The Transmigration of Timothy Archer

Philip K. Dick's The Transmigration of Timothy Archer is definitely worth a read. Telling a fictionalized story inspired by James Pike, only Dick could get away with writing a novel from a first-person female narrator and juxtapose transmigration of souls and theology themes with Berkeley "professional students," the drug subculture, mental illness and the death of John Lennon. Poking fun at the Bay Area "scene," Dick successfully weaves together these seemingly disparate themes to tell a story of Angel Archer, the daughter-in-law of Bishop Archer, as she experiences the deaths of her loved ones and struggles to move on. Since James Pike is the inspiration for Timothy Archer, and, of course, the author is Philip K. Dick, there's a religious conspiracy at the heart of the novel (Zabokites predating Christ by two centuries, anokhi mushrooms) and the ultimate question of life after death, theophany-type experiences (Dick experienced this in the 1970s, and his literature was forever changed). Although this is, to my knowledge, the only Dick novel with a female narrator, Angel is not too different from what one relative tells me is the typical profile of Dick's characters: people on the lower socioeconomic scale, working basic or lower level jobs, but thrust into situations of immense importance. Angel is the epitome of this trend, and is forever tied to the university and struggling to escape, never willing to go so far as to take that leap of faith, that will to believe in the impossible because it is impossible. In that regard, she is not like the character in A Maze of Death who is willing to take the chance and believe in the impossible. Naturally, Dick leaves things rather ambiguous and up for the reader to decide on their own on how to interpret Archer's character and transmigration...