The Man in the High Castle

Having read other Philip K. Dick novels, I didn't really expect this book to have a point or a clear conclusion, but I never expected to find it so.. upsetting. The vision presented in the novel is frightening, interesting at times, and at other times boring enough to make me skim through the pages. And then the entire thing just sort of fizzles out and ends with a whimper. 2.5, I guess? It was okay.

Another book I would have never read if not for my book club, especially because I don't really enjoy narratives where the Nazis win. And being such an old book, I had some trouble understanding the writing style and sometimes even the vocabulary, and I feel like a lot of the meta commentary and philosophizing went way above my head. I also didn't care much for any of the characters to feel invested in.

I still thought it might have a good ending that would make it worth my effort but that conclusion just blew my mind because I did not understand a single thing about what actually happened. What the f was that???? Just makes it feel like all the time I spent reading was pointless.

If you enjoy reading older books and award winners, then this might be for you. But like me, if you are more into modern writing styles and more accessible storytelling, I wouldn't recommend picking this one.

I watched the Amazon pilot episode yesterday so I had to read the book, which I finishing in two sittings, to my surprise. P.K. Dick is a very compelling writer even though I don't think I fully understand where he was going with this book, which doesn't really have an ending, just an invitation to think about where we're all headed with our lives. Pretty interesting.

This is the week I've been waiting for for months - the release of Amazon's series based on The Man in the High Castle! My obsession with this as-yet unreleased series started several months ago...

I've been listening to the Sword & Laser Podcast for about two and a half years, and it long been apparent that The Man in the High Castle was the favorite novel of Tom Merritt, one of the podcast hosts. I quickly came to respect the tastes of Tom and Veronica, and added The Man in the High Castle to my ever growing “to read” list. It was probably doomed to remain on that limbotic list indefinitely, but then Amazon posted the pilot for their upcoming series as part of a test program to see if they wanted to finance the rest of the series. I'd been curious about the book, so I figured I'd watch the first episode. By the halfway point I knew it was going to be good, but by the end I knew it was going to be phenomenal. So Phillip K. Dick's classic alternate history jumped to the top of my stack because I just couldn't wait until November to see how the story was going to end.

The Man in the High Castle is an alternate history about the United States if Japan and Germany had won WWII. The plot centers around a woman named Julia who finds a book about an alternative history of the United States and goes on a journey to find the author. The novel also has several subplots involving the political officials representing Japan and Germany, as well as Americans who are trying to find their place in society several years after the war.

What I've come to find about the works of Phillip K. Dick is that he tends to have amazing concepts and world-building, but less interesting characters and plot. The concept for The Man in the High Castle is brilliant, and presents an incredibly well thought-out alternate history. The characters are strategically placed in occupations that perfectly show the workings of this alternate society, and the characters themselves have very interesting and distinct desires. The ending of the novel, however, feels a bit anticlimactic after the buildup and suspenseful plot that leads towards the end of the book.

Which is perhaps why I'm so excited for the Amazon series. I was able to go to the High Castle Panel at San Diego Comic-Con this year, which has only made me more excited for the show. Based on the two episodes I've seen so far, the series is attempting to be faithfully painful to the world created by Philip K. Dick, while creating the sorts of story lines and drama that are more successful for a visual media. The sets, costumes, and acting are all amazing, and they have perfectly created the world that PKD envisioned in his original novel.

The novel is a classic example of alternate history, and although I wasn't overly excited by the ending, I still think it is well worth reading. While I believe the adaptation will create a more exciting plot and explore the characters more deeply than in the original book, I still think it was an enjoyable and intellectually stimulating read. It isn't my favorite novel of all time (sorry Tom!), but I'm very glad I read it. I think this is the sort of novel that anyone can read and enjoy, and I'm excited that it may find a larger audience with the Amazon Prime series release.

World War II could have very easily gone differently. It's easy to play with what-ifs and get to a scenario in which the Allies lost. Which is exactly what Philip K. Dick does in The Man in the High Castle. The victorious Axis powers of Germany and Japan (Italy, amusingly, has been sidelined in the 15 years since victory in the book's timeline) have divided up the former United States into two power centers, the Pacific States of America and the Eastern United States. The area around the Rockies forms a buffer zone between the two. Hitler is still alive, but very ill, and intrigue around the succession to German leadership is rife.

There are several parallel storylines. In one, a man named Bob Childan owns an antique store in San Francisco, where he sells nostalgic Americana to the Japanese ruling class. Unknown to him, a good number of those items are not genuine antiques, but rather high-quality fakes made by a corporation called Wyndam-Matson. One of the workers there is Frank Frink, who is hiding his Jewish identity. He has bigger dreams than knockoffs, though, and he and a coworker begin a small business creating original metalwork jewelry (which he consigns with Childan's shop). Meanwhile, Frank's ex-wife Juliana has been living and working in neutral Colorado when she meets a trucker, Joe, and they take a road trip to meet Hawthorne Abendsen, the author of a banned book called The Grasshopper Lies Heavy, which is set in a world in which the Allies did in fact win WWII. And a Swedish industrialist, Baynes, arrives in the US on a mysterious mission.

Sometimes I get the impression that parallel storylines are a way to write around not having a real plot, and that's what it felt like was going on in this book, for me. It didn't seem like Dick had an actual story he wanted to tell based in a world in which the war had turned out differently, it seemed like he started thinking about what it might be like, generally, if such a thing had happened, and then created characters to represent what that would might be like. It's a thought experiment, not really a “novel” per se. This would also explain why those characters are often so shallow...I found myself often confused about which character's storyline I was in because their thought processes were all so similar that it was hard to to tell. For a reader like me, who relishes character development, this meant that it wasn't an enjoyable book.

It might have worked better if Dick was a stronger prose stylist and had worked more to make the I Ching philosophizing elegant, but he's a stronger on ideas than he is on the actual writing. The portions of the book set in Japanese-controlled San Francisco did get me thinking about how white Americans would react to a situation in which they were socially inferior as a class, so it's not like the book offered me nothing as a reader, but it was just okay at best on pretty much every front as a work of literature. If you enjoy speculative fiction that makes you think, this might be something you'd enjoy. If you're looking for a book to tell you a cohesive story, though, this is probably not for you.

Rating: 3.5/5
Rounded to 4 stars

Honestly, reading a book about the historical movements in literature and how to read classic books helped me so much with The Man in the High Castle by PKD.

I didn't understand everything, but I understood and saw more than I would have. This book is filled with postmodernist musings about the self, identity, history, and more. PKD brings in many attitudes and fears that the general audience in the 1960's would have understood.

I want to read this book again in a few years. It's slow and the characters and their lives are filled with activities that didn't interest me much, but I want to see if that changes now that I understand a bit more of the historical contexts within which the book was written and what themes PKD may have been writing about.

I Finished It. Going into this book, I was thinking it would be something dramatically different based on what I had heard of the Amazon show. Instead, I got a fairly bleak look at a world where Nazi Germany won WWII, with the Big Reveal literally in the last few pages of the book. Knowing Dick is one of the legends of science fiction, I expected some actual science fiction here and all I got was alternate history. It was a good book for what it was, just wasn't what I was expecting.

I read this Philip K. Dick classic after watching the Amazon series that was based on it. Whew! It's a completely different experience, and reaffirms my commitment to reading the books that films and TV shows are based on.

The premise is that Franklin D. Roosevelt was assassinated in 1934 and the Axis powers won World War II. Thus, what used to be the United States is divided into the Eastern two thirds which is ruled by Nazi Germany, the Pacific States which are ruled by Japan, and a buffer zone of Western non-coastal states which are a kind of free for all where agents of both super powers roam.

There are several plots underway in this dystopian world. One involves the Japanese trade minister in San Francisco, Tagomi, who is drawn into hosting a secret meeting between a German official and a supposedly retired Japanese general. Tagomi is a contemplative man who consults the I Ching regularly about his decisions. He experiences a crisis in his world view, partly as a result of the situation with the German official and the Japanese general, and partly through his dealings with Robert Childan, an antiques dealer.

Robert Childan, Frank Frink a skilled metalworker, and Julianna Frink his ex-wife, all have pieces of the plot which lead them to crises in their lives, both physical and spiritual. They are all touched, to some degree, by a popular and subversive book called The Grasshopper Lies Heavy, which shows the Allies winning World War II. The I Ching is also in wide use in this novel, even being said to have written The Grasshopper Lies Heavy.

The book ends without wrapping everything up in a bow or answering many questions. So much is left to the reader's imagination. I've read several Goodreads reviews where people were frustrated by that, but I think it is pretty effective. I am prompted to speculate about what this book means, if anything. What are the consequences or next steps for these characters? What will they value differently in their lives? In the Amazon TV show there is a fully fledged resistance movement, but there isn't one in the book. Could a Resistance arise out of the experiences of these characters and others?

1. Japan en Duitsland hebben de oorlog gewonnen, en zie Wikipedia voor de verdere beschrijving van het boek (opgelet, spoilers).
   
   Een klassieker, met recht en reden. Ik herlees om de zoveel tijd eens iets van Dick. Niet teveel na elkaar – een indigestie van ‘s mans verzamelde verhalen is me ooit slecht bekomen – maar toch om de zoveel tijd eens iets.
   
   Volledig aangeraden, dat spreekt.

Excelente historia alternativa que plantea como sería el mundo en caso de que el Eje hubiese ganado la segunda guerra mundial. Sin embargo el libro deja demasiados elementos abiertos o libres a la interpretación del usuario, y resulta un tanto confuso por momentos. Quizás sea un asunto de la traducción, pero demasiados elementos importantes que se dan por asumidos y que nadie se toma la molestia de explicar sus orígenes o conceptos fundamentales. Final abierto, quizás DEMASIADO abierto.