The Man in the High Castle
by Philip K. Dick
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Book Summary Information
Author: Philip K. DickEdition: Paperback
Audio: English (Unknown); English (Original Language); English (Published)
Published: 1992-06-30
ISBN: 0679740678
Number of pages: 272
Publisher: Vintage
Book Reviews of The Man in the High Castle
Book Review: Worlds Within Worlds Within Worlds...
Summary: 5 Stars
I can think of several other Philip K. Dick books that should have won prestigious prizes like the Hugo award, but if there could only be one, "The Man in the High Castle" is a good choice. The Hugo is a fan award, and this novel's alternate-history setting makes it a definite crowd-pleaser, but such a gimmick by itself would not have been enough to earn praise. Instead of explaining how the Axis won World War II (boring), this author simply took the difference for granted, and asked himself how people would actually live in circumstances like that.
Needless to say, they get along as best they can, as people do in real life. It can be rather more difficult to do so than we are used to, though. Robert Childan, for instance, a dealer in American historical handcrafts and memorabilia, has to contend with the intricacies of Japanese culture when dealing with his clients - a tricky business for someone who wasn't raised in it. Frank Frink, a metalworker and secret Jew, has to struggle with business realities while waiting for some Nazi to find out who he really is. His ex-wife Juliana (one of PKD's comparatively few female characters with any decency) has to consider the possibility that her new boyfriend's secretiveness has a political dimension, as do most things in the postwar world.
Then there's Mr. Tagomi, the Japanese trade representative in San Francisco and the novel's true focus. As a conquering Japanese in the postwar Pacific States of America, you'd think he'd have it pretty easy, but he too has to contend with secret political shenanigans, especially when they come in the form of a Swiss commercial traveler who may not be what he seems. This eventually forces him to examine himself more closely than comfort will allow.
And while all of this is going on, everybody's getting all in a state about a novel called "The Grasshopper Lies Heavy", and no wonder - it's the story of what the world would have been like if the Allies had won World War II.
That's Philip K. Dick all over. He sets up a plausible, if slightly wigged out, scenario and then pulls the rug out from under you. It's all part of the ride.
"The Man in the High Castle", however, has a few things to recommend it even beyond the author's usual brilliance. The amazing imagination, the characterization, the setting - you expect all that in PKD. What you get here that doesn't always show up in the man's other novels is the stylistic touch. I've said before that, while he could be brilliant when on his game, he wasn't usually a great stylist. This is a glaring exception, especially in those passages dealing with the Japanese or those who aspire to acceptance by them. The prose in those passages is couched in a sort of formalized pidgin English, lots of sentence fragments and missing articles - "he lit up a marijuana cigarette, excellent Land-O-Smiles brand", for instance. The farther the characters get from the Japanese sphere of influence, the more standardized their English becomes. Although I wonder if some might find the pidgin offensive, it's a magnificent tactic, making the setting seem utterly alien without spending a lot of time on formal descriptions.
PKD was often at his best when he had some outside structure to his plots. Without that, he could lose himself in the inventiveness of his ideas - with it, his wilder tendencies served him very well. In "High Castle", he had such an outside structure in the "I Ching", the ancient Chinese oracle which just about everyone in the novel consults. This marks about the first appearance of the I Ching in an American novel, but its importance here lies in the way the oracle can rob the characters of power or bestow it on them, depending upon their state of mind going into the consultation.
Which brings us to the novel's themes. Read this novel carefully and you discover that most of the characters suffer from a profound sense of dislocation. There's a very simple reason for that, which you learn when Juliana Frink encounters the author of "The Grasshopper Lies Heavy," but even more compelling is the evident fact that physical objects have a power here that the characters gradually learn to recognize. Such recognition, at least in this novel, is an important part of Japanese culture, but these people come to see this power in a very immediate fashion. Some find it in ancient Japanese ceramics, some in Americana (whether genuine or not), and finally some find it in newly-crafted jewelry. Wherever it shows up, the characters tend to regain a sense of their roots. The results can be quite astonishing.
You may notice that little of this seems particularly science fictional, except in the most technical sense. Apart from one scene near the end, when Mr. Tagomi finds himself in a very different San Francisco than the one he knows, "The Man in the High Castle" is not so much a science fiction novel as a mainstream novel from a science fiction universe. Considering that PKD longed for mainstream success as well as success in sf, this may be the best of both worlds.
And with that, my friends, we have come to the end of Philip K. Dick's bibliography - if you've been reading me regularly, you and I have reviewed all of his surviving novels. Now you might consider his shorter fiction - well over 100 stories, all attractively available in great big paperbacks. And let's all consider what we're going to do without his great big lunatic empathy and imagination. Guess we'll just have to provide those things for ourselves - he told us we could.
Benshlomo says, Good people can survive anything.
Summary of The Man in the High Castle
It's America in 1962. Slavery is legal once again. the few Jews who still survive hide under assumed names. In San Francisco the I Ching is as common as the Yellow Pages. All because some 20 years earlier the United States lost a war--and is now occupied jointly by Nazi Germany and Japan.This harrowing, Hugo Award-winning novel is the work that established Philip K. Dick as an innovator in science fiction while breaking the barrier between science fiction and the serious novel of ideas. In it Dick offers a haunting vision of history as a nightmare from which it may just be possible to awake.
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