Book Review: The Man in the High Castle

 

The Man in the High Castle by Philip K. Dick
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

President-Elect Franklin Roosevelt is assassinated in Miami. Isolationism dominates American politics. The Nazis prevail in North Africa and link up with the Japanese in India. Russia collapses. Washington D.C. disintegrates under a Nazi hydrogen bomb. World War II ends in 1947 with Germany, Japan (and Italy) victorious.

Such is the world of 1962 San Francisco where curio salesman Robert Childan labors to please his mostly Japanese clients. Among them are Nobusuke Tagomi, an influential trade minister whose career is guided by the ancient Chinese book of divination, the I Ching.

Also dependent on the book's forecasts is judo instructor Juliana Frink. She lives in a puppet buffer zone between the Japanese West Coast and the German-controlled Mid-West, South and East. An encounter with a man claiming to be an Italian truck driver leads Juliana to read a fascinating—yet banned—book in which the allies win the second world war.

Using rapid POV shifts, Dick whisks us between characters as Juliana's husband struggles back in San Francisco to manufacture original jewelry while hiding his Jewish blood. At the same time, Juliana and the truck driver set off on a road trip to locate the banned book's author. Meanwhile, Tagomi facilitates a meeting between Japanese and German intermediaries working to derail a diabolical plot that could plunge the world into another terrible war.

Dick parcels out the backstory while keeping the narrative hot. His shifts in POV sometimes lost me, as did his stylized dialogue for certain inner monologues. And I wasn't sure what role the I-Ching played, other than to suggest the future is fluid, other worlds possible.

As one character mulls, "Evidently we go on, as we always have. . . . But we cannot do it all at once; it is a sequence. An unfolding process. We can only control the end by making a choice at each step."

Great alternative history with a tart blend of science fiction and mysticism.

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