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The Man in the High Castle (1962)

    'I see you're reading The Grasshopper Lies Heavy,' he said. 'I hear it on many lips, but pressure of
    business prevents my attention.' Rising, he went to pick it up, carefully consulting their
    expressions; they seemed to acknowledge this gesture of socialty, and so he proceeded. 'A mystery?
    Excuse my abysmal ignorance.' He turned the pages.

'Not a mystery,' Paul said. 'On the contrary, interesting form of fiction possibly within genre of
science fiction.'

    'Oh no,' Betty disagreed. 'No science in it. Nor set in future. Scienmce fiction deals with future,
    in particular future where science has advanced over now. Book fits neither premise.'
        -The Man in the High Castle

The central concern of all of Phillip K. Dick's speculative fiction seems to be our perception of reality and whether we can trust it, probably not surprising obsessions for an author who reportedly had his own problems coping with reality. So it's natural for him to have been one of the earlier writers to try out the alternate history genre. In this novel, Japan and Germany, having won WWII, have divvied up the globe. It's 1962 there too, but the Japanese administer California, while the Eastern United States is subservient to Germany.

The story, such as it is, follows a variety of characters, American, German and Japanese, at a time when Germany has been plunged into crisis by the death of the fuhrer, Martin Bormann. Along with this backdrop of the succession struggle, and rumors of Germany's intent to nuke her long time ally Japan, the American population has become captivated by a novel called The Grasshopper Lies Heavy by Hawthorne Abendsen, a reclusive author who lives in a secluded castle. The novel speculates about an alternate history where America wins WWII. The Germans have tried suppressing the book, but now Japanese too have begun reading it and one of the women in the book determines to try and track Abendsen down. As an additional subplot, the I Ching has become a dominant force in people's lives, with Americans following the Japanese lead in allowing it to chart their future actions. It is speculated that Abendsen may actually have written his novel according to the directions of the I Ching.

That's all there really is to the story. The plot is pretty much nonexistent, action minimal, and the book ends almost at random. As far as one can tell, the whole thing is just an elaborate joke, with the book being a kind of doppelganger for reality. Puzzled readers and Dick fanatics have conjectured that the author himself may have let the I Ching make plot decisions and simply stopped writing when it told him to stop. Whatever the case, it's easier to enjoy the ironies in retrospect than it is to enjoy the essentially directionless novel while you're reading it.

(Reviewed:06-May-01)

Grade: (C)

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The Man in the High Castle (1962)

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