The Transmigration of Timothy Archer represents the fifth Philip K Dick book I’ve read in a row. I have to say, that this one was the most work. It was the last he’d write before his death, and arriving at the end of his career (and life) as a writer before I have experienced much of the youth and dynamism of earlier work, I wonder whether I will grow to appreciate this book further.
At this very moment, I am not sure I can. Much like A Canticle for Liebowitz, which I read earlier this year, I personally (and it is entirely my own problem) struggle with the links to religious iconography and symbolism. This book is a character drama that has theological debate at its core.
Only Dick handles it differently - he looks at it not as something of faith, but something of myth and history. In this book, he and his characters, especially the titular Timothy Archer, look at this as all being real. He’s a bishop, but unlike the religious lot depicted in The Divine Invasion (which, for all its flaws, felt like an easier book to follow) - is set on Earth and an Earth that feels quite familiar. Or maybe I wasn't paying enough attention to the book.
It isn't science fiction.
There’s no flying cars. No laser beams of pink light, and only the smallest suggestion of it being part of a being that controls the spectator by means of various frequencies.- it reads like a book - and it is written from the perspective of Angel Archer, the bereaved daughter in law of the title character. Being written in the first person (a first from the female point of view) for Dick.
Angel is Timothy Archer’s daughter in law, and is an enjoyable narrator - with her skepticism cutting off Timothy Archer's rambling, drug addled brain with biting wit and intelligent, genuinely funny bits of dialogue.
There are somethings that cannot be escaped in Dick's work, particularly that in the VALIS series - and that is, again, a woman with cancer, the inevitability of death, and a hint of the paranormal. It is a story where people develop over time, go see mediums, debate passionately about belief systems, and Dick shows off the fact that while he was a prolific writer, he too, was a prolific reader, with our characters having immense, encyclopedic knowledge of theology and the history of Christianity.
This book is not what I expected. As a result, I kept waiting for the penny to drop, for some trans-dimensional horror to emerge and swallow up the interest from the plot - but it never came. Instead, what I read was a tale about an awkward live triangle, a man who had has faith in god challenged, and a little bit about how people deal with death.
It is in this book, however, where we catch a glimpse of what made so much of Philip K Dick's science fiction library so good - he always makes it about the characters, even if he never really made stories that were entirely character driven. They were event driven. The people in this book grow, and change, and morph, have hope, have despair, and confront their own mortality.
It is bittersweet, and it marks the time that sees me take a break from Philip K Dick. I've ordered Ursula K LeGuin books, and I am looking forward to a change of pace, but my PKD collection will await after a short holiday.