Radio Free

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Radio Free Albemuth
$13.95
I wonder what Philip K. Dick thought of Radio Free Europe, the American show broadcast to anti-American nations during and after the Cold War. He had little patience with any totalitarian system, so he may have thought it was a good idea to invade evil empires with ideas. He certainly thought enough of the notion to base this novel on it. In this case, though, it's not just evil nations being invaded by ideas, it's all of Earth.

Within the story, there's no Radio Free Albemuth as such - that's a joke between some of the characters trying to figure out what's happened to their friend Nicholas Brady - but there is a broadcast from space that locates certain people and attempts to free them from the evil illusion that Earth is. Nicholas, like a few thousand others, comes to see by this extraterrestrial effort that Earth is under the thrall of a vast wickedness, and that the information beamed into his brain is in the nature of an invasion by a Vast Active Living Intelligence System. (Yeah, it's VALIS, from the later PKD novel of the same name, which makes this novel a sort of first pass at the later story. Hold your horses, we'll get to that.)

In some ways, this sort of moral invasion sounds like a pretty a good idea. It's an even better idea in the world of "Radio Free Albemuth", an alternative America in which one Ferris F. Freemont has won the American presidency and turned the county into a Stalinist police state, under the guise of fighting Communist infiltration at home. This is pretty scary for ordinary citizens like Nicholas's close friend Philip K. Dick, the science fiction writer. Such citizens find themselves under constant observation by the Friends of the American People, a sort of volunteer secret police who bully others into informing on their friends and neighbors. For someone like Nicholas himself, this state of affairs is even more tense. Not only is he under surveillance like everyone else, he's also in touch with an extraterrestrial (and maybe divine) enemy of the state. And there's always the possibility that he may just be nuts.

Complicating matters further is the fact that all of this is loosely based on events that occurred in PKD's own real life in 1974. "Radio Free Albemuth" may have been one way for him to sort through his experience, but it doesn't always make a good novel. For instance, as you may have noticed, he more or less divided himself in half here - Nicholas has the experiences and "Phil" watches. By naming a character after himself, PKD evidently sought to consider his materials coolly and figure out just what the truth was. This is fine for an essay or philosophical treatise, but a novel usually requires a little more heat.

What's more, Phil and Nicholas trade off narrating "Radio Free Albemuth," so this division doesn't really even work as a distancing device. What's the point of ascribing all your pain to a fictional character if you're then going to inhabit that character in the first person?

Phil and Nicholas, and Nicholas's wife Rachel, also spend a lot of time discussing the ethics and cosmology that Nicholas receives by divine broadcast. It makes for some fascinating reading here and there - PKD's prose had been improving for several years by this time, and "Radio Free Albemuth" is no exception to that process. Nevertheless, the exposition slows the novel way down, which is a shame. After all, with this setup, the novel had a perfect opportunity to join the ranks of paranoid thrillers like "The Parallax View" and "The Manchurian Candidate", but it doesn't really work to interrupt a thriller periodically for philosophical/theological discourse.

Okay, so it's not a paranoid thriller. I have a sneaking hunch that PKD wrote "Radio Free Albemuth" to comfort himself after some years of genuine agony - to assure himself that the world had some meaning, that he would be okay one day, and that eventually the good guys would win. If I'm at all on the right track about this, it was a wise choice. As you might guess, by writing a story for himself, PKD came up with a story for the rest of us.

Now, he was too much of a realist to tack on a happy ending - even in his earliest days he almost never did that. With this story, as the narration itself points out, we're considering a worldwide global empire of evil established nearly two thousand years ago, opposed by a small cadre of men and women largely unknown to each other, all of whom hear voices in their heads. This is not "Star Wars". The Empire strikes back with a vengeance and the good guys' victories are much smaller. They are there, however, and that's what gives "Radio Free Albemuth" its teeth. I said earlier that novels require more heat than expository works, and as a matter of fact the finale of "Albemuth" has enough emotional punch to satisfy anyone, whether PKD put it there deliberately or not.

A good many commentators have suggested that this novel was a sort of first draft for "VALIS", which found a publisher during PKD's lifetime where "Albemuth" did not. At some point I'll discuss whether "VALIS" was more deserving of that distinction than "Albemuth". For now, suffice to say this: The fact that "Radio Free Albemuth", with its message of small but potent victory over death and destruction, found a publisher at all and can be read by you and me, is in itself one of those small victories. Like so much of PKD's work, especially his later stuff, it makes you feel good at the end. Read and enjoy.

Benshlomo says, The little things aren't as little as they seem.

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