Philip K Dick's life is divided into two parts by the crippling, yet weirdly productive, breakdown he

underwent in February and March of 1974. He was in a bad way at the time. His wife and child had left
him, he was strung-out and exhausted, and coming off pain medication from a wisdom tooth extraction.
In this delicate state, he opened the door to a delivery girl who was wearing a gold pendant of the
Christian ichthys symbol; as it caught the sun, Dick experienced a beam of pink light shooting
information directly into his brain. Over the next couple of months, he came to believe that real time had
ceased in 70 CE, that the Roman Empire was temporally superimposed over contemporary California,
that he was ‘really’ a first-century Christian called Thomas with three eyes, and that life on earth was
being directed by a ‘Vast Active Living Intelligence System’ orbiting Formalhaut.

This was not the first book he wrote after the experiences of ‘2–3–74’ (as he called it), but it is the novel
in which he addresses what happened to him, how it should be analysed, and what if anything it means.

There is something odd about the way some people write about this book and about Dick's breakdown in
general – as though the jury's out on whether it was a breakdown or a real mystical revelation. Did he
really receive a message from god, or was he just sick? fans ask. ‘Was Philip K. Dick a madman or a
mystic?’ I find this horribly coy, in fact I think it's irresponsible. A choice between mental breakdown and
the reality of three-eyed secret Christians from the star system Sirius living among us is no choice at all.
Philip K Dick had a fridge clinking with amphetamine bottles and he was, as he later put it: ‘at the trough
of my life, at the point where I saw nothing but inexplicable suffering.’ It is not surprising that something
snapped.

Which puts this book in an interesting light – I would hardly class it with works of neo-mysticism like
those of Hesse or Castaneda, but rather with books about people struggling with mental disorder. Some
sections call to mind One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest, or The Bell Jar. But the book I thought of most
while I was reading it was something else – an obscure novel by Evelyn Waugh, of all people, called The
Ordeal of Gilbert Pinfold. In this underrated gem, Waugh tells the story of an episode of psychotic
paranoia he experienced while on a cocktail of drugs and alcohol: the novel becomes a sort of
psychodrama in which Waugh battles with his own mind for authority over the evidence of his senses. In
the end, the rational Waugh wins out and the hallucinations cease.

Dick is doing something similar in VALIS, but the trajectory plays out differently. Taking a more radical
approach to the warring impulses in his mind, he splits himself up into two separate characters for the
purposes of the novel: ‘Philip Dick’, the rational author and narrator of VALIS, and Horselover Fat, the
subject of the hallucinations. Horselover Fat suffers a kind of breakdown, and interprets it as an all-
embracing religious experience; ‘Philip Dick’ argues with him and tries to keep him grounded in reality.
So Fat is free to expatiate on his own proliferating theology – stuff like this:

The primordial source of all our religions lies with the ancestors of the Dogon tribe, who got their
cosmogony and cosmology directly from the three-eyed invaders who visited long ago. The three-eyed
invaders are mute and deaf and telepathic, could not breathe our atmosphere, had the elongated
misshapen skull of Ikhnaton and emanated from a planet in the star-system Sirius. Although they had no
hands, but had, instead, pincer claws such as a crab has, they were great builders. They covertly influence
our history toward a fruitful end.

…and ‘Dick’ is free to comment – as he does after this passage—

By now Fat had totally lost touch with reality.

There is something quite witty in this interplay, in the constant switching between grandiose theorising
and immediate deflation. It's also reassuring. The structure tells you that he understands how mad his
theories are, and is dealing with them accordingly.

The problem is that it can't hold. As readers, we know they are the same person because he tells us so
right at the beginning, explaining it as a device ‘to gain much-needed objectivity’. Occasionally, the
narrator will slip up, and write things like: ‘Bob and I—I mean, Bob and Horselover Fat…’. And as the
book goes on, in a kind of bravura smudging of identities, the psychosis begins to seep from one
character to the other. The supposedly sane Dick finds himself believing Horselover Fat's theories. The
separation between them breaks down. ‘You're not crazy, you know,’ Dick says to Fat eventually (as I was
screaming, yes! he is!). Every other character gets sucked into Fat's orbit:

We were no longer friends comforting and propping up a deranged member; we were collectively in deep
trouble. A total reversal had taken place: instead of mollifying Fat we now had to turn to him for advice.
Fat was our link with that entity, VALIS or Zebra, which appeared to have power over all of us…

The author is literally going mad before our eyes. This process culminates in an extraordinary scene
where the two personalities finally merge – but by then, it is far from clear what we are supposed to
conclude from this. Dick and his friends see it as the return of his sanity – just as the real-life Dick, after
the pink beam experience, felt that he had been crazy all his life and was now made sane. From the
outside it looks like precisely the opposite. We can see that Dick's issues were not ‘fortean’, or
‘paranormal’, but medical.

That makes VALIS a more moving book than I was expecting. And deceptively well written: there are
enough clues in here to demonstrate that Dick understood perfectly well that it could be mental illness.
But the novel is carefully constructed to allow you no vantage point from which to make objective
conclusions about how Dick really feels – it's written, as it were, between mutually reflecting mirrors,
never settling on any one interpretation of the author, but bouncing back and forth forever between
different ‘hoax-like fluctuations of what used to be reality’