Customer Reviews

Galactic Pot-Healer

5 star:		(7)
4 star:		(10)
3 star:		(3)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(2)

 

 

According to the author's biographer, Laurence Sutin, Dick didn't much care for this book. I can't imagine why, except that in his more determinedly resolute moments he may have considered the ending too patly pessimistic. I agree with Sutin's rating: Pot-Healer is a gem. Rarely for Dick, it has only a single point-of-view character, the pot-healer (not mender), stranded in a Stalinist USA of the 2040s, who is somewhat circuitously approached by the Glimmung - a possibly divine, certainly whimsical entity of faraway Plowman's Planet. The Glimmung is putting together a collaborative enterprise of life-forms from around the galaxy in order to raise a sunken cathedral, and along the way our hero meets with some spectacular inconveniences, including his own corpse and a book in which his future (or one of them) is inscribed (possibly), occasionally in language he can understand. This is one of Dick's funniest and most enjoyable books, putting a light touch to many of his favourite issues. It's as packed with energy and invention as any of his more famous works and, perhaps because of the single point of view, feels more focused and coherent than many - and this in spite of the fact that its epic plot and impressive special effects all take place within the space of less than a hundred and eighty pages.

Philip K. Dick wrote over forty novels, most of them science fiction. Often churning out books with the expectation that the paperback editions would have the shelf life of lettuce and then vanish from the earth never to be read again, he often repeated himself and took huge leaps of absurdity, sometimes for the sake of laughter, sometimes to work himself out of a painted plot corner. Galatic Pot-Healer is one of his lesser novels, a fast read and almost comic book in its imagery and characters. It recycles some names and concepts from earlier works (his children's story "Nick and the Glimmung" comes to mind) and contains some unexplained absurdities, but it shines out from his other lesser works with its deep use of Gnostic theology and metaphysical ideas couched in science fiction narrative.

The Glimmung is a Jabba-The-Hut-like creature, weighing 40,000 pounds, living on a remote planet but being capable of physical projecting himself by unknown means to other planets where he appears to a select group of humans sometimes in the form of an albatross, sometimes in the form of a hoop of fire and a hoop of water intersected with a paisley carpet and a teenage girl's face floating in the middle. This is clearly a comic composite of Zeus and Jehovah with a heavy dash of Judeo-Christian mysticism thrown into the mix. The Glimmung bundles up his small group of artisans from Earth (including Joe Fernwright, the Pot Healer of the title who can restore antique ceremaics) to come to his home planet to raise the ruins of the ancient temple of the Fog-Things, known as Heldscala, from the ocean floor to restore the ancient way and bring peace back to the planet.

The planet itself is controlled by the Kalends, insect-like wraiths who have written a book in changing script that is a pre-recorded history of the planet. The history (the text of the book) keeps changing as people take different courses of action. As soon as Joe reaches the planet, he gets a copy of the book of the Kalends, and reads that the Glimmung will fail in his raising of the temple and that joe himself will take a course of action that will lead to the Glimmung's death.

Much of the novel has the feel of a comic book, but the gnosticism that was so dear to Philip K. Dick shines through. The Glimmung appears in different form to different people and his raising of the temple from the ocean depths directly reflects the artisans (pot healer, engineers, psychokineticists) attempts to actualize the depleted talent of their own lives. The Glimmung tells Joe early on, "There is no life too small." Their Jabba-the-Hut-like God has entered their lives to restore them to themselves. The novel spirals towards a whacked out confrontation with the Black Glimmung who stirs from the ocean depths and the artisans fight their nemesis by mering their minds with that of the Glimmung.

Philip K. Dick was just years away from the writing of his most gnostic works (Valis, Divine Invasions, etc.) and here we can see a science fiction pot boiler having loads of fun with religion, mysticism, metaphysics and gnostic theology. A strange hybrid. An odd novel. But also a fun and quick read.

When a man finds a job offer floating in his toilet, he's either desperate or in a Philip K. Dick novel. Joe Fernwright, the title character in this novel, is, of course, both.

We might consider it odd that a job offer in a place like that should lead Joe Fernwright to his life's purpose, but this is, after all, PKD's world; the job offer does exactly that. At the start of his story, Fernwright has little else to hold onto - his ex-wife thinks he's a joke and tells him so as often as possible, the craft of ceramic repair that he loves is useless in his plastic age, his government gives him no privacy even in dreams. It's part of PKD's brilliance to give us such a character - we believe that Joe Fernwright would accept the offer in his bathroom tank, just on the off-chance that it might restore his dignity and give his life some meaning.

The search for meaning is not an uncommon theme for PKD, but "Galactic Pot-Healer" is different in the extent to which Joe Fernwright's search is conducted alone. There's community in it, to be sure; on the other hand, Fernwright begins and ends the book in isolation, an unusual state for PKD characters. It's an important one, though, because although his isolation at the end of the book saddens him, he is content.

It would be unfair to suggest that he's content with his isolation because every other character in the story drives him crazy, but any reader might be excused for saying so. Most of these beings, human and non-human alike, change their attitudes from paragraph to paragraph for no discernable reason, which can get dizzying real quick. For instance, Joe has a love interest, Mali. Within the space of ten pages, she introduces herself to Joe with flattering interest, turns completely cold at a remark from him that she finds insulting, warms up again within minutes of his approach, humiliates him in front of a large group of people, and then takes him to bed. She never can seem to figure out how she feels about him, but it scarcely matters - neither can anyone else.

And if Mali is a bundle of neuroses, then Glimmung, the being who provided that toilet-tank job offer, is completely certifiable. Is it near-omnipotent or enfeebled? Calm and generous, or peevish and subject to towering rages if crossed? Tyrannical or profoundly grateful for its friends? Well, that depends on which page you're looking at.

Like the characters, the story lurches from mood to mood, theme to theme, a state of affairs that is not helped by the fact that Joe and Mali and Glimmung and everyone else suffer from Eloquentiasis. That's the disease that causes fictional beings to declaim on various philosophical points at the drop of a hat, instead of letting the story make their points clear for them. This sometimes produces an amusing or touching moment, as when Joe's ex-wife challenges him to prove that he can speak intelligently to her dinner guests and he launches into an analysis of Beethoven's music as opposed to Mozart's, but most of the time it just slows things down. Here, in addition, it confuses the heck out of anyone trying to find a narrative thread to hang onto.

And yet, despite all the technical flaws, this is still PKD, and as usual he redeems himself by the love he feels for his characters. Indeed, this story grips and moves because of that exact love and care - Joe Fernwright, self-involved loser, learns from the 40-ton Glimmung that all life is worth caring about. It is this that makes him, as Glimmung says, "the best of them," the most whole of all Glimmung's hirelings, this that enables him to stand in isolation at the end and try something new. PKD was a big guy - I suspect he might have seen himself as the huge, gelatinous Glimmung, teaching his own character the way to love.

Speaking of which, I've got a soft spot for "Galactic Pot-Healer" for an additional, very personal reason. Early on, Joe consults an automatic adjustable clergyman for advice on how to proceed with his life. He goes through various religious settings and gets a lot of very spiritual advice. Just before his money runs out, he sets the device to Judaism, and it advises him to eat a bowl of soup. As a Jew, after I laugh myself silly at this, I say it shows very clearly just how much PKD cared about the children of his own mind. We should all have something we care about that much.

Benshlomo says, The flawed need love too.

A bizarre collection of loosely thrown events, not-developed characters, somewhat thin dialog, pot healing aspect that isn't obvious or in significant role in the story, presents Douglas Adams style hilarious robot who expresses feelings that are sarcastically deeper than the main character's girlfriend. What is this?

The story is about group of entities all over the galaxy who are forced to gather to a distant planet to raise a sunken theological relict. The entity behind the effort to collect its workforce is 40-ton Glimmung who has god-like, almost infinite powers. But it also has a counter force called "black Glimmung" whom it must fight like the Ancient Greek mythology titans did.

I guess, the thrown in ideas could theoretically be projected into larger context if pressed hard, but that would be a gross exaggeration. It is not feasible to identify, or project, oneself to a 40-ton entity which takes place of god. The entity does not have meaning for his existence, no goal, no grand plan, nothing to gain from the underwater adventure other than something about carrying "his other self" (cathedral) from the bottom of the ocean to the shore. The lead character, narrator, is an empty pot, shivering in the wind. He just happens to be a piece of a broken amphora; representation of the theme.

One (1) star. "Underrated Classic, unique ..." say other reviewers. Probably so for PKD fans. For others, you have to tune your mind to another channel. And I think that's what PKD wanted: not to take this story seriously. Enjoy the imagination.

I've read more than a dozen of Dick's novels and this one is by far the worst I've encountered. As in too many Dick novels, the main character is an idealized (but still highly annoying) projection of Dick's own personality. The main female character is as empty as any adolescent male fantasy. The writing is horrible, full of awkward and improbable turns of phrase - usually made while Dick was attempting to show off his rather blue-haired erudition. The plot is a lame attempt to grapple with a juvenile theological question. The narration in general is full of contradictions and abrupt shifts of tone and character presentation. And the flaws just keep on coming.

In short, Galactic Pot Healer is a compendium of the worst aspects of Dick's writing, storytelling and ideology. Strangely, the one that followed it, Ubik, was one of his best. Dick was unpredictable in that way.

This is one of PKD's more obscure titles, and in some ways, this status is warranted. Of all Dick's novels, I found Galactic Pot-Healer to be the most unconstrained and it is certainly not for the uninitiated. Even though I've read almost all of his other works, the convoluted plot and the always transient identity of the Glimmung was very confusing. But, as Dick's career attests to, just because it's unconventional doesn't mean it can't be successful in a quirky sort of way. And I think because of this, Pot-Healer is one of Dick's funniest books. I just love the part where Joe is trapped in the box and calls in to the radio talk show, asking where he is. But the focus of the book is a very serious exploration of metaphysical interplay between the Glimmung and his (her?) antithesis the Black Glimmung. Strangely, there was something about Joe's investigation that I found terrifying. Even more than The Game Players of Titan, the paranoia is tangible and omnipresent, and it makes Pot-Healer a very dark book. It is NOT light metaphysical comedy, and Dick never provides the reader with sure footing or any character that can truly be trusted. I recommend checking out a few of the more straightforward PKD books (The Man in the High Castle, Now Wait for Last Year) before reading this, because, though it is one of his shorter works, it can be daunting for someone unacquainted with PKD.

In this story of the far future, sci-fi master Philip K. Dick introduces Joe Fernwright, a man who makes his living by healing broken pottery - until his business dries up on him. Stuck in a world that has no more use for him, Joe passes his time playing silly word games until called by a mysterious entity named Glimmung to undergo a life-changing experience. Glimmung wants him to go to a place called "Plowman's Planet" to help him in an overwhelming undertaking: raising a vast cathedral and all its contents from the depths of the sea. Despite the alien Kalends' prediction of failure (or perhaps because of it) he agrees, at least for the moment.

This is a pretty confusing story, even for Dick, with so many wild ideas, plain absurdities, thinly veiled symbols, and supposedly infallible predictions pointing in different directions that the reader's expectations are continually being toyed with. Are the Kalends really infallible? Exactly what kind of failure are the Kalends claiming will happen? How much free will do the various participants really have? Does Glimmung even care if he succeeds or not? Despite the theoretical and borderline theosophical bent of these questions, the protagonist's dilemma is always defined in very specific terms: yes or no, stay or go, help or hinder. Clearly Dick wanted to write a novel about the nature of religious belief and modern man's relationship to it, but his own personal uncertainties made it impossible to provide the kind of real conclusions that he hoped for. So instead he portrays his protagonist as a lost soul in search of redemption but continually beset by a lack of certainty. Will he throw his life away in meaningless gesture? Or will his defiance bring down the very god that has chosen him? Don't expect any easy answers from Dick.

Despite all the craziness, at well under 200 pages of easy reading, this reviewer breezed through the book in nothing flat. An entertaining read even if it doesn't make as much sense as you'd like it to, but probably not one of Dick's best novels.

In Galactic Pot-Healer, Dick's attention was more on creating a myth than on writing a novel. The characters are relatively undeveloped, and the science-fictional conceits are used rather casually as vehicles for archetypes; the work is almost a Jungian allegory. It does not lack Dick's characteristic humanizing touches, but its tendency toward myth makes it unique among his novels. It is certainly as dense with themes and ideas as any fiction he ever wrote. Joe Fernwright, the main character, is found at the beginning in an oppressive future dystopia where policemen stop people for walking too slowly, all phone calls are monitored, and everyone is programmed to have a common dream every night. He is a pot-healer; that is, he has the skill of not just mending but restoring broken pots to their exact original condition. A godlike extraterrestrial being called the Glimmung enlists him on a team made up of species from throughout the galaxy to help raise a sunken cathedral called Heldscalla on the Glimmung's home world, Plowman's Planet. From this Faustian undertaking, Joe experiences an awakening to self-knowledge. This is a story of hope and ultimately religious transcendence.

Here Dick explores the theme of how a god can be irrational and somewhat malevolent, like the Old Testament Yahweh, and still be a god. On another level, this book is saturated with sadness, a sense of loss.

A godlike entity known as the Glimmung has summoned a group of colonists, typical PKD average Joes and Joans, to a far off planet called Plowman's Planet. Each of the people summoned possesses a unique ability, a talent, that is desperately needed by Glimmung for some purpose which is not readily revealed.

Joe Fernwright is the PKD everyman, and his talent is healing pots, that is, he is able to repair ancient clay vessels by essentially feeling how they were and how they want to be repaired. Joe is of course attracted and repelled by a dark haired girl, Mali. Both become pawns of the Glimmung in his/its quest to raise an ancient sunken temple called Heldscalla from it's watery grave. Here the tale twists. Up until now, there are plenty of PKD ruminations on religion and relationships, but suddenly the story takes on an almost Cthulhu-like tone. There are other forces at play, and the Glimmung may or may not be what it claims.

Dick as usual is commenting on the relationship between reality, what we believe, and how we have arrived at our individual version of reality. Here he seems to be going on at length on the issue of self-worth, and finding one's humble gifts worthy in the grand, galactic scheme of things. Dick invests Joe with a modest skill, repairing pots, but then does an about-face by making this pedestrian job one of great importance, on par with restoring great paintings. As the story evolves, Joe becomes less of a sad sack and more of an existential soul adrift. Joe's world becomes filled with paranoia and dread the more he learns about Plowman's Planet.

Alongside Dick's other sci-fi novels, Galactic Pot-Healer is less frivolous in tone than most of his other books (no Lord Running Clam here, folks), despite the title. The love relationship between the male and female characters is also one fraught with angst and emptiness. Yet somehow in the middle of all this bleakness, Dick reigns in his story and refuses to be overwhelmed with despair.

One gets the sense that Dick ended writing a different novel than he had intended and with a different ending than he originally had in mind. It's also a variation on the theme that crops up in "The Divine Invasion", "A Maze of Death", and some of his more theologically inclined short stories. This book is more unsettling than most Dick novels, and darker themes are touched on that leave an odd, haunting effect. It's a strange novel.

Galactic Pot-Healer is in many ways a companion novel to "A Maze of Death" and also "Flow My Tears...". Similar in the emotional range of the story and the interactions between characters. It is less philosophical than "Man in the High Castle", yet contains a provocative view point.

Surrealism, absurdity, dadaism, abstraction. The twentieth century gave us plenty of words to describe the movement in art that eschewed normal dedication to order and jumbled together randomness, or at least stuff that might look random. Detractors argue, of course, that anyone can throw together nonsense. And they're right, of course. But it takes a genius to produce good nonsense.

Joe Fernwright works as a healer of ceramic pots in a huge androgynous office complex in Cleveland. Business is slow, especially since ceramic pots have been outlawed in favor of plastic. To make matters worse, the government forces its citizens to dream about the glories of Che Guevera, inflation is diminishing his earnings, and he gets only limited use from telephone diciontaries and encyclopedias. Joe is almost ready to give up when someone badly in need of pot-healing services starts dropping messages in his toilet. After this mysterious benefactor transports him inside a crate, which he learns about by means of a radio show, Joe joins dozens of others on a galactic quest to Plowman's Planet where an enormous liquid (maybe) entity called Glimmung wishes to raise a gigantic cathedral from the depths of Mare Nostrum. Or possibly Hell. After that things really get strange.

Of course, as with Douglas Adams or Neil Barrett there's much more at work here than pure silliness. The insanity is all being carefully orchestrated so as to make us think about the big questions of redemption, indivdiualism, determinism, death, purpose, and many others besides. And the philosophy in turn gives way to yet more insanity, such as when Joe argues with a computer over whether Glimmung's arch-nemesis' victims are sitting ducks or sitting hens.

Phillip K. Dick obeyed few of the rules that any beginning writer is told to follow. But time and again, when we read his works we see his shrewd insight cutting effortlessly through the morass of modern thought. Consider at the start where Joe and other bored office drones play "The Game", which consists of running English phrases through a compujterized translator to Japanese and then back to English, and then trying to figure out the original phrase from the result. Absurd, no? Except that in our modern world, thanks to the wonder of the internet, many folks actually play such games with the Babblefish program, and often with hilarious results. That's Phillip K Dick for you. Don't laugh too hard at his notions, because they might get sneaky and come true.