Customer Reviews

The Divine Invasion

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1 star:		(2)

 

 

The protagonist of the Divine Invasion is Herb Asher, a recluse living on a human colony on the planet CY30-CY30B. Asher spends most his time lying in bed, listening to singer Linda Fox, until one day a deity identifying itself as the Judeo-Christian God Yahweh calls him to comfort his neighbor, Rybys Rommey, who suffers from multiple sclerosis. A prophet named Elias Tate informs them that Rybys, a virgin, is pregnant with the Second Coming and the three travel to Earth where the child will finish the battle with Belial, the Adversary who banished Yahweh to CY30-CY30B thousands of years earlier and has kept the Earth under his dark cloud since.

Or at least that is the story that keeps playing in Asher's head as he is kept in a frozen state awaiting a new pancreas to replace the one that was injured in the jet crash that killed Rybys upon their return to Earth. Meanwhile, her child Emmanuel, who survived the crash but with brain damage, lives with Tate and attends a special education school with Zina, a girl who seems to know much about Emmanuel and his place in the cosmos.

Welcome to the strange, strange world of latter day Philip K. Dick. The science-fiction author, who specialized in surreal settings and complex puzzles concerning identity, questioned the cosmos as only he could in his final trio of novels of which the Divine Invasion is the middle entry. The novels were inspired by an instance in 1974 in which Dick alleged that a transcendental being briefly possessed him.

For a project inspired by such an absurd episode, the Divine Invasion has a tight, highly coherent theological underlining. Dick shows a remarkable understanding of Gnostic principles, with Asher, Fox, Rybys, Tate, Emmanuel, and Zina each representing an important component of the Christian cosmic order. Although Dick is as reader-friendly as possible (he makes no presumptions about readers' foreknowledge of these concepts), one will have to be patient as he carefully unveils and explains his characters' significance, shifting surface realities and using non-linear story telling. If you can deal with that, you will be treated to a highly imaginative and highly intelligent philosophical novel. The Divine Invasion is another instance in which the term mad genius perfectly applies to Dick.

Divine Invasion opens with Herb Asher (do I detect a botanical reference?) "dead and in cryonic suspension" overseeing information traffic from within his dome around the binary star system CY30-CY30B. His sickly female neighbor, dying of multiple sclerosis, becomes pregnant with a virgin birth (her hymen is intact and Herb is repulsed by her sickness) that turns out to be the result of Yahweh--God of the old testament. Although only perhaps (like us all?) vividly dreaming, Asher accompanies his legal wife (Yah has insisted he sympathize with her by vengefully threatening to destroy his most treasured belongings, especially his tapes of Linda Fox, a galactically renowned vocalist) through quasi-fascistic interrogations and security back to Earth. There his life is reminiscent but different than on the world of methane crystals housing the dome where he "really is." As the "legal father" of God (as he explains to a police man who stops him in his fly-car) he meets his step-son, the Christ-like child who combines infinity from God (the alien who comes in half-human form to Earth) and the earthly from his human wife. Emmanuel, the God-child, is engaged in both a battle of recalling his true nature and playing with his elusive female playmate, Zina. Zina knows things about him that he doesn't. She is Shekhina, "the immanent Presence who never left the world...the female side of God" who remained with the immanent world when the Godhead split. Elias Tate, Herb Asher's best friend, is the prophet Elijah on the two-star system, but a black man who works at an audio components shop on Earth. Thus the inimitable and brilliant Dick establishes an overlapping confluence between the celestial (the extraterrestrial) and the mundane--he literalizes the Gnostic worldview, spiced idiosyncratically with bits of his personal life, esoteric Judaism and mystical Christianity. (The well-regarded literary critic, Harold Bloom, tried to write--wrote--a fiction book based on Gnosticism that fell far short of this brilliant effort.) Quoting Church father Tertullian on the resurrection of Jesus Christ, Asher's friend Elias, who counsels him to dump his wife and pursue his dream--Linda Fox, who in space is only a projection of artificial intelligence--explains: Et sepultus resurrexit; certum est quia impossibile est." He was resurrected from the grave; this is therefore credible, just because it is absurd. I think you have to give the benefit of the doubt not to those who cannot penetrate Dick's densely nuanced tangle of relevant references upon a single reading--but to Dick, who has instantiated Gnosticism in fiction with entertainment and story-telling acumen, imparting lodes of theological information along the way where others have failed. In Islamic culture being a writer may be considered suspect because one is competing with God. But Dick is alway competing with God--and making "Him" such as he is (here an alien with a penchant for intrauterine symbiosis) palpable and relevant for modern times. That is what great authors (e.g., Pushkin in Russia) do: they revive and re-weave culture, preserving it in their creative efforts. The devil appears as an especially stinky goat, who is killed on a rooftop (as is another goat in Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?!) But Belial (the sheep who lusts after non-existence) was created by God. As my son raps, "Good and evil are not equal; light created the darkness." A theological mini-masterpiece--pearls before swine are still pearls.

To all the would-be literary naysayers out there who say "all possible plots have already been used" and "every book is just a different version of a previously released book", I have one piece of advice for you: read a Philip K. Dick book. Particularly his Valis trilogy is highly unique and a bit eye-opening. How many books have you read that star God as a crippled, 10-year-old amnesiac? Not very many, I would imagine, but this is such a book. Setting the novel in such an off-kilter scenario allows Dick to examine, and thereby challenge, our conventional ideas of God. This book is very dense and hard to penetrate at times... many of the references escaped me, but I still found it interesting for it's novel views on theology and the nature of God. I highly recommend this book, and Dick's entire Valis trilogy, to anyone looking for theology-expanding fiction, or simply a unique read.

This is Dick at his best. This book is one of the most incredible novels I have ever read. I couldn't even read too much of it at one sitting because the concepts fried my brain so much, but I couldn't stop either. Only someone who was as insane as Philip K Dick was toward the end of his life could come up with insights and concepts as brilliant and moving as those presented here. The theology was incredible and the way he dissected God's mind blew me away. A must read for anyone. I have and will continue to praise this novel and recommend it to anyone interested.

Philip Dick was an immensely creative and entertaining writer - a real stylist but also a creator of wonderfully inventive plots. But he does something else, something that many of the best SF writers do - he is an educator. But where other SF writers educate their readers about the latest scientific discoveries and technological developments - and the implications of these for individuals and for the environment and society of humans - Philip Dick takes on deeper things - the nature of reality, the psychological functioning of the mind, and in this novel, God and religion. These are topics that Philip Dick certainly doesn't trivialise. He obviously spent much time researching and understanding the philosophy of these ideas in a way that enables his novels to be a foundation for readers who are interested - and his novels have a way of making you interested.

I suspect that the average reader of novels - even literary novels - would be surprised by some of the background material that Philip Dick weaves into his stories. In fact, I'm surprised myself when I realise I'm deep in some theological arguments that were probably 'lifted' from some research source and then brought to life in such an engaging way.

In this novel you, like I, might be confronted for the first time by a really tangible God, something drawn together from the ideas of generations and generations of philosophers.

Actually, this is the only other _Valis_ novel. There was supposed to have been a third, but Dick died before it was finished. _The Transmigration of Timothy Archer_, while good, is not properly part of the _Valis_ trilogy.

This book, while set in the far future, does continue the specific themes introduced in _Valis_, and reference is made back to some of the specific characters. You see, this is the time when VALIS, the Logos, the greater face of God, or whatever name you choose to limit it by, breaks through into our "black iron prison" to reclaim it and banish the Empire and the black magician behind it.

I admit that the story takes 50 or 60 pages to get up to speed, but by that time the IDEAS that are the real value of P.D.K.'s writing begin to surface. For instance, the idea of the "Hermetic Transform" and how the microcosm and macrocossm can interpenetrate and become One- and how to God time can run backwards. Pretty deep stuff compared to most of the semi-literate pap that is published nowdays.

What really leaped out at me though was the fact that Dick wrote of the Torah as an interactive, holographic, computer code. It predicts the future because it is the blueprint for creation that even God refers back to. He wrote this in 1981- _The Bible Code_ wasn't published until 1997. Talk about being "ahead of the curve."

Although Dick's final three books are best enjoyed as a trilogy, "The divine invasion" remains my favorite of the three. The science fiction setting of the book allows Dick the freedom to explore some of his more radical notions without having to ground them in the more mundane reality of the other books in his trilogy. One doesn't usually expect to encounter profound and moving meditations on the nature of good and evil in a science fiction book, yet Dick pulls it all together with his powerful storytelling ability.

The concept behind this book - that God has been exiled from the Earth and is attempting to return to do battle with evil - was intriguing enough that I bought a copy. The story that Philip K. Dick spins from this concept doesn't live up to its promise, however.

I found the writing in Divine Invasion to be very uneven. Portions of the story were enjoyable, and the signature PKD theme of altered reality makes its appearance more than once. But the characters were lacking; apparently divine entities have little or no personality, and the human characters were pretty thin as well.

What was most annoying to me, though, was the almost endless theological rumination. Granted, I expect a novel about God to deal with issues of a divine nature. But PKD runs on and on at great length, apparently presenting almost any thought he had on the nature of God, Creation, Evil or what-have-you, and with very little focus, so that the story suffers in the end. Layer on top of this a healthy dose of what would pass for a religous studies curriculum, and Divine Invasion falls flat.

I would recommend that you pass on this book and, instead, read a novel that better showcases PKD's talents - say "Flow My Tears the Policeman Said" or "Ubik".

"Above them the city machine worked, gathering up the remains of Belial. Gathering up the broken fragments of what had once been light"

By this point in his life Dick was either completely drenched in insanity or saner and more focused than he had ever been in his life. What do you get when you put together a galactically-famous super Diva, Satan in the form of a petting zoo Goat, a God that has amnesia, and of course fly-cars? Well obviously you get Phil Dick. In this, his last official novel before his demise, he tries to cram philosophies of the space time continuim as well as theology to explain reasoning behind the following ideas:
a. - God can be convinced to change
b. - Evil is the antithesis of God not because God is good, but rather because God is creation and evil is death, the absence of creation.
c. - Reality as humans know it may only be an overlapping reality of a primary reality.
d. - If God cannot remember creation, creation cannot exist.
However above all these points he stresses that all is predestined and that evil exist only because God created it. His story surrounds several key characters, mainly Herb Asher, a Kafka-esque character who has little to live for; it also follows his 'legal' son Eman, who is actually, God, or the male half of God. Yes, in Phildickian fasion this is a fairly convuluted novel, but this reviewer found it to come full circle rather well.
One dissapointment is the lack of developement in the storylines of the Cardinal of Earth and the Leader of the Communist party. Dick's point on how in the future good and evil will completely shift sides is put in place, but other than that he lets the characters he used to introduce the idea kind of fall out of the novel. He brings them back momentarily towards the end, but drops them again. Also, I found the longer passages to go into borderline incoherent rambling, but that was to be expected from latter-period Dick.
In synopsis, this is a fine read. It sometimes reads as though it were a large essay in which Phil Dick tries to cram all his theories into much too short of a medium. But the story and theories are entertaining nonetheless. A fine book, but defineitely not a starting place for beggingers in Dick's writings.

Easily the most readable and interesting of Dick's final soul-searching trilogy, of which it is the second installment, this novel is a recasting of the nativity story in 21st century terms. It describes the trials and tribulations of a man and his "son"---the Divine Child---as they try to smuggle God back into a world corrupted by Belial.Dick's craft was never finer than in this novel, and his philosophical speculations, inspired by early Christianity, Zoroastrianism and mystical Judaism, are at times breathtaking, even scriptural, in their beauty and subtlety. Unequivocally Dick's best.