I wanted to read The Man in the High Castle for the 1962 Club, but it didn’t arrive from the library in time. Although speculative fiction is generally not my genre, this book is so well known that I was curious about it.
The novel postulates that the Axis powers won World War II. As a result, the United States was divided between Germany and Japan except for the Rocky Mountain states, which were deemed unimportant. Germany has the Eastern states and Europe and Japan has the Pacific states and Asia.
The action of most of the novel takes place in San Francisco, where a lot is going on. Frank Frink has quit his job at the factory and been convinced by his coworker to make jewelry, which his coworker is trying to sell. Mr. Cheldan, an antique dealer who specializes in pre-war American goods, very popular with Japanese businessmen, who are the only people with any money, finds out that some of his goods are counterfeit. A mysterious Swede named Mr. Beyner is coming to visit Mr. Tagomi at the Japanese Trade Mission. In the Rocky Mountain states, Julia Frink, Frank’s ex-wife, has met a young man. All of these characters incessantly consult the I Ching.
The fortunes of all these characters are going to be affected by the death of the head of Germany and the resulting factional struggle for power. A shocking book is circulating that posits that the Allies won the war. It’s banned in German areas, but in San Francisco everyone is reading it.
Almost 100 pages into this novel, I was profoundly uninterested in what was going on with all these characters. I only continued with the book because it began to be obvious who the person referred to by the title was, and I was mildly interested in that.
One of my problems with the book was the writing style, which is often very telegraphic, especially when reporting characters’ thoughts, leaving out parts of speech and using a lot of sentence fragments. I’m not familiar with Dick’s writing style, but at first I thought this was a device to show a sort of stereotyped Japanese influence, but then he used the same style for the thoughts of characters from the German-controlled areas.
I won’t tell what it is, but this is a novel with a twist. For me, novels with twists generally make everything fall into place, just a new place. However, in this case I felt the twist made the whole rest of the novel meaningless.
whatmeread 