Philip K Dick has an obsession with diseased, ill, dying women. They've featured in each of the recent books I've read. Last time, it was cancer, this time, it is MS. They're (both times) used as motivating plot devices by the machinery driving the plot forward to make the protagonist have something to care about. Were it not for these decaying figures of femininity, the protagonists may just have nothing.
The Divine Invasion is the second book in Dick's VALIS series where he continues to go entirely far too deep into the exegesis of the first novel, only this time, with there being far more story and far less theological musing.
Still, its clear that the protagonist, Herb, is a raving lunatic to those that observe him. He hears the voice of God. He travels within a myriad of knowledge, seeming to flit from time to time (literally) from past to present to future and to worlds parallel and others only perhaps existing within his own consciousness.
Herb hears the voice of God, and is compelled to look after a woman who will paradoxically birth to God. Only, she's dying. Slowly. Painfully. Yet, at the same time, Herb may just be in cryonic suspension. But he also has a son. The son of the woman who is and was and will be dying. But he also owns and operates a radio and audio equipment store. But he also is a frontier man, living in a habitat rebroadcasting signals from a mother ship. But hes also a Father of a boy who he does not yet know to claim that he is God.
But hes also obsessed with Linda Fox, who is a singer who in some of Herb's realities is famous and played throughout the galaxy, and in another of Herb's realities, a young sultry, aspiring singer who becomes the target of his lust.
There are a lot of timelines, and they do not flow particularly logically or smoothly for the most part. The Divine Invasion isn't a story about a broken clock, but instead a story about changing individual variables in existence and then allowing the the outcomes to play out in a not entirely linear manner. It is also about oppression and control, with many memorable, amusing moments of prose about the government wanting to kill people. They become chilling as some sequences unfold.
It is entertaining, though; as an Atheistic individual, the religious segments of explanatory exposition to become a little too jarring and tiring. I cannot expect it not to be, given the title, and given the fact that there are widespread warnings about the fact that VALIS as a property is very much about Philip K Dick's very own religious and spiritual experiences.
I suspect it is also about the drugs of the era. There are some very fragmented and not entirely lucid sequences of dialogues and character interaction in the book. It very much has me imagining that the likelihood of certain substances being in the underlying formulation that compounded the book into being.
It is a fantastic journey, much like all of PKD's work, but I am rather glad to reflect upon this title, and eager to move into the next one in the series.