I Am Alive and You Are Dead: a journey into the mind of Philip K Dick
Emmanuel Carrere; translated by
Timothy Bent Bloomsbury, 336pp, £17.99
ISBN 0747569193
Journeying into the mind of Philip K Dick is a risky undertaking. Even when he wasn't totally, officially crazy, he was pretty loopy. His madness, moreover, had a particularly insinuating quality that would at once call into question your own sanity. Letting him inside your head is tricky enough; getting inside his is courting disaster.
Perhaps it helps to be French. Emmanuel Carrere announces that this is "a very peculiar book" and that he has tried to portray the Dick life "from the inside . . . with the same freedom and empathy . . . with which he depicted his own characters". Scenes in the book are, therefore, "imaginative recreations", though they are based on the vast quantity of material Dick left behind, notably Exegesis. This was Dick's attempt, in his officially mad phase, to explain his conviction that the year was 70AD, and that we were still living under the heel of the Romans.
It has to be said that Carrere emerges triumphant from the process. This is a readable, intelligent and plausible evocation of Dick's inner world. Moreover, thanks to a fine translator, Carrere's narrative panache survives in English. Simply for a good read, anybody - not just Dick fans - can safely pick up this book.
But what is it all about? For the uninitiated, Dick was born in Chi-cago in 1928. His twin sister, Jane, died soon afterwards, an event that seems to have haunted Dick until his own death in 1982. An awkward, troubled intellectual drifter, he went through various wives, paying his way by writing science-fiction stories and novels. He did not like doing this, and often expressed contempt for the form and its readers. Throughout his life he dreamed of writing a "real" novel. He had some success - notably with The Man in the High Castle - but missed the millions he would have made had he lived a little longer. Blade Runner, Total Recall, Minor-ity Report and Paycheck are all films based on Dick stories.
Dick's high-speed hackery means that a lot of his output is very sloppy. Some say that his best books are well written and some even go so far as to suggest that he was the greatest writer in English in the latter half of the 20th century. For me, however, the prose never rises to meet the challenge of the ideas. Simply considered as novels, his books never quite make it to the heights of science fiction attained by, say, H G Wells and Stanislaw Lem. Certainly, Dick never achieved the crystalline beauty of Jorge Luis Borges. As repositories of ideas and commentaries on the contemporary condition, however, his works are unsurpassed. He was the Corbusier of science fiction; it will be years before his legacy is fully assimilated.
At the centre of his imagination - and Carrere's method is perfect for capturing this - is a paranoid awareness of the fun-gibility of our world-views. Shifts in perspective change everything. You can be happily human one minute, an android the next. Or, as in The Man in the High Castle, the Japanese may have defeated the Americans, but then again they may not. This idea has proved amazingly fertile for subsequent SF, from the Matrix films to the Point-of-View Gun in this year's screen version of The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, which makes the victim see the world through the shooter's eyes. All pure Dick.
Yet making art out of uncertain reality is one thing; living a life on that basis is another entirely. In Dick's case, the dividing line was always blurred. Even at his most sane, his mind was consumed by the paranoid, gnostic conviction that reality was a construct, a locked room to which somebody, somewhere had a key. For years he consulted the I Ching, becoming obsessed with the infinite ambiguities of its wisdom, while his strange and intense flirtation with Catholicism seems to have been based less on faith than on his conviction that the Church was hiding something.
At his most lucid, Dick could safely hold both the paranoia and the scepticism in his mind simultaneously. Oddly, in Carrere's account, it seems that he was able to do something similar even when at his most crazy. In his last interview, he told a journalist of his latest enthusiasm - Benjamin Creme, a New Age guru - but then, once the tape was turned off, he decided that Creme was all nonsense. In this mode, the contradiction was dangerous, its very existence further evidence of the desperate instability of any world-view.
While Carrere succeeds in getting inside the mind of this extraordinary man, he might have provided a little more context, to give some idea of the world that spawned such a bizarre and spectacular phenomenon. But if you are seriously considering the hazardous climb up Mount Dick, this is base camp.
Bryan Appleyard's most recent book is Aliens: why they are here (Scribner)
Post this article to
We want to encourage people to comment on our content and to exchange views with other readers and hope this will be done on a courteous basis. However, if you encounter posts which are offensive please let us know by emailing comments@newstatesman.co.uk and we will take swift action where necessary.
