Book Review: The Man in the High Castle

Call it a New Year's resolution if you will, but as 2015 drew to a close, I decided that I wanted to become better acquainted with the work of Philip K. Dick, the well known science fiction author. I had always been a fan of science fiction as a genre, in film as well as literature, but my particular interest in Dick's work arose from a greater interest in what you could call 'intellectual' science fiction. To draw a comparison between two films, any incarnation of the Star Wars franchise would be a good example of 'entertaining' science fiction, which primarily serves the purpose that the category implies. Blade Runner (and the novel upon which it is based, Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?, also written by Dick), on the other hand, is also entertaining, but is certainly more intellectual and artistic, given that it uses science fiction as a means to think about present and, most likely, future issues.

And so began my merry romp through the work of Philip K. Dick, beginning with his Hugo Award-winning novel, The Man in the High Castle. I decided to begin with it partially because it ranks among his best-know and most celebrated works, but mostly because of its setting. When I learned that the novel took place in an alternate history, in which the Axis powers won the Second World War, I was immediately curious as to how Dick imagined and conveyed the resulting world. After all, the deeper into an alternate history one decides to set a story, the more challenging it is to tell a credible story that does not fall apart when its underlying assumptions, historical or otherwise, are called into question.

In the novel, the former United States of America are more
or less divided as shown above between the
Japanese Empire and the Nazi Reich.

I was very pleasantly, and perhaps not all that, surprised. As soon as I began The Man in the High Castle, I was immediately engrossed by the immersive post-war world which the novel's characters inhabited. This reaction did not owe little to my original curiosity, but I believe the writing itself deserves the greatest credit. After all, while many of the story's characters reflect on their history and wonder what might have happened if the Axis powers had not won the war, their reflections arise from a very well-established sense of acceptance of their present global order, in which the Japanese Empire and the Nazi Reich govern the world and that is simply the way of things.

About halfway through the novel, however, I began to realise something. I noticed that The Man in the High Castle had managed to propel me through to its midway point on little more than its setting. The story followed the lives of various characters living in this alternate past, but their lives seemed loosely connected at most, and there was not much of a plot to speak of. In a timely response to my thoughts, however, the plot of The Man in the High Castle slowly began to emerge. Before long, like the novel's characters, I too accepted the setting of the story as the connections between the characters became increasingly apparent and the resulting, fast-paced episodes had me rushing through pages during the wee hours of the morning.

When I closed the back cover of The Man in the High Castle, I had yet another realisation. While the book was certainly thought provoking, it was not intellectual stimulation which I most associated with it. Rather, I wallowed in the conclusion that I had been thoroughly entertained, at first by the novel's setting, and subsequently by its plot. This is not to say The Man in the High Castle was not intellectually stimulating at all. Quite on the contrary. The acceptance of the vast majority of the global population to the story's geopolitical world order, for example, served as a sobering reminder that humans might be able to get used to just about anything. That being said, I was ultimately impressed by the novel's ability to be artistic and entertaining in equal parts, and on that basis, I would recommend it to anyone whose curiosity in the book might just have been sparked.