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. ( )

The writing has the clunkiness of a hastily written first draft: Sketchy scenes, inconsistent characterization. And yet... the [b:The Man in the High Castle|216363|The Man in the High Castle|Philip K. Dick|https://images.gr-assets.com/books/1448756803s/216363.jpg|2398287] is compelling. This is a thoughtful, philosophical novel, very different from the Amazon video series it inspired. Most of the action occurs internally. The erratic actions and abrupt scene shifts create a dizzy disorientation. What is real? What is fantasy? The reader, like the characters in the story, cannot be sure. By the odd, surreal conclusion, I felt as though I had lived this story. Maybe I still do. ( )

In Philip K. Dick’s alternate history novel, the Allies have lost WWII and the United States is divided up between Nazi Germany to the east and the Empire of Japan in the west. Between the two territories is a neutral zone straddling the Rocky Mountain States. It’s 1962 and the Chancellor of Nazi Germany, Martin Bormann, has just died, leaving several high-ranking Nazi officers to jockey for power including Reinhard Heydrich, Joseph Goebbels, and others.

In the Japanese-controlled Pacific Western States, Rudolf Wegener (traveling under the name Baynes) defects from Nazi Germany to meet with a sympathetic Japanese General. There, Wegener reveals Operation Dandelion, Germany’s plans to attack the Japanese Home Islands. The meeting is held in the office of Trade Minister Tagomi in San Francisco, which is raided by an armed German militia assigned to kill Wegener.

Meanwhile, machinist Frank Frink teams up with a co-worker to form their own business making hand-wrought metal jewelry. They plan to peddle their wares to a few local shops, starting with the largest antique shop in town owned by Robert Childan. Reluctant at first, Childan accepts the jewelry on a consignment deal but uses one of the pieces to curry favor with a young Japanese couple. He also sells a piece to Mr. Tagomi who later experiences a strange vision of an alternate San Francisco.

In the neutral zone, Frink’s ex-wife, Julianna, is a Judo instructor and has been dating a truck driver named Joe Cinnandella. Julianna is engrossed in a popular novel called The Grasshopper Lies Heavy in which the United States and Britain have won WWII and now dominate the world. So compelling is the story that Julianna convinces Joe to drive her to Cheyenne, Wyoming to visit the author, a man named Abendsen. Along the way, she learns that Joe is not who he seems.

Throughout the story, Mr. Tagomi and other characters in San Francisco consult the I Ching, a Chinese book of divination, to guide their decisions and foretell the future.

Overall, The Man in the High Castle is a fascinating idea of what would have become of the United States had the Axis powers won the war. The oppression and fear experienced by the characters is palatable as each of them struggles for the best existence they can manage given their circumstances. ( )

Lido ( )

(1962) Confusing book with a great premise. The Allies have lost WW2, and the Germans & Japanese are now contentious allies. Nuclear war is threatened and small events seem to have global impact. What is reality? KIRKUS REVIEWThe teratological curiosity of the American reading public, whetted and abetted by the press, could have made this novel a sure best seller. Consider the premises upon which Mr. Dick bases his book. They are fascinating: What if the Axis powers had won World War II? What if Germany and Japan had divided after conquering in 1947...Capitulation Day it is called? He takes the hypothesis one step further. It is fifteen years later... 1962. Africa is a "huge empty ruin" sacrificed to Nazi Medicare. The Mediterranean sea has been entirely drained, converted to tillable land. The "blond queens", the "near men" of the Gestapo have found a new use for the big toe. San Francisco is occupied by the Japanese. Old Adolph is in some sanitarium with syphilis of the brain and Martin Borman, heretofore the top man, has just died leaving the Axis powers with a choice among Goebbels, Heydrich, Goehring von Schirach and a couple of other cuties. How did the author turn this projected cosmos into a hinterland where only confusion and boredom reside for the reader? The Man in the High Castle is overpeopled, spattered with telegraphic dialogue simply absurd (A Japanese suicide says to his Colt .22 "Cough up arcane secret".) Finally, there is riddled throughout a quasi-mystique, a pseudo-religious leit motif relating to an Eastern machine that answers questions when asked. This one could be pushed solely on subject-matter. But it will disappoint greatly.Pub Date: Oct. 15th, 1962ISBN: 0679740678Page count: 276ppPublisher: PutnamReview Posted Online: Sept. 22nd, 2011Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1st, 1962