The Man in the High Castle (1962)

Phil is continuing with his theme of unsympathetic characters. Juliana is basically a psychopath. The plot is as deep and interesting as a coin toss. ( )

koh library. Axis wins WW2. pub 1962, read 2017

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. ( )

This is another book I read and loved as a teenager and I wanted to see if I still liked it. Well, it's... complicated.

I was and am still impressed with the worldbuilding and the alternate history PKD presents in this book. It's very well thought-out, with lots of interesting details. The man clearly did his research. Not everything is totally believable, but a) I don't neccessarily need that in a speculative fiction story, as long as it requires only a little suspension of disbelief, and b) some of the things that happened in reality do not sound believable when you tell someone who has never heard about them. People are clearly able to come up with all kinds of ideas, good and bad.
The most interesting thought experiment, for me, was how people who lived in this alternate reality where the axis powers won WWII would imagine a world that was an alternate reality to theirs, and how this imagined world would be similar and different to our reality.

Even though a lot of people don't like it, I really do like the ending. I think it's a very fitting ending for this book, and everything else would have felt wrong one way or another. So for me, this is perfect.

What was it I didn't like, then?
The execution. Rather, some of it. PKD clearly has a good grasp on his characters and their voices, and he is able to write different pov characters in different voices that show us who they are. He does this exceptionally well, in my opinion, in the pov chapters of Robert Childan and Mr. Tagomi. Which makes reading other pov chapters even more difficult, because I have to assume his writing choices were made in purpose. Maybe I simply don't get them. Maybe it's a language barrier thing and this is the one book I prefer in translation. But most of the other pov characters' voices seem so incoherent. Especially in the Juliana and Wegener chapters, there is no thought process. At least Wegener gets a little characterization, while Juliana is super naive in one paragraph, and in the next one she figures out rather complex connections and draws the right conclusins, and the reader is left wonderung how she did that, because we never get so experience her thought process.

On the contrary, it seems Juliana is only allowed an inner monologue when she explains to herself what seems to be the insight PKD wanted us, the reader, to take away from the book. Which made her chapters seem infantilizing and rather arrogant to me. She is not a character in her own right, which is why she is not characterized (and on that note, nor are the other characters that appear in her chapters), but a tool to get the author's important message across to the dumb reader, because we can't figure it out on our own.

Also, what is going on with the obsession about her breasts? There really was nothing else PKD could have used to make one small point?

So, in the end, I asked myself two questions:

1. Is this a classic?

It presents interesting ideas that were groundbraking at the time, and it is a staple work of the genre. Thematically, I would say it is still relevant, although there are more relevant speculative fiction works out there.
I do get the impression that this book is hyped more for its ideas and not for its writing, basically the work of an author in love with his ideas (and sometimes thinking those ideas are too complex for the reader, which is why he has to spell them out), and an undeniable talent for writing, who should just have put more effort into the latter. But even in speculative fiction, an idea is not enough.

2. Is this dick lit? (for more info, check out my "about me" section)

I'm on the fence for this one, because it doesn't focus on man pain, but the breasts thing makes me say "yes". ( )

I wanted to read this book before I watched the Amazon pilot of “Man in a High Castle.”

Written in 1962 this is Philip K. Dick’s impressive imagining of a world after the Nazi and the Japanese have defeated the Allies.

Dick creates a plausible explanation for how the Axis wins the war, which starts with having FDR assassinated in 1933 just before his inauguration. (This was the attempt on his life where the major of Chicago is killed).

I think there is a tendency to believe that history is predestined. That the Allies (the forces of good) would inevitably triumph over the Axis (the forces of evil). But that’s not true. One of the messages of the book is that if you don’t resist evil, it can triumph.

The world described in High Castle is a nightmare. A mundane, banal nightmare which has us rooting for the Japanese as the less awful of the two conquerors.

As much as I was impressed with all of the interesting details of this world that Dick creates I found the actual novel somewhat less than impressive. The characters are not well developed and while he has several storylines developed, none of them is given enough attention. We are sort of dropped into this world for a brief visit and then the story ends.

I think he could have made a much longer novel – although I’m not sure I wanted to live that world any longer than I did.
( )