The Man in the High Castle

I recently had the pleasure of reading my first Philip K. Dick novel. I feel pretty secure in saying pleasure, even though I’m not entirely sure of my final reaction to the book. The Man in the High Castle is about an America in which FDR was assassinated in his first term and the Germans and Japan won World War II. Yet the novel isn’t entirely that simplistic, in fact, for perfectly postmodern shits and giggles, embedded in the novel is the story of a writer who lives in the neutral Rocky Mountain States who has written a highly controversial book about what the world would have been like had America and England been victorious. The book is a best seller, and of course banned on the German controlled East Coast, but the Japanese on West Coast don’t feel quite as threatened by it. The reactions of the different characters to this “novel” are varied and sometimes amusing – as one Pacific American muses how much worse things could have been.

There are a handful of characters representing various backgrounds in the novel and we get to know them well, in each case following them through a journey of sorts, some more intense than others. Dick does an excellent job following through with each character, and twisting the novel within the novel throughout the storyline. What starts to be a horrifying alternate reality ends up reflecting on the true modern world – mirroring back and forth and back and forth until the end, which I won’t spoil for anyone. Ultimately it is the ending I am unsure of – it will probably require a second reading for me to make up my mind on whether it is an ending of pure genius or a postmodern copout.

I like Dick’s writing style, although sometimes his predilection for succinctness irritates me. Not that he excludes anything necessary in his brevity, I just felt “cut off” now and then in this work – I want to see deeper, and he does not allow it. At any rate, I look forward to reading The Simulacra and eventually trying out more Dick novels.