The Transmigration of Timothy
Archer by Philip K. Dick
A Mighty Fine Novel, Makes The Miraculous Believable
Loosely based on the story of Bishop James Pike, Dicks last novel tells of
an erudite man of the cloth whose faith is shaken by the suicides of his son
and mistress, and then transformed by his bizarre quest for the identity of
Christ.
Personal Review: The Transmigration of Timothy Archer by
Philip K. Dick
Considering how the strange the title is (calling to mind, at least for me,
"The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch" for some reason) this is a
surprisingly normal book. The last book that Dick published while he was
alive, and nominally part of the final trilogy of his novels, it is probably the
most normal thing I've ever read from him. Like the previous two novels it
deals with issues pertaining to the nature and existence of God (or an
entity that could be described as "God") but unlike those novels more or
less dispenses with science-fictional or fantastical elements in an attempt
to just be straightforward about it. There's no mystical weird satellites or

colonies on other planets or anything like that. It could take place in this
world, and for the most part does (there's one nod toward the surreal
toward the end but you could interpret that in a few ways) which lends it a
kind of weight that the more psychedelic stories can't always manage
when they start to spin off into the places where our minds can't follow.
The story is narrated by Angel Archer who was married to the son of
Bishop Timothy Archer. The Bishop is engaged in a quest to puzzle out
the nature of God, a quest that starts to become more important as the
personal tragedies start to pile up and questions like "where do we go?"
and "what happens when we do?" take on an urgent nature. Dick's
characterizations are at his best here, the narrator Angel is by turns
numbed and stubborn, raw and sensitive, dancing around the topics even
as she's trying to face them head on. It's a bleak story, with nobody really
seeming to find what they want and characters sort of fading away as they
wonder if there is a meaning to anything. In the center of it all is Bishop
Archer, who is constantly questioning, even when the questions aren't
really that pleasant (or even that relevant sometimes), pushing out in quest
after quest to try and understand what nobody else really can, because he
has to, because it may be the most important and impossible thing in the
world. Archer's questionings may be futile or may eventually lead to a
small insight into the grand fabric of things, but at least he makes the
attempt, even if he goes about in the wrong way at some points. Being a
late-period Dick novel it does suffer a bit from his attempts to blend
different philosophies and religions together, leading to several scenes
where people just quote obscure stuff at each other in lieu of making an
actual point. It wasn't too bad this time out (or maybe I'm just getting used
to it) or it may be helped by the fact that for once he has a genuinely
touching narrative surrounding all the arguments so even when the plot
takes a break to make room for philosophizing, it feels like a natural
extension of things. But Archer's dogged persistence into finding the truth,
if one really exists, is both hopeless and inspiring and perhaps mirrors
Dick's own thoughts. A good summation of where his head was at the end
of his life, it's not the one you turn to when you want your mind bent but it
does bother to ask some questions that even today we don't have real
good answers for.
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