snpmurray's Full Review: Philip K. Dick - The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldr...
An exploration of the nature of self and soul, The three Stigmata is one of Philip K Dick’s masterpiece works.
Barney Mayerson has a rather unusual job. In his office in New York, he sits all day and examines pieces of art, technology and assorted varieties of material goods, and uses his significant skills as a precognizant to determine whether his company could make money off them in the future.
Barney works for a rather unusual company too. His boss is Leo Bulero, biologically enhanced mogul and sole owner of Perky Pat Layouts, the most popular mass-marketed material goods line in the history of mankind. Perky Pat is a beautiful, alluring, blond-haired miniature doll, and she and her muscular and charming boyfriend are the main focus of attention for countless humans living on primitive colonies throughout the solar system.
These colonists have the misfortune to have been randomly selected by their governments to be drafted into the first phase of colonization of our system. This is unfortunate indeed, since the massive machines and many bacteria required to make the planets and moons hospitable have only just got to work….there is little in the way of color in their lives, and their habitations are nothing more than drab hovels. Deprived of social lives, material goods (too heavy to afford to transit), and hope (the draft is for life), the colonists have found their own form of entertainment…in the drug known as Can-D.
Can-D (also controlled by Leo Bulero), once ingested, has the most incredible effect on the user. Having first set up their hovel with a layout of Perky Pat and all her latest toys, houses, appliances, and friends, the colonists ingest the drug and can live convincingly, if briefly, the lives illustrated by the dolls on the floor before them. It is make believe and fantasy taken to a almost supernatural level. So completely does it relieve the monotony that it is epidemic in the colonies despite being illegal.
This is all going swimmingly for all concerned until news comes that the entrepreneur Palmer Eldritch, presumed lost after twenty years in deep space, has returned to our solar system. It is rumored that he carries with him a new drug, more powerful and hallucinogenic than Can-D, and that it will ruin Perky Pat Layouts if Bulero and Barney Mayerson cannot foresee how to stop it.
Thus the stage is set for battle, and Mayerson foresees that Leo Bulero will in fact kill Palmer Eldritch. Resigned to this fate, Bulero sets out to confront and defeat Palmer Eldritch, but he has not counted on Eldritch having a secret weapon….the drug he calls Chew-Z. The drug is so powerful a hallucinogen that it knocks Can-D into a cocked hat psycho actively speaking. It invokes in the user an entire universe, distinguishable from reality only in so far as determined by ….none other than Palmer Eldritch. Whenever the drug is used, there is Eldritch, able to manipulate the subjective experience of the user. Thus Leo Bulero and Barney Mayerson becomes embroiled in a battle which they had not foreseen….let alone Bulero’s company, but his own life, and indeed the future of human consciousness itself seems to be hanging in the balance.
What is this drug? For that matter, what is Eldritch? Can they prevent the epidemic that would leave the entire human race at the mercy of Eldritch’s whim? Can they even do so much as to escape from a hallucination so real they cannot tell whether the drug has yet worn off? These and other amazing revelations await you in “The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch”
So much for the plot…….fantastic, eh?!
And here is a beautiful book, endowed with every gift the author could have bestowed upon it. An original and massive story, colorful and articulate characterizations, weird and wonderful inventions and imaginings, and wonderfully written scenes, which take the reader to places they have never been before.
Phillip Dick presents us here with an illustration of the futility of trying to answer the question….
“What is reality?”
Both Can-D and Chew-Z produce alterations of consciousness so profound that a religion is rapidly forming around them. All colonists who have consumed Can-D have experienced first hand a change in perception so complete that their view of subjectivity has changed forever. Eldritch’s Chew-Z differs only from its predecessor by one order of magnitude, but this dissolution of category, where the border between hallucination and waking state is lost completely, is a step too far. Dick unravels reality for the protagonists. Bulero and Mayerson are going on a wild ride, and we can come along too, from the relative reality of our favorite armchairs!
Difficult to write, Philip Dick does a masterful job of managing to illustrate hallucinations of improbable magnitude and simultaneously maintain context, such that the reader can step with only minor difficulty, from objectivity to the subjective. One wonderful scene during the involuntary introduction of Bulero to the drug Chew-Z has him wandering a mental landscape which crosses the barriers of both subjective reality, and also of space, and time. Conversing with future humans, contemplating a plaque commemorating his victory of Eldritch, Bulero is viewed by the future humans as a phantasm, whilst up comes Eldritch in similar astral form, in the guise of a small dog, to show its’ cocked-leg distaste for such a memorial.
You get the somewhat warped picture?
The protagonists are frightened, confused, disoriented and desperate. Leo Bulero is gradually led to learn the lesson that the vagaries of material life are of little concern if one can no longer rely on ones own sense of self, and continuity of consciousness. Chew-Z permits Eldritch to reach the most innermost regions of the characters own minds, and in discovering Eldritch there, the final answer to the question of who and what Eldritch is will shock them both, and change the world forever.
This novel deals in the mystical adeptly. Dick lays on clear overtones of religiosity, and the nature of godhood. What properties has a man which God does not, and vice versa? By allegory, and with a slow creeping satirical humor, this novel seeks to provide one possible answer.
Many of the flights of fancy in this book have provided me with good thinking and pondering material. Bulero is so wealthy he has been able to afford to have himself evolutionarily enhanced. Artificially accelerated to become what humans of the future might be, he is possessed of enormous frontal lobes, and a chitinous coating. This book here pokes fun at the idea of medical enhancement. Barney Mayerson’s ex-wife is maimed by the very same treatment which moves Bulero forward, moving backward through her own evolution in a sad, touching (and fascinating) way.
The huge satire that is “Perky Pat” and her layouts was totally inspired! The author plays this for all it is worth, he touches on it from many angles. For example the hilarious consequences of the same dolls being occupied by more than one user…we observe the imminent virtual adultery of two users ruined, as their real-life partners arrive in the same dolls bodies, and all pull in different directions. There is, of course, an underlying commentary on the futility of product fetishism. I enjoyed that immensely.
I enjoyed this book a great deal. You will need to be in the mood for this, or able to get in the mood. The shifts between one reality and another, and the subtle shifts in perspective can leave you reeling, and leafing back through the pages if you try to read too quickly. Having said that, I give it a high recommendation. Like any great book, I have left it with possession of experiences I would never have known any other way.
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