Glad that I finally read this – the first PKD I truly liked. Reading it almost never happened, as after Flow My Tears, The Policeman Said I decided to stop seeking out more Philip K. Dick. But as I’m also slowly trying to read all big classics of scifi, I had to tackle it one day.
The Man in the High Castle got Dick a Hugo award, and is one of the stalwarts of alternative history. It is considered his most literary novel – Ursula Le Guin even claimed it “may be the first, big lasting contribution science fiction made to American literature.”
Obviously it ticks many boxes for those that like to analyze things: it has meta-fictional parts, references to real and imaginary Nazis, characters with false names, characters pretending to be someone else, questions about the nature of reality & authenticity & art, a formally inventive origin story (Dick used the I Ching to plot the novel), ruminations on other cultures, totalitarian & leftist politics, and one of the biggest what if questions of the 20th century. A postmodern smorgasbord.
Yet none of that really sold it to me.
That’s probably because you can’t really learn anything about the metaphysical nature of reality from a novel to begin with. For me, all these things in The Man in the High Castle are first and foremost an exercise, something that structures the story, sure, something that provides a backdrop that is different from most realistic novels. Then again, maybe not that different, because there’s heaps of realistic novels about the Nature of Reality & Art & Morality too.
It leaves us with the alternate history as the novel’s only unique selling point. Nazis and Japanese ruling the USA: there you have something new, something interesting. And yes, admittedly, there’s something eerie about an Endlösung that’s fully executed, about imagining future power plays between axis countries.
But I’m not inclined to say that the alternate history or the politics are where the novel’s merit lies for me. The political action generally stays in the background, and Dick’s characters generally remain stuck in cultural essentialism when they discuss systems: the Germans are so and so, and the Japanese are this and that. Even so, I guess the setting does help: might Dick’s different backdrop make what is shown a bit more interesting – more clear, with some added contrast? More interesting than it would be in a regular novel? A spiced up version of our own reality? What would M. John Harrison say?
Anyway, for me The Man in the High Castle‘s main draw is its collection of really, really good scenes. Scenes about a shop owner. About two guys trying to set up a handmade jewelry business. About a woman having a fling. Small, slow scenes, unspectacular in the light of World Politics or the African Holocaust. Yet somehow Dick manages to imbue them with life and atmosphere and humanity. Somehow they stand their own in the midst of sentences about history “passing us by”, the evocative power of fiction – “even cheap popular fiction”, “plutocrats”, “Fascist theory of action” or the fact that “it’s all darkness”.
So maybe Joe Cinnadella is right when he claims that it is no “big issue” who wins out. Maybe Dick was a cynic who tried to show that either way, life is life.
Ah – that would conflate two things. Because it does matter who wins out: better, more ethical politicians means less suffering. But indeed: even when there are pigs in power, small scenes of life retain their potency, and certain lives will keep a certain je ne sais quoi. ‘Life is life’ does not mean suffering will be a constant throughout different versions of reality. There’s no debating that, and there’s no debating the realness of suffering either.
Dick knew that too: he got stuck on a sequel to The Man in the High Castle because he couldn’t emotionally deal with having to research the atrocities of Nazi Germany again. And in 1978 he wrote this next bit in How to Build a Universe That Doesn’t Fall Apart Two Days Later – a speech published in 1996’s
David Hume, the greatest skeptic of them all, once remarked that after a gathering of skeptics met to proclaim the veracity of skepticism as a philosophy, all of the members of the gathering nonetheless left by the door rather than the window. I see Hume’s point. It was all just talk. The solemn philosophers weren’t taking what they said seriously.
A real classic that’s easy to recommend: 4.5 stars.
Consult the author index for my other reviews, or my favorite lists.
Click here for an index of my non-fiction or art book reviews, and here for an index of my longer fiction reviews of a more scholarly & philosophical nature.
Weighing a pig doesn't fatten it. 
ps – It struck me this is actually the earliest PKD novel I read. I think I’m going to give Dick another chance, and someday read some of his novels written around the same period: Martian Time-Slip, Dr. Bloodmoney, The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch, maybe even The Man Whose Teeth Were All Exactly Alike.
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I agree that this is one of the more successful (successful for this reader at least) of PKD’s novels, raising valid questions requiring valid answers rather than merely adding to our confusion. The fact that I’ve hung on to this for another read rather than passing it on (as I’ve done with most of his titles I’ve read) might indicate my appreciation of it. My review (here: https://wp.me/p2oNj1-Ku) suggests what I drew from it a decade ago.
Now for another go to see if I can make head or tail of Flow, My Tears…
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“Genuine imitation leather” made me chuckle. It’s a strange reality we live in.
Your review focuses mainly on the stuff that weren’t really this novel’s selling points for me. I wonder how you would write that review nowadays.
I didn’t have much luck with ‘Flow’ – even though I thought it was entertaining, it’s mainly Dick pushing all those same buttons again.
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I may have to reread this sooner rather than later and rethink my appraisal in light of your review…
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I’d be very interested to read such an account of yours.
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What would we do without Blade Runner? If Dick wrote nothing but Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep he would still be influential.
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I should reread ‘Androids’ someday. I didn’t really like it, but I think I approached it in the wrong way, not really understanding what PKD was about – it was the first of his books I read. I also never liked the movie (nor the remake for that matter). Don’t know why, maybe I was too young, it must have been 25 years since I saw it. I can see it’s influence though – I think that of the movie was bigger than that of the book.
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From Blade Runner: Darryl Hannah’s cartwheels, Rutger Hauer at the end – “Time to die”, all of Harrison Ford… LA – I think the whole thing is worth re-watching. The remake wasn’t – it’s a sequel, years later. It was kind of weird – I’m not a big fan, actually had to watch it a second time because I couldn’t remember if I HAD! Then it sort of came back.
But the original? So full of perfect little pieces. Look for the Dr. Frankenstein and his monster resonance, Rachel, the police captain with the origami horses, deciding which memories were real and which fake and whose… Good stuff.
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You sell it well. One day…
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Funny how people will believe you when you sell things you love, but not when you sell things you wrote for them. It’s the same love.
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It’s the same love, but it might not be the same product…
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It’s not the same product – but it IS the same judgement, the same person making it – in some sense.
Selling yourself is an art slowly learned, if ever.
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I liked this one too. But because it was so much more than simply an alternate history novel. I feared that it would be only about that.
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Yes, exactly. In a way, the alternate history is just a sideshow. Do you remember what your favorite PKD is? If you have one that is.
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Probably Ubik. I also really liked The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch.
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I tried to watch the tv show on Amazon and quit after 1 episode, it was so boring.
As for his books, I don’t have any recorded, so if I read them, I read them in my teens and before I was 22. But if I did, I don’t remember them at all. Every review since then has led me to avoid him like the plague 😀
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I watched the trailer after reading this, and indeed, it looks totally uninteresting. I’ve basically lost faith in screen adaptations of books. They are different media forms, and I think screens need something specifically written for a screen, and episodic story telling needs something specifically written for episodic storytelling.
That said, I’ve basically lost faith in practically all big business corporate storytelling – the odd exception (Succession, Bojack Horseman) notwithstanding. I often think motivation makes or breaks a show: how was it pitched to begin with? Was it pitched as something epigonic, or as something original, of its own? Game of Thrones was original at first, but quickly began to self-plagiarize to enhance audience and $$$, and quality declined to the point of being ludicrious, the sequel/prequel was even worse clearly trying to rip off its older sibling – catering to success to grab money before any artistic considerations, and The Rings of Power and Foundation also seemed primarily made to cash in on the speculative screen hype started with GoT. I have to say I’ve only seen 1 or 2 episodes of all these shows (except GoT, which incredibly I’ve stuck with to the end). And don’t get me started on about anything in the Star Wars “franchise”.
I’m sad to report even the Dune movie didn’t really hold up. I’ve seen it in the theater the day it came out, and I had a great time, you’ve read my review. A few weeks ago I borrowed the DVD from the library, and I turned it off after an hour. Part of that was that I was tired and wanted to go to sleep, but I haven’t felt the inclination to put it in again and finish it AT ALL. I think it worked well the first time because I simply was curious how everything was going to be portrayed, and I guess the action and the sets still work, but the second time around I started to be bothered by how cartoonish lots of the characters were portayed (Thufir Hawath, Gurney Halleck, even Paul himself) and I started to notice how also this movie was made to cater to the lowest common denominator – a commercial product first and foremost. Obviously, there is something pulpy/cartoonish in Herbert’s novel, so maybe I shouldn’t be to strict on Villeneuve, but still, the movie seemed just so transparent and a bit boring when I tried to rewatch it. I still think the sequel will be good enough on first viewing for the same reasons I liked the first one when I first watched it.
Sorry for the rant.
As for PKD, if there’s any novel of his that could be not too bad for you, it’s this. It has a quality not unlike some of the Russians you are reading.
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Rant away. Movies in general are getting more and more bland and made to make money instead of telling a good story.
It’s why I only pay for amazon prime as my streaming service. That has enough older stuff to keep me occupied for years. But I don’t want to wade through the morass of new or even newly released stuff. I really enjoyed Dune, but I think my love of the entire Dune Chronicles is carrying over to the new movies. We’ll see what I think of them in 10 years, hahahahaa 😀 BUT, I haven’t found myself with the desire to pop the disc into my bluray player ever since watching it initially
I think PKD just isn’t for me. At this point in my life I’m not willing to rub my face with sandpaper “just in case in feels good”, you know? 😀
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It would be cool to see a review of a rewatch on your blog. You obviously are right that for any Dune book fan it’s impossible to approach the movies objectively. As I said, I really enjoyed my first watch too, but my hunch is I’ll return the DVD to the library when it’s due without watching the remainder. I think I have another week or two.
I realized I didn’t include LOTR in the rant above: as I wrote in my review of the books, I think Jackson did a really good job for the original trilogy, even elevating certain parts of it, and making it shine like the story is at heart: an epic action filled adventure.
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Think this book works precisely because it focusses on the characters and on scenes; the speculative stuff is embedded into those scenes, which is the sort of speculative fiction I most prefer. The second reason it works is that Dick put a lot more work into it than he did into his other books.
I never watched the TV series but felt it went for the obvious – ie, America under Nazi rule – whereas this is peripheral in the book. As a result, they are two very different beasts.
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Agreed on all accounts. It makes me wonder what other great stuff he could have accomplished if he hadn’t been such a prolific writer churning out brick after brick after brick. A shame really.
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This was one of a run of novels where Dick seemed to be thinking about political systems and issues, but as seen by people outside the power player circles (mostly), the lowly and the disaffected. I would include The Simulacra, The Penultimate Truth, and Dr. Bloodmoney, along with this one, as the chief examples. In particular he is has the untruthful nature of the authorities in these societies weaving in and out of the information background that the characters live in. If you’re expecting a story where the evil overlords are overthrown, disappointment awaits you. These are not that sort of book (Revolt in 2100, Slan, Renaissance, etc.). Sometimes his novels end at a breakpoint in the characters’ arcs but with major conflicts at the ruling caste level still raging. It’s like Dick was thinking about the issues raised by 1984 and similar works, in light of the powerful but secretive bureaucratic agencies that had infested the US government, but wanting to explore those issues through non-heroic commoners rather than in the typical SF heroic mode. But by mid-1965 he had gotten psychedelicized (as the Chambers Brothers put it) and his interest drifted away from political questions.
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That’s a great insightful remark, thanks a lot! Makes me bump up Dr. Bloodmoney as a probable next PKD. Will look into to 2 other titles too, they are unknown to me. The psychedelicized PKD doesn’t interest me as much.
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The other issue that seemed to be on Dick’s mind in 1964-1965 was mental illness. Which shows up most garishly in Clans of the Alphane Moon, but also in Martian Time-Slip and Dr. Bloodmoney (and the whole plot-line with the schizophrenic pianist Kongrosian in The Simulacra).
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I haven’t actually read this one yet, but you sell it well, Bart!
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I couldn’t get over the ending. Mr. Dick certainly knew American politics.
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Interesting. What was your beef with the ending?
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No beef, he showed the US exactly what it’s capable of – winning a war and then giving the country away.
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That was one of you reviews that waited on my TBR, as I expected sth longer 😉 and now, after reading this… I have to agree with what you had to say.
I’ve read more imaginative alternative histories, but this had a benefit of being written by an excellent author, who gave his universe life. This is definitely worth reading and I’d also rate it around 4.5
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Glad you enjoyed the book too. It´s interesting that lots of PKD fanatics don´t seem to list this as one of the important titles – maybe because it´s one of his more ´regular´ stories?
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