The Man In The High Castle by Phillip K. Dick: A Review

The Man In The High Castle by Phillip K. Dick is a disturbing alternative history set in a alternative future that we would have had if the United States had not entered World War Two until it was too late, Russia had been beaten back after the battle of Stalingrad, and Britain was crushed beneath the German boot.

This book is very weird as it was written entirely based on I Ching, a classic Chinese text which is a symbol system used to identify order in random events. The text describes an ancient system of cosmology and philosophy that is intrinsic to ancient Chinese cultural beliefs. The cosmology centres on the ideas of the dynamic balance of opposites, the evolution of events as a process, and acceptance of the inevitability of change.

This book’s plot tends to jump all over the place which makes for very weird reading because the reader of the text tends to have their suspension of belief lost in the plot of the novel, meaning that they do not really believe that this plot is even plausible.

Phillip K. Dick was insane when he wrote this novel and based it all entirely on the throwing of I Ching sticks and the latter consultation of the appropriate section of I Ching.

I thought this novel was very much like the Cold War: two competing superpowers who have divided a conquered nation into their respective territories. These superpowers then compete with each other, with the threat of Mutually Assured Destruction, in order to better their technologies, with one superpower being slightly ahead of the other superpower.

This text also references what really happened in World War Two as part of a novel called The Grasshopper Lies Heavy. This novel is about what could of happen of the Allies won the war and is also a banned text.

I really did not like this novel as it was very confusing with the characters and the plot jumping all over the place but it was a very interesting novel to read and to try to understand.

In The Man In The High Castle, Philip K. Dick demonstrates his genius by creating a world where Germany and Japan won World War Two and America is occupied by the Axis forces. While this story creates an alternate reality, the fact that it takes place in 1962 (when Dick wrote the book) serves to blur the distinction between science fiction and the present reality. The story revolves a few central characters who are in very different situations. Mr. Tagomi, the novel's main character, even though it is not that obvious, works for a highly questionable trade company and faces various moral dilemmas throughout the book that involve his sense of what is right and what is wrong.

A separated married couple are also the focus of The Man In The High Castle. Juliana Frink lives in Colorado, the buffer zone between the Germans on the east coast and the Japanese on the west. She becomes increasingly fascinated with an underground novel entitled The Grasshopper Lies Heavy that paints a picture of an America that won WWII. She goes out her way to meet the author of this book, who lives in a high castle that is it heavily fortified against entry (this man in his castle also gives the title to the novel). Her husband Frank Frink is a craftsman who makes cheap imitations of old American artifacts in a Japanese occupied Californian town. Frank also faces very similar moral choices in this book that challenge his artistic values.

It is a culture where the ancient Chinese oracle, the I Ching is consulted for moral decisions. Religion, social customs, art, aesthetics and racism are portrayed in a shockingly real manner. Dick himself used the I Ching to help him write the book, giving the story a spontaneous, open-ended quality but also a very confusing plot that is open to interpretation on what really happens since the book just seems to “gets lost in translation.”