Galactic Pot Healer

We don't have to love everything the man wrote.

You have to admire Dick, though, for his vision. I get the sense, reading Galactic Pot Healer, that he had expected the work to come out vaster, more weighty than it did. Here, admirably, Dick tackles some of his favorite themes - the crushing weight of conformity, what it means to be useful v. what it means to create ... the nature of perfection. The problem is, clocking in at just under 200 pages, these vast ideas come off feeling a touch undercooked. There are moments of profundity, no doubt, but these are few, and seem to duck quickly off-stage as though embarrassed amidst the light hurly-burly of the rest of the novel. You know that friend that you have, who really means what he's saying about the terror of neo-liberalism, but can't help turning his convictions into purile jokes at the party because he doesn't want to be so gauche as to seem sincere? Yeah, that's what this book was like...

Galactic Pot Healer, which I, like you, originally assumed dealt with the interstellar medicinal qualities of marijuana, actually chronicles the existential traverse of one man from a future totalitarian Earth (about as bleak as you might expect from Dick) to a backwater planet where a vast, godlike alien has summoned him to help restore a sunken, mystical cathedral from the depths of a stygian sea. Along the way Dick makes his typical satirical jabs at authority - not hard enough to draw meaningful blood, but enough to identify the joker as a rebellious sort. Dick's protagonist muses over which seems worse: an impossible, mysterious quest, or a meaningless descent into madness as a cog in a broken machine called Earth. Is it better to burn out, or to fade away? The book proceeds because he chooses the quest, and we are introduced to a team of galactic experts assembled to provide different aspects of what at first blush appears to be an alien undersea archeological project. And then things get wierd. The rest of the novel's plot twists are more the surrealist variety... We likely all have our favorite modes of the Surreal (Make Mine Murakami!) and those surreal modes which seem jarring, manic and annoyingly self-indulgent (*cough* Vonnegut *cough* Slaughterhouse Five *cough*). Guess how I felt about the rest of the novel? Actually, later in the film I started to imagine scenes from the novel in terms of visuals from the conclusion of Miyazaki's Spirited Away... I'm not sure that's what Dick intended. And I liked Spirited Away way, way, way more... To the point that I began to think "I feel like dropping this silly novel and going to watch Spirited Away..."

I'd prefer not to resort to a silly review just because I felt that this was a silly novel. The protagonist in the novel's trade is that of a "pot healer," that is, he is able through some future technology to heal ceramics in such a way as to leave no trace of their former brokenness. Sound metaphoric? The alien female with whom he pairs' specialty is removing the age-old encrustations of coral from sunken relics. And beneath a vast ocean lies the mystical ruin of Heldscalla, the alien cathedral... The ocean threatens living death - an eternity of decay, without hope of release into nothingness. The godlike alien is compared again and again, annoyingly overtly to Faust, though I wonder just how familiar Dick was with that work - the comparison rang false. World-spanning themes like sacrifice, identity, and the magnificence of human imperfection are danced through: not laughed at, granted, but sort of waved at, as though from the window of a truck being driven by a rope-tailed Werj. There was plentious material here - and I scented some great ideas. But something about this soup just didn't marry. The prose was good, even haunting at times. The characters less good, and in the end the story just not very compelling.

I don't know, maybe the novel wasn't that bad. It's one of those books about which I'd say try for yourself and see what you think. And then not at all be surprised if it became your new favorite Dick novel, or if it caused you to swear off Science Fiction for a few months in disgust. All I know is that I saw potential, and then not much payoff. Which, in a sense, is what the book is about...

Final grade: B/B-
Re-read? Not likely.