SCIENCE FICTION BOOK REVIEW: “The Owl in Daylight” by Tessa Dick (2008)

Yesterday we talked about “What if Our World is Their Heaven?” a book which transcribed the final interview with Philip K. Dick, in which he gave a detailed outline for the next book he intended to write, “The Own in Daylight.” Alas, he never lived to do so. Today we’re going to talk about “The Own in Daylight,” a book written by Tessa Dick, Phil’s widow, and published last year, and based on her reminiscences of Phil’s own, unwritten story.

Evidently she let it slip that she knew the story, and was begged by fans to please publish it. She says she attempted to capture the spark of his story - which, I’d have to say she succeeded at - but she did it without using his intended plot, as described in a letter he sent his publisher, and in the extensive interview in the book I reviewed yesterday. It does, however, use a lot of touches and flourishes from what we know about his unwritten novel, almost as an homage to an idea rather than an attempt to reconstruct the story by aping his style and notes. In fact, the author has said that she never actually read “What if Our World Is There Heaven,” and had no knowledge of the contents of its big interview while working on the book. It’s an interesting concept, and I’d have to say it works. In fact, intuitively I’d guess it probably works better than a more slavishly-literal reconstruction could be, since it’s got some of the fun and play and unpredictable spark of life in it that we usually expect from his work, which would probably be hard to come by otherwise.

The plot is fairly straight-forward PKD stuff: You’ve got a guy who’s a film score composer for schlock teen slasher films and monster movies. He’s successful, but in the typical idiom of a Dickian protagonist, he feels trapped and unappreciated by his job, and he’s having a hard time balancing his wife and his mistress. Unlike most of Phil’s books, he’s got a kid.

The protagonist stumbles haphazardly in to a cosmic struggle between light and dark, which results in him lapsing in to a coma during which he experiences a whole bunch of major instances from his own life, and is given the option of making different choices. At the same time, the supernatural struggle going on in the background and the ministrations of his family cause his subjective unreal world to have all kinds of reality shifts, many of which are deliberately reminiscent of some well-known incidents in Phil’s own life. These cause his dream state world to spiral off the tracks in to an odd combination of The Magic Flute and Dante’s Divine Comedy (Mostly the Inferno, but there’s a lot of Purgatorio in there as well). Faust also gets a name check.

It’s all fairly clever and written in a jaunty style that involves a lot of unexpected ping-ponging back and forth between people and situations. My personal favorite is when several of the characters turn in to owls for no adequately explained reason. A close second is some aliens who are on earth to do scientific research, but end up deciding to make a movie about the protagonists‘ dream, since