March 12, 2003
Eye in the Sky
Eye in the Sky, Philip K. Dick.
Eye in the Sky is not one of Philip K. Dick's best books; it lacks the sheer headtwisting power of some of his later works such as VALIS, and it doesn't have the polish of The Man in the High Castle, which I think is Dick's most readable novel, if not quite his best. The conceit of protagonists trapped in an amorphous reality has been done better by other authors before and since; Dick himself did it better in the fine, jarring, and creepy Ubik. But there's one wonderful moment when our hero and his stalwart companions -- loonies and neurotics, the lot of them -- are living in a paranoid schizophrenic's fantasy world. She's convinced that everything, cats, spiders, houses, canned food and chopping knives, is out to get her. In the end, of course, she decides that the main characters are all out to get her as well, and since her delusions guide reality, suddenly they are. They are transformed into horrible malevolent bug things, except for the hero, who watches in horror. And it's a memorable scene, one of the few really good ones in the book (another is the hero's umbrella ride up to Heaven, where he sees the face of God), but how much more wonderful and unheimlich would it have been if the hero and his third-person singular voice had been transformed as well? I'm not sure which would have been worse -- a slow transition from two-fisted engineer to bloodsucking entity, or an abrubt shift, like PKD stepped away from the typewriter and let someone with an even shakier grasp on a much less pleasant reality take over for a page. I suspect the latter would have given me a case of the whim-whams for a week.