Philip K. Dick & David Streitfeld (editor) The Last Interview (2015)
I'd told myself I wasn't going to buy any more books until I'd got through the thirteen or so left on my to be read pile, seeing as said pile has been up in the forties and fifties for the best part of the last three years; and there I was so close to beating the thing, and soon I would know the joy of being able to buy a book and just start reading the fucker right there; but we were in Austin and this was too much to resist, particularly as I was previously unaware of its existence.
I have copies of a couple of the tapes from which some of this material is taken, but here we have the benefit of an editor to cut through the awkward pauses, mumbling, and background noise of Mrs. Dick putting on the chip pan to make Phil's tea; so mostly this is concentrated Dick, in a manner of speaking, and is as such gripping. Most of the really crazy stuff is thankfully limited to the final interview, and the majority of what is reproduced here spans his somewhat more lucid phases of the seventies. What has surprised me the most is that my impression of the man has shifted once again after reading this collection, and slightly for the better. His wearying attitude to women as being either embittered controlling harridans or else dark-haired versions of magic pixie girl but with bigger tits seems a thankfully lesser aspect of his psychology, as it is revealed here, and he was, if anything, a man who understood his own failings. Additionally, the extent and development of his blossoming psychosis seems well mapped, dispensing with the customarily overstated ambiguity of how much of that stuff he really believed and by what criteria. So for most of the page count, he comes across as interesting and likable, and of such genuine insight as to warrant all that is claimed by his posthumous reputation. Only at the end, in the final interview, do we meet a version of Phil pretty much consumed by his own mania, and we can almost sense the interviewer desperately wanting to get away; which makes it all the more terrible when we come to the last page and discover that Dick suffered a stroke the very next day, never spoke again, and would be dead within a couple of weeks. It's as though we've been allowed a final snapshot of the point at which his own consciousness began to eat him alive.
Dick's posthumous reputation has been so inflated in recent years - partially thanks to the tsunami of dubious blue and orange adaptations for film and television - that the backlash was inevitable, particularly as he was a flawed individual in certain respects, as are many of us. So it's good to be reminded that, regardless of anything else, he remains amongst the greatest writers of the twentieth century.
I'd told myself I wasn't going to buy any more books until I'd got through the thirteen or so left on my to be read pile, seeing as said pile has been up in the forties and fifties for the best part of the last three years; and there I was so close to beating the thing, and soon I would know the joy of being able to buy a book and just start reading the fucker right there; but we were in Austin and this was too much to resist, particularly as I was previously unaware of its existence.
I have copies of a couple of the tapes from which some of this material is taken, but here we have the benefit of an editor to cut through the awkward pauses, mumbling, and background noise of Mrs. Dick putting on the chip pan to make Phil's tea; so mostly this is concentrated Dick, in a manner of speaking, and is as such gripping. Most of the really crazy stuff is thankfully limited to the final interview, and the majority of what is reproduced here spans his somewhat more lucid phases of the seventies. What has surprised me the most is that my impression of the man has shifted once again after reading this collection, and slightly for the better. His wearying attitude to women as being either embittered controlling harridans or else dark-haired versions of magic pixie girl but with bigger tits seems a thankfully lesser aspect of his psychology, as it is revealed here, and he was, if anything, a man who understood his own failings. Additionally, the extent and development of his blossoming psychosis seems well mapped, dispensing with the customarily overstated ambiguity of how much of that stuff he really believed and by what criteria. So for most of the page count, he comes across as interesting and likable, and of such genuine insight as to warrant all that is claimed by his posthumous reputation. Only at the end, in the final interview, do we meet a version of Phil pretty much consumed by his own mania, and we can almost sense the interviewer desperately wanting to get away; which makes it all the more terrible when we come to the last page and discover that Dick suffered a stroke the very next day, never spoke again, and would be dead within a couple of weeks. It's as though we've been allowed a final snapshot of the point at which his own consciousness began to eat him alive.
Dick's posthumous reputation has been so inflated in recent years - partially thanks to the tsunami of dubious blue and orange adaptations for film and television - that the backlash was inevitable, particularly as he was a flawed individual in certain respects, as are many of us. So it's good to be reminded that, regardless of anything else, he remains amongst the greatest writers of the twentieth century.
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