“They want to be the agents, not the victims, of history. They identify with God’s power and believe they are godlike. That is their basic madness. They are overcome by some archetype; their egos have expanded psychotically so that they cannot tell where they begin and the godhead leaves off. It is not hubris, not pride; it is inflation of the ego to its ultimate—confusion between him who worships and that which is worshiped. Man has not eaten God; God has eaten man.”
World War II could have very easily gone differently. It’s easy to play with what-ifs and get to a scenario in which the Allies lost. Which is exactly what Philip K. Dick does in The Man in the High Castle. The victorious Axis powers of Germany and Japan (Italy, amusingly, has been sidelined in the 15 years since victory in the book’s timeline) have divided up the former United States into two power centers, the Pacific States of America and the Eastern United States. The area around the Rockies forms a buffer zone between the two. Hitler is still alive, but very ill, and intrigue around the succession to German leadership is rife.
There are several parallel storylines. In one, a man named Bob Childan owns an antique store in San Francisco, where he sells nostalgic Americana to the Japanese ruling class. Unknown to him, a good number of those items are not genuine antiques, but rather high-quality fakes made by a corporation called Wyndam-Matson. One of the workers there is Frank Frink, who is hiding his Jewish identity. He has bigger dreams than knockoffs, though, and he and a coworker begin a small business creating original metalwork jewelry (which he consigns with Childan’s shop). Meanwhile, Frank’s ex-wife Juliana has been living and working in neutral Colorado when she meets a trucker, Joe, and they take a road trip to meet Hawthorne Abendsen, the author of a banned book called The Grasshopper Lies Heavy, which is set in a world in which the Allies did in fact win WWII. And a Swedish industrialist, Baynes, arrives in the US on a mysterious mission.
Sometimes I get the impression that parallel storylines are a way to write around not having a real plot, and that’s what it felt like was going on in this book, for me. It didn’t seem like Dick had an actual story he wanted to tell based in a world in which the war had turned out differently, it seemed like he started thinking about what it might be like, generally, if such a thing had happened, and then created characters to represent what that would might be like. It’s a thought experiment, not really a “novel” per se. This would also explain why those characters are often so shallow…I found myself often confused about which character’s storyline I was in because their thought processes were all so similar that it was hard to to tell. For a reader like me, who relishes character development, this meant that it wasn’t an enjoyable book.
It might have worked better if Dick was a stronger prose stylist and had worked more to make the I Ching philosophizing elegant, but he’s a stronger on ideas than he is on the actual writing. The portions of the book set in Japanese-controlled San Francisco did get me thinking about how white Americans would react to a situation in which they were socially inferior as a class, so it’s not like the book offered me nothing as a reader, but it was just okay at best on pretty much every front as a work of literature. If you enjoy speculative fiction that makes you think, this might be something you’d enjoy. If you’re looking for a book to tell you a cohesive story, though, this is probably not for you.
