2010 books

[peteryoung]

14) Tessa B. Dick, The Owl in Daylight, 2009
Given that Anne Mini's recent family memoir connected to Philip K. Dick was pulled prior to publication, I can't help but wonder if there were jitters in the publishing world about The Owl in Daylight, written by Dick's fifth ex-wife Tessa, that steered them away from any involvement in it. Or maybe there were other reasons. Unable to secure a publishing deal, Tessa Dick instead went down the self-publishing route and this novel bears no imprint. The main draw for buyers will no doubt be either to read it out of curiosity or because they are PKD completists, as it is connected to the few references Dick left behind which mentioned his plans for a novel which was to bear the same title – Dick's ideas as well as drasecretcampus's speculations about the plot can be found at Wikipedia here.

Tessa Dick has followed her own muse while writing the book Dick might have written, and in the spirit she believes he would have written it. 'The owl in daylight' was Dick's metaphor for blindness, and PKD enthusiasts are still stumbling around in the dark trying to grasp the story and concept he may have wanted to extract from the metaphor. If that indeed was Tessa Dick’s aim as well, I soon found that the best way to read The Owl in Daylight is actually not to do so as if it was the novel Dick may have written himself. As Dick has already appeared subjectively as the main character in other stories (notably Michael Bishop's The Secret Ascension) his appearance here, strictly speaking, ought to be considered more in that way rather than as another cameo of the kind that surfaced in much of his later work, post-1976. While Tessa Dick's two main characters of Art Grimley and Tony are drawn from events in the life of Dick himself (life-changing hallucinations, a job in a record store while writing short stories, dark-haired girls and an unsolved break-in), they still don't feel authentically 'Dickian' in that they haven't been penned by Dick himself; these are Tessa Dick's creations and ought to be regarded as such.

The plot bears many similarities to how Dick outlined it in conversation, transcribed in Gwen Lee’s What If Our World Is Their Heaven? which I read a few years ago. Art Grimley is a composer of B-movie soundtracks from Berkeley who wishes he could be more successful with serious music, while Tony is simply a younger version of Dick in his teens and twenties. When told as parallel narratives, Art's story broadly mirrors Dick's relationship with science fiction and mainstream literature, and involves an infection by an alien plasmate (also seen in VALIS and Radio Free Albemuth) which gives him visions of Tony's life whilst in a coma. Tony's story, after some rather good character building, suddenly digresses into an illusory experience in which he and his young wife become owls in a forest, whilst also experiencing a version of Dante's Purgatory. This lays on the allegory a bit too thick: to be blunt, it's a shame how weak this awkward fantasy section is and it's notable how it departs from the spirit of PKD dramatically, bringing down the authenticity of the novel as a whole. It wouldn't be any great loss if it was excised completely, although it contains several points about morality that could better be woven into the story elsewhere and necessarily in a more subtle fashion. Tony is the story within the story of Art Grimley, and while this idea works well in theory there needs to be more that directly links the two characters, and in considerably more detail, to do justice to the inner and outer aspects of this neat compositional structure.

The Owl in Daylight wasn't an eye-opening read by any stretch of the imagination. It draws on the PKD mythos while at the same time not actually adding anything of real significance, because we're still as much in the dark about Dick's own plans for his novel as we were before reading it. In Tessa Dick's own way and in her own style it's still a respectable attempt to make real something that might have been, although it could have benefitted from more editorial input. So yes, one for the completists and the curious, and there is also a sequel on the way, The Owl in Twilight.

Comments

[drasecretcampus.livejournal.com]

(Still) Odd to be cited as an authority - all I must have done was cited Rickman, Suvin and PKDS Newsletter descriptions, and maybe tried a little synthesis. It's not like I've read anything other than the published extracts of outlines.