The Man in the High Castle

Finally found the time to read Philip K Dick's masterpiece The Man in the High Castle, something I missed when I last seriously interested in PKD in my late teens.

Set in an alternate 1960s America where Roosevelt was assassinated in 1933 and the Allies lost World War II, it imagines a world where the US has been divided between a Japanese-controlled area on the West Coast and a Nazi controlled zone on the East. The characters are, almost without exception, minor or middle-ranking members of society: a skilled machinist, a judo instructor, a dealer in early 20th century American ephemera, a trade delegate, and, as the lone exception to the rule, a senior Swedish executive.

Rather than explicitly describe the horrors of the Axis-dominated vision of the world, PKD brings it out through a series of everyday moments in the lives of his characters. Through Robert Childan, a man whose trade in the trivial items of pre-war American life — much of which may be fake or may not have the weight accorded it by is supposed provenance — has made him wealthy and who has internalised and adopted the manners and speech of the occupying Japanese regime. Through Frank Frink, trying to escape from the thumb of his corrupt boss, at constant risk of deportation and summary execution should his Jewish origins come to the attention of the authorities. Through Juliana, Frank's ex-wife, disaffected with her life in the neutral Rocky Mountain States, who sets out to track down the author of the novel, The Grasshopper Lies Heavy, a fictional history of an alternate America where Rexford Tugwell became president and the Allies won World War II.

Throughout the book the major characters constantly consult the I Ching, drawing on its pronouncements to guide their actions and give structure to their world. More than that, the I Ching was central to the composition of The Grasshopper Lies Heavy and its message, when asked about the meaning of its novel, is that the it brings the reader the truth: that the world of the The Man in the High Castle is false and the the world of The Grasshopper is real, even though the world of the novel-with-the-novel isn't the same as the world outside PKD's novel.

But for all that, The Man in the High Castle is direct and clear and realistic — for a Philip K Dick novel, at least — that portrays a disturbing version of the world that might, according to the novel's own theories, but just as real or unreal as our own world.