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17 of 17 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
Dick's strange Gnostic vision, December 28, 2003
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.
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8 of 8 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
A Visit from the Stars, March 17, 2004
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.
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5 of 5 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
Extremely Unique and Thought-Provoking, June 18, 2001
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.
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