It feels wrong to write a meaningful review about a book which went mostly over my head. Perhaps that is a reassuring sign that I'm not an insane schizophrenic going through a drug fuelled religious awakening as may have been the case for PKD.
The book seems to wrestle with the question What's the meaning of it all? to which our Southern Californian heroes try to answer with very little success. Why did God kill my cat? Why did God give my friend cancer? Why didn't God save my friends from suicide?
They do, however, encounter something very real and divine in the form of VALIS which penetrates their minds from some underlying substratum of reality. Maybe. Or maybe it was some sort of Soviet MK Ultra gone wrong? Whatever it is, their mystical experiences reassures them they're NOT crazy--there IS something out there--but they still struggle to make sense of what's going on. PKD writes himself as one of the characters fatigued by the prolonged irrationality of it all:
It's yourself. Don't you recognize your own self? It's you and only you, projecting your unanswered wishes out, unfulfilled desires left over after Gloria did herself in. You couldn't fill the vacuum with reality so you filled it with fantasy; it was psychological compensation for a fruitless, wasted, empty, pain-filled life and I don't see why you don't finally now fucking give up; you're like Kevin's cat: you're stupid. That is the beginning and the end of it. Okay?
The manic oscillation between faith and nihilsm and the pain in between appears to mirror what Dick himself was going through at the time.
It could be projection but I think the book ends with the soothing idea that there is a Saviour after all. He might be somewhere in Micronesia but it's ok if we don't understand what that's all about.
Have you read the following books (Divine Invasion and Transmigration of Timothy Archer)?
Nope. I had assumed VALIS was his grand exegesis but it makes sense that it's part of a trilogy.