that anokhi was a real substance, which believers consumed, a kind of magic mushroom. If Timothy can find and take that mushroom he will be saved. He flies to Israel, drives ill-equipped into the desert, and dies.

Angel has always taken drugs. Now, in her grief, she has come to earth. To help her she has Bill, who can´t follow concepts but who can give her affection. And Barefoot, who knows that death and life are two parts of one whole, and that focusing on being in each moment granted us is the closest we can reach to purity in this life. Pondering on the life and death of Timothy, Angel begins to find meaning in each, comes to understand that it was necessary for him to die and her to suffer so she can find some form of resolution, and with it, some form of wisdom.

The Transmigration of Timothy Archer (published 1982) was Philip K Dick´s last work, and one of his best written and well-organised (Dick´s 12 ´mainstream´ novels are much more carefully written than his SF stories). Dick´s book comes with a bibliography and references to Aeschylus, Plato, Dante, Donne and Yeats among others.

Philip K Dick is best known for his novels The Man in the High Castle (published in 1962, awarded the SF Hugo award 1963) and Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep (published 1968, the basis for the 1982 film Blade Runner). It is generally accepted that Dick is a great science fiction writer. Stanislaw Lem says in his essays Microworlds (1984) that there are only three science fiction writers: H G Wells, Dick and the Strugatsky brothers. The rest are adventure story writers. It is possible to turn this assertion on its head and say that these three writers are not science fiction writers at all. This fussing about labels is not as trivialising as it sounds. How we classify a writer, for instance, controls what preconceptions we bring to their work, and whom we compare them to, what context we see them in. Dick´s work does not fit easily into the science fiction mould, nor into that of the ´novel´: romantic, experimental or post-structuralist. He belongs to a tradition that includes Aristophanes, Lucian of Samosata, Grimmelshausen, Swift, Gogol, Kafka, Orwell, Hasek, Samuel Becket, Nabokov, Simenon, Borges. These are all ´respectable´ authors, but are they novelists? Or science fiction writers? Dick will be appreciated best, and given his true stature, if seen as part of this stream of fiction.

All these writers, including Dick, express unease, self-doubt, even paranoia as a response to the society in which they live. They satirise, express cynicism, look for some more ´eternal´ structure where ideals and values are more stable.

It is these concerns that unify Dick´s work. "Second Variety" (1953) shows automated mechanisms taking over the conduct of a war for their own, non-human, purposes; in Mary and the Giant (1955, 1987) the titular character enters the alien world of adulthood and becomes an alien herself in order to survive; in Eye in the Sky (1957) a number of characters impose their own radically different ´reality´ on others (what is real?); in Confessions of a Crap Artist (1959, 1975) characters´ fantasies become realities to others; in The Man in the High Castle (1962) an alternative reality in which the Axis powers won WWII gives birth to a banned work of fiction in which the Allies were victorious - which is real?: more germane, conquest and control are shown as unreal and destructive values; in The Simulacra (1964) the President of the United States is one: is this fantasy or reality?; in The Penultimate Truth (1964) peace is declared, but not for the majority of the world´s population, who are spurred on to greater efforts by a televised simulation of war; in "We can remember it for you wholesale" (1966) memories are implanted, we cease to be what we remember; in Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep (1968) machines become more human than humans, and have the same existential problems (what is human?); in A Scanner Darkly (1977) reality is distorted by a drug, and the drug is called death, which we all have to take; in Valis (1981) god searches for man just as man searches for god and one of these is a science fiction writer called Philip K Dick: the question asked is, is this real or is it science fiction?; in The Divine Invasion (1981) god forgets who he is and is healed by his feminine part so he can heal the world.

The progression from distrust of political manipulation, fear of alienation caused by mechanical and electronic substitutes for the senses, paranoia and ´reality fluctuations´ caused by drugs taken to deal with these fears, doubts caused by unrestrained metaphysical speculation ending in a powerful need for a healing resolution fuel the works Dick wrote between 1956 and 1982.

More important than what form of fiction Dick wrote is the realisation that he was a gnostic, one who sought for (and found) hidden knowledge. But he was a very strange kind of gnostic, one who expressed his wisdom in pulp fiction.¤

6) Paperback Book The Transmigration of Timothy Archer by Vintage. The Transmigration of Timothy Archer, the final novel in the trilogy that also includes Valis and The Divine Invasion, is an anguished, learned, and very moving investigation of the paradoxes of belief. It is the story of Timothy Archer, an urbane Episcopal bishop haunted by the suicides of his son and mistress--and driven by them into a bizarre quest for the identity of Christ.¤

Page Updated: Robert N. Goolsby, 4-Nov-2008, 06797344499780679734444, 490-570-650-460-620-6X0-8

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