Valis

This book had been waiting for me for a while, it was one of those books you know you are going to enjoy when you read it, and so you don’t read it. You don’t read it for months, you don’t read it for years, and you don’t even buy a copy. You just let it be there in the world, waiting for you. Now this is of course dangerous – because you can leave these things too long, miss the window of opportunity for your consciousness to lock into synch with the art work – and then hey you’ve blown it this incarnation for that particular piece of stuff.

So anyway last year it was a beach holiday, it was the best we could do what with me being unemployed and it was a family holiday too (her family) – and I figured, well I’m going to do a lot of reading. It’s Fuengirola, cultural opportunities for days out are going to be limited, and she’s going to want to get a tan this holiday and just chill out – none of my mad adventures. So I pack books – Collapse by Jared Diamond, The Chalice and the Blade by Riane Eisler, some more doomy titles I can’t remember – and I go out and buy, specifically, Valis.

But I didn’t read it then either – out to Spain it went, back from Spain it came, and on to the shelf it went.

Then this year Keith and Mark both read it and I knew that if I didn’t read it soon – it would become a never read. I should put this reading block in the context of the fact that I haven’t been able to read fiction for about two years now. I don’t know why, but only non-fiction has rocked by boat. I guess that it is related to reading Last Hours of Ancient Sunlight and then spinning off on a whole Peak oil trip, that made novels just seem a little pointless.

So anyway, Valis was my introduction back to fiction – but is it fiction? Really fiction? I mean, I know enough about Dick’s life to get that the use of his own name in the book is not just some Paul Auster like trick but actually reflects the heavy autobiographical content. Given that all autobiography contains only the approximation of truth, is Valis any less an autobiography than any other? The book also reminded me of two other books I’d read recently The Eden Express by Mark Vonnegut and Conversations with God by Neale Donald Walsch. In fact its kind of like a merger of the two – insanity and God. In fact Valis seemed a more honest kind of book than Conversations with God, the ostensibly true record of one guy’s chat with the man upstairs.

I guess in the end Valis couldn’t hold up to the strange mental book I’d projected during the years of delay – but then what could? There’s a message – take the experience now, don’t delay for Chrissakes…. But it is good - so read it now, before its too late.