Philip Dick's unfinished novel, The Owl in Daylight, to be written by Tessa Dick

24 September 2008

Gerard Wood

Earlier this year we chatted with Philip K. Dick’s fifth wife, Tessa, about the forthcoming biopic of her husband. Starring Paul Giamatti in the role of Phil Dick and with a screenplay by Tony Grisoni (Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas), The Owl in Daylight promises to interweave an account of Dick’s life with elements of his fiction. By all accounts the movie will focus on events in the 1970s, in particular Dick’s infamous visionary experiences of March 1974 when he claimed to have been contacted by an extraterrestrial force called VALIS (Vast Active Living Intelligence System) via a beam of pink light.

Much of the remainder of Dick’s life involved understanding, explaining and communicating this experience.

Tessa, who married Phil in 1973, has first hand experience of these events and has stated that “from the beginning, and always” she has taken his visions seriously. Although divorced in 1977, they remained close, so much so that Phil asked her to take him back, to which she finally agreed in late 1981.

For a number of reasons, Tessa is not excited by The Owl in Daylight movie project. Asked by Etienne Barillier of the Dickien website “what does it feel like to know that an actress will play your part?” she responded, “I try not to think about that movie. No actress could capture me, but perhaps she will come across the way Phil described me” (in The Dark Haired Girl). She is not optimistic about the project either, telling us, “This biopic promises to present another fantasy of drug-induced paranoia sprinkled with peppery females who drag the great author down into the gutter”.

The Owl in Daylight is also the title of the novel Dick was working on at the time of his death in 1982. Very little material exists for this unfinished novel and it might be more accurate (if poor English!) to say that it is his unstarted novel. Except, as Tessa points out, Phil “spent months working out the plots for his novels” before committing them to paper: “The typing, however, is not the writing.”

An author in her own right, the news is that Tessa has taken up the challenge of completing the novel.

A reasonable question might be why it is that Tessa believes she is qualified to pick up where Phil left off? So, we asked her: “I believe that I am the only person who was close to Phil who actually took a serious interest in his life's work. He taught me more about content than mechanical writing skills. Besides, I lived through the 1974 experiences which inspired the VALIS trilogy, The Transmigration of Timothy Archer and The Owl in Daylight.” Earlier this year she told us that she had spent hours with Phil “discussing the situation of a man caught inside a computer-generated virtual reality. I have studied Goethe's Faust and Dante's Divine Comedy, and Phil explained to me in detail how they relate to the theme of his novel. It is simply a matter of sitting down and typing it...” As she explains on her blog, “I spent ten years with the man, and I participated in the writing of A Scanner Darkly and other works. I know how Owl should be told, and I am telling the story.”

If you would like a look at the work in progress, a preview edition of The Owl in Daylight is available at Amazon (see below). The completed novel will be available in mid 2009. You can find Tessa’s comments about The Owl in Daylight on her blog at http://tessadick.blogspot.com/2008/06/owl-in-daylight.html.

SFFMedia will review the novel when it is completed.

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