Flow My Tears, the Policeman Said

"The real, ultimate truth is that despite your fame and your great public following you are expendable, he thought. And I am not. That is the difference between the two of us. Therefore you must go and I remain."

So muses the police general, Felix Buckman, on the fate of Jason Taverner, ill-fated celebrity who undergoes one of Dick's most disorienting reality-shifts. I've read this innumerable times, but this time my attention was least focused on the police state apparatus- where you can be micro-detonated at their pleasure- or the bewildering drug effects that precipitate JT into an alternative reality- but more on the relationship between the TV host and the scores of women who encounter him throughout the book. Maybe I've been reading too many feminist reviews of PKD, but it struck me this time how quirky and psychotic some of these portrayals are. I read in one review that one of Dick's fixations here is love, which is true; but he strives throughout this book- maybe more than any other- to invent female personalities that form a spectrum of psychosis ranging from the paranoid dementedness of Kathy to the more conservative anxiety of Mary Anne. Taverner meets about 7-8 women during the course of this book, and they all seem to exhibit mental derangement of some kind. The dialogue conveys this with its mixture of film noir and absurdist strangeness which is compelling in its own way. It's the case that Dick worked through his problems with women in his books, but usually the hero only has to deal with one or two. In contrast, Taverner like a urban mythological Ulysses has to fight, berate, comfort, abandon a whole score of them, which I think is the only example of this in Dickfiction. As to the police state, that is truly frightening with its octopoid grasp of daily human activity through surveillance, which is apt to malfunction, with devastating results for the innocent victim. Dick was flagging a warning here to us future dwellers. So yes, I still love the book which, I gather, is mentioned extensively within the "Exegesis" as Dick tries to interweave its themes with his visionary, conceptual explosion which occured about the time it was written- 1974, his 1984.