For all the time I was reading Phillip K Dick’s Counter-Clock World I tried to decipher meaning(s) underneath the story. It can be tricky in a story that takes place in world like ours and is about real people, as real as you and me, and yet the historical context is entirely ingenious, a thing of imagination.
The world in Counter-Clock World is in reverse. Birth and death change method of expression, womb is the final refuse. Death and burial, the natural order of a Christian life, initiates re-birth that takes a person from old age to youth to childhood and finally to a baby who ends up inside the woman who would take it in her womb. A dead and buried person, or should I say body, undergoes recovery of the vital parts of his or her biological existence. There is also the concept of soul, a complex idea that Dick develops but does not elaborate, maybe he should have read Hinduism or maybe he did but the story is hardly about a discussion on soul and rightly so, but the narrative action does take place because of a religious tension that threatens to challenge some rooted ideas that have started to gnaw the social order. Once the person recovers and comes to his senses inside the coffin, he must call out for help and he is rescued by the summoned grave diggers, skilled, commercial and enterprising people.
The story, therefore, is as fantastic as one can expect from Dick. The novel takes place against this background or may be the background itself becomes the reason behind the story. Whichever way I see it I find the story incredible and entertaining. The allegory in the novel can be compared to John Bunyan's Pilgrim's Progress and Herman Melville's Moby Dick; the geography of Dick’s world can be a symbolic representation of our own decadence that finds expression through the representation of abstract ideas and principle by the characters and the events in the narrative. The cliché or saying that more things change, more they remain same suits Counter-Clock World. Human nature remains as mysteriously undefined as god is conspicuous. And religion as always remains a bone of contention for this dog-world. Dick captures a sense of uselessness of the human life despite all the sound and fury, love and sex, unexpected kindness and regular horror, constant ennui and counterfeited joy, and sadly in Dick’s world there is no light at the end of the tunnel.
The trouble with Dick is he never gives an explanation; the story doesn’t pause to reflect back, possibly that makes it a racy stuff, if you know what I mean. In a way Dick is just summarizing an event like a historian. A work of fiction, a science fiction, that reads like an observation of a particular piece of time – and we already know time is a complex tool here. The question though remains whether this work (by extension any work, if I may presume) of Dick will survive the Library. The Library in this novel is a self-sustained organization that meticulously destroys information, words (written or oral) are procured (by any means possible) and read and consigned to nothingness. The disambiguation of this world is a hard work and the Library is the voluntary agent.
Phillip K Dick is not as spontaneous as Ray Bradbury, but he is equally entertaining. I will not say who is a better writer, that’s for someone who enjoys one over the other, but the complexity of Dick allows him to be prosaic about a world that we may wake up to any day.
