Mother Night

Kurt Vonnegut, Jr. Mother Night (1961)
Well, this is an odd one. Kurt Vonnegut draws you in with his characteristically timeless and engaging prose, conversational and forever scattering arrestingly surreal images in one's path; so it's probably technically impossible to be bored, unless you're some sort of twat; and he draws you in whilst writing something which doesn't quite add up, or at least didn't for me. It's decent, but compared to the others I've read, it doesn't quite get there.

Mother Night represented an earlier stopping point in Vonnegut's continuing mission to describe that which cannot be described, or at least earlier than Slaughterhouse Five which did a better job of dealing with the atrocities of the second world war specifically by acknowledging that the horror is simply too big, and that one can only describe it by showing it to be beyond description. Here we have a representative of the American Nazi party awaiting trial in Israel whilst backtracking through the misdeeds which ultimately put him there. He is initially a character which cannot be defended, an architect of the holocaust by word if not deed; and so we are invited to examine all aspects of his character except for those pertaining to that which can be neither excused nor forgiven. All very well, except this is all undone near the conclusion of the book once we discover our boy to be the ideological opposite of that which we believed him to be, and so he faces execution knowing he must maintain the illusion of his war crimes, I suppose becoming something of a Christ figure. The implication of the title, taken from Goethe's Faust, would suggest that we are each of us the stuff of darkness, coming to the light only through acts of will, through education and moral evolution. This squares well with what I gather to be Vonnegut's take on morality, namely that its absence relates to ignorance rather than anything specifically evil; although this also seems close to the notion of original sin, which possibly confuses things.

The problem with Mother Night is that, whilst it's a fairly straightforward narrative, it attempts a few too many about-turns with our understanding of its main character and the message becomes confused so it doesn't quite hang together so well as it might. I suppose this is odd considering how Slaughterhouse Five played the same cards whilst juggling time travel and a narrative occurring in what may as well have been random order, and that Slaughterhouse Five got it right. Mother Night still does more than most authors would attempt and is obviously worth a read, but he wrote better.

The Transmigration of Timothy Archer

Philip K. Dick The Transmigration of Timothy Archer (1982)
This was Dick's final book, alternately either the third of the thematic trilogy begun with VALIS and The Divine Invasion, or else just a regular novel with that lost third part actually being The Owl in Daylight which he sadly never got to write.

The Transmigration of Timothy Archer is effectively a late mainstream novel, containing no specific element demanding classification as science-fiction, another journey through Dick's version of our world told roughly as the story of Bishop James Pike, a friend of the author in real life. Pike was a vocally liberal and thus inevitably controversial Episcopalian minister and occasional civil rights campaigner of the 1960s who famously and tragically died whilst searching for proof of the historical existence of Jesus Christ in the deserts of Israel; which is more of less what becomes of Bishop Archer here, with the twist being his apparent transmigration to the body of his friend, the somewhat schizophrenic Bill Lundborg, an obvious author stand-in. However, Bill is almost certainly no more able to offer an objective view of reality than the author, and so the worth of his testimony remains ambiguous.

Dick himself appeared in a lot of his own fiction, particularly the later novels, and the tendency is pronounced with this cast of characters, most of whom can be identified as different aspects of the author; and yet despite the implausibility of all these people each being equally familiar with Goethe, Thomas Aquinas, and the German language, it holds together because Dick writes such a compelling argument. Unusually The Transmigration of Timothy Archer is told from the first person viewpoint of a female character apparently representing Dicks' scepticism. Essentially he seems to be stood back, taking a look at himself and all of his manias and asking if it's really been worth it, if any of it amounts to anything more than Bishop Pike's doomed quest for what was most likely a mirage. Specifically, despite future plans laid out in Dick's letters of the time, The Transmigration of Timothy Archer reads like the work of a man who knows he is writing his last book:

I am terribly frightened of death, I thought. Death has destroyed me; it isn't Sri Krishna, destroyer of all people; it is death, destroyer of my friends. It singled them out and left everyone else undisturbed. Fucking death, I thought. You homed in on those I love. You utilized their folly and prevailed. You took advantage of foolish people, which is truly unkind. Emily Dickinson was full of shit when she prattled about 'kindly Death'; that's an abominable thought, that death is kind. She never saw a six-car pile-up on the Eastshore Freeway. Art, like theology, a packaged fraud. Downstairs the people are fighting while I look for God in a reference book. God, ontological arguments for. Better yet: practical arguments against. There is no such listing. It would have helped a lot if it had come in time: arguments against being foolish, ontological and empirical, ancient and modern (see common sense). The trouble with being educated is that it takes a long time; it uses up the better part of your life and when you are finished what you know is that you would have benefited more by going into banking.

Whilst this may seem to take the opposite view to that which Dick had written in VALIS and others, it should be remembered that even at his most manic he remained, to a greater or lesser extent, a passive observer within his own consciousness.

He said one time in group therapy that all he wanted to be was a pair of eyes bugging out from the wall, so he could see everyone but no one could see him. Just an observer, not a part of what was going on, ever.

To suggest that Dick's religious understanding was no more than a thought experiment, trying on a theological world for size, seems quite wrong and overly simplistic, although I've probably said as much myself back when I was a bit more stupid. Whatever he believed at any given time was subject to revision and evaluation, and no part of it was considered sacrosanct, which this book shows. Unlike the best of Dick's oeuvre it tends to be somewhat lacking in humour, but once you've read it, you should understand why; and saddest of all, after nearly a decade of struggles and freak-outs, it reads like he was finally beginning to level out.