Every once in a while, when the modern world seems especially insane, I read another Philip K. Dick book as a kind of therapy. Last time it was Time Out of Joint, ten years ago. On this very blog. I concluded: "I wonder: has the modern world come too closely to resemble Philip Dick's mindscape, that the impact of his novels is lessened?"
This time, I picked up
Galactic Pot-Healer, and came away with similar if slightly different feelings. Earthman Joe Fernwright has a dead-end job, with diminished prospects, fixing ceramic pots, in a future America that seems depressingly familiar to our own present, with an overreaching government that is bent on repressing speech and thought, and crushing dissent and artistic expression. The Glimmung is a strange and powerful being on Plowman's Planet, who brings Joe Fernwright and a host of various odd aliens there to raise an ancient sunken cathedral named Heldscalla from the deep ocean. There these beings discourse on the meaning of life and whether the ever-updating Book of the Kalends is completely prophetic. The Earth-based initial chapters were almost too painful to read, but once Joe Fernwright gets to Plowman's Planet, Dick's bizarre imagination takes over. The ending doesn't quite live up to the set-up, but it still is a window into Dick's highly unusual brain.
Dick wrote an earlier short children's novel about the Glimmung that was published posthumously as Nick and the Glimmung. There is a joy in reading it that is lacking in this adult novel.
