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cybeleflame's review
informative
mysterious
reflective
sad
slow-paced
- Plot- or character-driven? Plot
- Strong character development? No
- Loveable characters? It's complicated
- Diverse cast of characters? No
- Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes
3.0
rpych2's review
4.0
3.5 rounding up to 4 stars. I didn’t love The Divine Invasion, so most of the reason I read The Transmigration of Timothy Archer was to finish off the VALIS trilogy. But I liked this one more than the last, because it had a lot of interesting themes to think about. Things like determinism, mental health, and death were prevalent in the story and made the reader really consider their thoughts on them. Angel Archer was a great narrator, which is a bit surprising given PKD’s track record with female characters. This was a good conclusion to an up and down trilogy from a great author.
gavgav's review
challenging
reflective
slow-paced
- Plot- or character-driven? A mix
- Strong character development? Yes
- Loveable characters? No
- Diverse cast of characters? No
- Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes
3.75
tittypete's review
2.0
A cutting edge Episcopal bishop has some wild ideas about god and stuff. Yep. Hold on to your dicks this is gonna be a fun one! I dunno. The novel is narrated by his daughter in-law who's husband has stiff pants for his dad's secretary. The bishop thinks maybe Jesus's teachings weren't original and maybe the resurrection story was the product of a magic mushroom cult. His son kills himself because he wants to bone the secretary so bad but it doesn't really work out. She kills herself because her cancer comes back from remissionlville. Then the bishop dies farting around in the desert looking for clues to god's mystery. But ... he lives on inside the mind of his secretary's mentally ill son! Zing!
Had some interesting ideas and philosophical musings. But yeah. Ol' PKD was getting weird before he bellied up.
Had some interesting ideas and philosophical musings. But yeah. Ol' PKD was getting weird before he bellied up.
jimbus's review
4.0
A criticism often levelled at Dick is that his female characters are badly written, and it’s hard to deny it. Particularly in his earlier work, the female characters, when they exist at all, are an amalgamation of every dreadful trope regarding women in popular fiction. They are poorly developed, flimsy. They are nagging wives, whores, and addicts. The lecturer who took the SF module I did at uni (we read Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?, which is a fairly tame offender) pointed to his succession of failed marriages. Those feelings of bitterness are almost certainly a contributing factor. Personally I’d argue that, in many ways, Philip K. Dick was a bad writer. I mean, God I love him, and I plan to read everything he ever set down on paper; no one has ever fed my head the way Dick does. But he wrote a lot, and did a lot of drugs. That even his bad novels are still pretty good is a testament to his ability. But when he was less experienced, under more pressure, and probably having to produce more work than he had good ideas for, certain elements of his work suffered, characterisation being chief among them. The women in his work get it worse because of the misogyny in the groundwater and the aforementioned personal factors. He got away with it because the core ideas in his fiction are always so damn interesting. You could just go read philosophy, but it wouldn't be nearly as fun. Who goes to Dick for characters, anyway?
But if you did want to come to Dick for the characters, you could do a lot worse than The Transmigration of Timothy Archer. Being the final novel he completed, you might expect it to exhibit his mature style, but it does more than this, becoming the kind of logical end point of both strands of his work. Dick’s theological and philosophical concerns are present, as always, and all the characters freely debate the nature of belief and the existence of God. But, they are much more than just mouthpieces for Dick’s ideas, something his earlier work can suffer from. Transmigration is the end point of Dick’s work on character and his maturing as a writer, from The Man in the High Castle (an earlier work, but he spent much longer on it than his other novels of the period, and you can really tell), to Do Androids Dream?, to A Scanner Darkly. Dick’s concerns were always very human, there just weren’t always humans to be concerned about, but you can see that in this thread of novels that Dick did work on developing his characters, on making them more than mouthpieces. You’ll also note that the aforementioned novels contain some of Dick’s most complex female characters. I’m not sure if they pass the Bechdel test, but it’s something, compared to say, Eye in the Sky.
Transmigration is a novel soaked in pathos. What could be more emotionally charged than the death of John Lennon, a musician you and your late husband were very fond of? Every station is playing Beatles songs on a loop, and it takes you right back to the ‘60s, right back to when you were in love with him. Such is the setup for this novel, and boy does it grab you, because not only are we immediately given an emotional concern, but it is all from the perspective of Angela Archer. A Dickian heroine. If nothing else this will immediately interest readers of his works because (to my knowledge) this is the only time he ever used one.
It’s that emotional resonance in going back to the ‘60s that still keeps this identifiable as a late Dick novel, and it gives the whole work a feeling of lament. Death is inescapable, this inevitability even figured in to the structure, in which we first meet a woman who has experienced much loss, and then slowly come to know just what it is that she lost. She is also flawed and unreliable, and despite lacking the schizophrenic quality, has a lot in common with the narrator of A Scanner Darkly (and in fact the book does as a whole). It is not played out as a main theme, but pretty much everyone is fucked up on drugs, which in some way contributes to the whole mess. Not only is the ‘60s over, but we come to realise it wasn’t that great, really. Dick doesn’t go so far as to include an explicit memorial, but one knows his dead friends are lingering.
That feeling of lament, and the exploration of nostalgia in its most literal (saddest) sense, reminded me a lot of Pynchon, particularly Vineland, while I was reading. I know Vineland is one of Pychon’s least liked novels, but I quite enjoyed it, and am thinking about it again having finished Transmigration. I think they make quite good companion pieces, so bear that in mind if you’re planning to read one or the other.
I haven’t yet read any of Dick’s more “straight” literary novels, but if this is anything to go by, they are certainly worth a look. If SF functions by estrangement, then Dick does a very good job of making his representations of real life seem very strange indeed, leveraging, in this mature work, his considerable speculative talents to make a familial tale of tragedy and loss seem very fucking far out, indeed.
But if you did want to come to Dick for the characters, you could do a lot worse than The Transmigration of Timothy Archer. Being the final novel he completed, you might expect it to exhibit his mature style, but it does more than this, becoming the kind of logical end point of both strands of his work. Dick’s theological and philosophical concerns are present, as always, and all the characters freely debate the nature of belief and the existence of God. But, they are much more than just mouthpieces for Dick’s ideas, something his earlier work can suffer from. Transmigration is the end point of Dick’s work on character and his maturing as a writer, from The Man in the High Castle (an earlier work, but he spent much longer on it than his other novels of the period, and you can really tell), to Do Androids Dream?, to A Scanner Darkly. Dick’s concerns were always very human, there just weren’t always humans to be concerned about, but you can see that in this thread of novels that Dick did work on developing his characters, on making them more than mouthpieces. You’ll also note that the aforementioned novels contain some of Dick’s most complex female characters. I’m not sure if they pass the Bechdel test, but it’s something, compared to say, Eye in the Sky.
Transmigration is a novel soaked in pathos. What could be more emotionally charged than the death of John Lennon, a musician you and your late husband were very fond of? Every station is playing Beatles songs on a loop, and it takes you right back to the ‘60s, right back to when you were in love with him. Such is the setup for this novel, and boy does it grab you, because not only are we immediately given an emotional concern, but it is all from the perspective of Angela Archer. A Dickian heroine. If nothing else this will immediately interest readers of his works because (to my knowledge) this is the only time he ever used one.
It’s that emotional resonance in going back to the ‘60s that still keeps this identifiable as a late Dick novel, and it gives the whole work a feeling of lament. Death is inescapable, this inevitability even figured in to the structure, in which we first meet a woman who has experienced much loss, and then slowly come to know just what it is that she lost. She is also flawed and unreliable, and despite lacking the schizophrenic quality, has a lot in common with the narrator of A Scanner Darkly (and in fact the book does as a whole). It is not played out as a main theme, but pretty much everyone is fucked up on drugs, which in some way contributes to the whole mess. Not only is the ‘60s over, but we come to realise it wasn’t that great, really. Dick doesn’t go so far as to include an explicit memorial, but one knows his dead friends are lingering.
That feeling of lament, and the exploration of nostalgia in its most literal (saddest) sense, reminded me a lot of Pynchon, particularly Vineland, while I was reading. I know Vineland is one of Pychon’s least liked novels, but I quite enjoyed it, and am thinking about it again having finished Transmigration. I think they make quite good companion pieces, so bear that in mind if you’re planning to read one or the other.
I haven’t yet read any of Dick’s more “straight” literary novels, but if this is anything to go by, they are certainly worth a look. If SF functions by estrangement, then Dick does a very good job of making his representations of real life seem very strange indeed, leveraging, in this mature work, his considerable speculative talents to make a familial tale of tragedy and loss seem very fucking far out, indeed.
anotherpath's review against another edition
4.0
Man. PKD is one of those guys who has a way of intellectually bulldozing over the reader. It's quite unfair, the author has to agonize over each sentence and construct them, piece by piece, so he can play with concept after concept or reference after reference while doing so. The reader is either with it while engorging on those constructions rapidly, or they aren't. With PKD I feel incredibly unread, and that's fine.
The above thought can be applied to this novel as the third in a trilogy. This could only be considered a trilogy from the perspective of an author, not that of the audience. It has nothing to do with the other two books, outside of the fact that each character within is a stand in for the various religious moods of PKD at the time of writing.
When he starts the novel out with a metaphorical shotgun blast and takedown of his fictional (& literal) Alan Watts stand-in Edgar Barefoot, I felt winded. Watching his various characters intellectualize and flounder with their faith left me consuming this book in smaller portions.
Then Edgar returns in the last twenty pages and redeems himself, and you realize that you've been witnessing the events of the story from a jaded, but not entirely true perspective.
It's really odd to have a novel containing Alan Watts as a fictional character (I tried to wave it away, but his allusions to Shiva's dance and the Koan about one hand clapping make it definite) , and it's synchronistic to the extreme, but I have a feeling you don't come across Valis unless you're already deep into the journey, and it probably always unfolds this way to it's readers. So props to PKD for a brilliant, but flawed trilogy.
I'll leave you with a quote from the book. From PKD's -- Alan Watt's -- Edgar Barefoot, that accurately describes my own awakening, the concept that gripped me and finally left me at peace; that of the Universe as the Statue of the Thinker.
"What I had acquired, there on that walk, out of my apartment where I had no access to pen and paper, was a comprehension of a world conceptually arranged, a world not arranged in time and space and by causation, but a world as idea conceived in a great mind, the way our own minds store memories. I had caught a glimpse of world not as my own arrangement—by time, space and causation—but as it is in itself arranged; Kant’s ‘thing-in-itself.’”
Edit: After reading other reviewers, this book is probably NOT PKD's third Valis book. Crazy. Shit. Publishing.
The above thought can be applied to this novel as the third in a trilogy. This could only be considered a trilogy from the perspective of an author, not that of the audience. It has nothing to do with the other two books, outside of the fact that each character within is a stand in for the various religious moods of PKD at the time of writing.
When he starts the novel out with a metaphorical shotgun blast and takedown of his fictional (& literal) Alan Watts stand-in Edgar Barefoot, I felt winded. Watching his various characters intellectualize and flounder with their faith left me consuming this book in smaller portions.
Then Edgar returns in the last twenty pages and redeems himself, and you realize that you've been witnessing the events of the story from a jaded, but not entirely true perspective.
It's really odd to have a novel containing Alan Watts as a fictional character (I tried to wave it away, but his allusions to Shiva's dance and the Koan about one hand clapping make it definite) , and it's synchronistic to the extreme, but I have a feeling you don't come across Valis unless you're already deep into the journey, and it probably always unfolds this way to it's readers. So props to PKD for a brilliant, but flawed trilogy.
I'll leave you with a quote from the book. From PKD's -- Alan Watt's -- Edgar Barefoot, that accurately describes my own awakening, the concept that gripped me and finally left me at peace; that of the Universe as the Statue of the Thinker.
"What I had acquired, there on that walk, out of my apartment where I had no access to pen and paper, was a comprehension of a world conceptually arranged, a world not arranged in time and space and by causation, but a world as idea conceived in a great mind, the way our own minds store memories. I had caught a glimpse of world not as my own arrangement—by time, space and causation—but as it is in itself arranged; Kant’s ‘thing-in-itself.’”
Edit: After reading other reviewers, this book is probably NOT PKD's third Valis book. Crazy. Shit. Publishing.
jessidee's review against another edition
challenging
slow-paced
- Plot- or character-driven? A mix
- Strong character development? It's complicated
- Loveable characters? It's complicated
- Diverse cast of characters? No
- Flaws of characters a main focus? It's complicated
4.0
tankard's review against another edition
5.0
9/10
This is a beautiful book. Especially considering that it was published shortly before his unexpected death.
This is a beautiful book. Especially considering that it was published shortly before his unexpected death.
discogotbooks's review
3.0
This one never quite clicked. Though I enjoyed the characters, the story, and much of the meandering philosophy, especially the zedokite stuff. But the end felt abrupt and sudden, and left me feeling colder about the universe then either of the previous Valis books. Maybe that's the point, maybe I want more out of the universe than it can reasonably provide.
wildgurl's review
5.0
This is a challenging, yet compelling third book of the VALIS trilogy, although it stands alone as a novel. It's an empowering and intellectual glimpse into the interpretation of madness, theology and philosophical illusion. Mind twisting, thought provoking and at times disturbing; the obsession with God and metaphysics, schizophrenia and suicide, and the characters themselves drove this book for me and it has definitely made me think and perceive intellect in a new way. Absolutely fantastic......