Sunday 23 May 2010

Philip K. Dick - The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch

This was my 4th PKD novel after Man In The High Castle, Scanner Darkly, Do Androids..?

PKD's idea doesn't really hit home until the last couple of chapters. It's still quite ambiguous. Whilst I enjoyed the book, I knew that if it was by another author I would have dropped it.

The character development in the book is awful. There were a fair few of them, and they didn't really differ. There was nothing to associate them with. The prose doesn't make up for this either. Perhaps the book would be better read in its entirety, rather than chapters or 2 a day.

I did like the book to some extent; mainly because I'm fairly familiar with PKD. You have to trust him, they say. I found myself glancing through the characters on Wikipedia for guidance... I think for all the faults this book isn't really worth reading unless you're a big PKD fan. PKD is all about the ideas, the paranoia, questioning reality, questioning everything.. In conclusion, without a decent background and accessible plot line, characters, prose.. The ideas don't exactly shine through... Those of us that read for longer periods of time and more slowly (you'll find yourself re-reading a lot of paragraphs in PKD stuff) will probably rate it better than I did.

"Reality is that which, when you stop believing in it, doesn’t go away."

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