The Man in the High Castle

I didn't dislike it, but I also don't feel like I connected with it? I liked the initial structure of it feeling like multiple vignettes that had all connected somewhat to the same book. And while I understand what was happening, I felt like it wasn't quite hitting the right notes for certain characters or even the overall theme. In a lot of ways, it felt like it kept fumbling some of them. (Edit: Upon reflection, it isn't actually true that the stories were woven around the same book because three of the characters never actually engage with the book in any capacity and their stories don't even mention it from the background.)

It was fine. Not my favourite book, but it was okay.

I struggled to finish this book. The story didn't grab me and I didn't really care about what was going on until about 90% into it. All in all, I found it terribly unsatisfying and disappointing.

I read this book because I'd seen a couple of episodes of the TV series. Honestly, as usual, the book is better. They took a lot of liberties with the series (only way to stretch a relatively short book that long,) and the characters are sometimes quite different.

This is classic Phillip K. Dick. Dystopian alternative future. It's very conceptual, rather than character-driven, although a couple of the characters are better developed than the rest. Worth a read, for sure.

On the surface, The Man in the High Castle is another alternative history. In it, the Axis powers have won the war, and America is fragmented, with the eastern states ruled by Nazi Germany, an autonomous Rocky Mountain State, which acts as a demilitarised buffer zone, and Pacific Seaboard America, governed by the Japanese. An uneasy peace hangs over the world, with Germany undergoing internal political struggles while waging a prolonged cold war against Japan. These events, and their effects on society, are told on a very personal level, through the lives of Frank Frink, a salesman of fake American curios, Juliana, Frank’s estranged wife, Joe Cinadella a Nazi war hero, and Nobuske Tagomi, head of the Japanese Imperial Trade Mission in San Francisco.

Juliana, in particular, is affected by a popular book, The Grasshopper Lies Heavy, by Hawthorn Abendsen, which imagines a world where America and Britain were victorious, and the excesses of the Nazi regime were no longer a threat. The Asian influences on American society are also delicately realised, in particular with the reliance Frank and Juliana and others place in the I Ching, the ancient oriental method of divination (in fact Dick himself consulted the I Ching regularly in writing the book).

In typical Dick fashion, this is more than an alternative history. In writing The Man in the High Castle, which in turn is about Hawthorn Abendsen’s The Grasshopper Lies Heavy, Dick has turned a mirror back on itself, creating an infinite regression and questioning the nature of reality and our perception of it. Maybe the world of Castle is a mass-delusion; maybe our own is. Whatever the case, the ‘characters’ are trapped within its confines. But is the ‘real’ world any better, and would we choose to live there if we could? For this reason alone, Castle is a deeply enjoyable and thought-provoking read.