Saturday, February 28, 2009

Eye in the Sky: A Novel

Eye in the Sky was written by the eponymous Philip K. Dick, he of Blade Runner ("Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?") and The Running Man, among other seemingly made for the big screen novels. Dick's meditations on consciousness are a running theme throughout all of his works, and Eye in the Sky is no different. In this tale, our hero Jack Hamilton and has just been given a choice at his military contractor job, where he works at a facility that contains the particle accelerator known as the Bevatron. Jack's wife, Marsha, is suspected of being a Communist sympathizer, and as a result Jack's job is at risk. Adding to the betrayal, Jack's friend Charles McFeyffe is head of security and leads the prosecution against them.

With Jack questioning his own wife's loyalty and choosing between his marriage and his career, Jack, Marsha, Charles, and a few other folks take a tour of the newly operating Bevatron. Then disaster strikes.

The Bevatron's particle beam tears through the visitor catwalk above, dumping eight people into it, including Jack, Marsha, and Charles, along with Bill Laws, an African-American scientist reduced to giving tours of the Bevatron; Arthur Silvester, a fundamentalist World War II veteran; Joan Reiss, a neurotic secretary; and Edith Pritchert and her son, a prim-and-proper patron of the arts. While their bodies lay crumpled on rubble of the broken Bevatron, their consciousnesses are whisked away to alternate universes created by each of the visitors.

In some ways, Dick was light years ahead of his time. Although the novel is obviously dated by references to McCarthyism, the challenges posed by each world couldn't be more apt for our modern times. The first world, created by Silvester, is a fundamentalist's dream, combining geocentric Christian and Islamic beliefs. Dick skewers both religions with one deft chapter, and the reference to Eye in the Sky has (among other parallels) a literal manifestation in Silvester's God. That's right, he's a big Eye of Sauron, so big that it looks like a gigantic lake.

Silvestri's world is either terrifying or hilarious, depending on your perspective. With the divine so intimately real, prayers manifest (one simply prays for money), God's wrath is always around the corner (transforming straying believers into hunchbacked damned souls), and science is a cult that nobody seriously practices. Dick shows just how capricious and dangerous an old Testament God would be, and the difficulty of navigating a modern world with such an omniscient presence.

And yet, Silvester's world has laws. Subsequent worlds range from the bizarre to the outright terrifying. Pritchet's world is one of absolute tranquility, a super-filter that causes anything offending Edith to disappear from existence. Again, Dick hits the mark: in the world of Tivo, the Internet, and politicized news channels, the ability to filter out dissenting opinions has become all too common. If it were literally true, Dick demonstrates how what might on the surface seem ideal rapidly descends into a very personal hell.

The next world is by far the most terrifying; If Mrs. Pritchet found everything offensive, Reiss is afraid of it all. The water is poisoned, houses literally try to eat you, and lurking inside every one of us is a cold, calculating insect just dying to burst free...

The final world brings us back to the crux of the conflict for Jack and Marsha - a Communist's view of what America must be like. The identity of the creator will ultimately determine if Marsha is guilty of being a Communist.

The book is not without its flaws. Dick comes off very much a political author who doesn't necessarily know the targets he skewers. A fight with angels devolves into a peculiar human-like brawl, with angels being kicked in the groin, skewered in the spleen with a hatpin (seriously), and otherwise being beaten up as if they were common thugs. No fundamentalist worth his bible would ever believe angels could be so easily defeated, much less beaten up.

Bill Laws, the African-American, is cast in a sympathetic light, but he has little to do. Laws never gets his own world and thus he seems more of a caricature, content only to chastise Jack on his own hypocrisy. Marsha comes off as whiny and self-centered, and her supposed interest in political causes makes her seem more like a suburban socialite with too much time on her hands than a believable advocate of human rights. And then there's Jack, who just comes off as an arrogant jerk most of the time.

And yet, Eye in the Sky is so far ahead of its time. Dick has set up a perfect series of foibles to demonstrate his own beliefs, and in doing so shows how we all barter our individual freedoms for religion (Silvester), peace (Pritchet), security (Reiss), and democracy.

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