by Cathryn Conroy (Dublin, Ohio): I read this under duress. (Well, sort of.) I read it because it was the selection of the month for a BookBrowse community of readers of which I am a part. We are choosing books listed in “1,000 Books to Read Before You Die,” by James Mustich. And as with all book clubs, we occasionally read books that we would never otherwise read—and that’s a good thing!
This one in particular is not my preferred genre. Written by Philip K. Dick, it is billed as science fiction, but it’s more political fiction or speculative fiction. And it’s a bit bizarre for my tastes.
It’s 1962. This novel imagines a world, especially in what used to be the United States, in which Nazi Germany and Imperial Japan won World War II and then split up the USA with the western part going to Japan and the eastern going to Germany. It takes place primarily in San Franciso. The Japanese are in charge. They make the most money, live in the grandest homes, and have the best jobs, while the white U.S. citizens serve them. Still, the Germans lurk in the background, and they pose a dire threat to the world, still attempting to massacre anyone who is not Aryan.
The characters include a man who sells (mostly) counterfeit American collectibles, two men who start a jewelry-making business (and one of them is a Jew who is trying to hide his identity), a Japanese trade minister, a duplicitous German who is trying to pass messages to the Japanese, a Nazi Gestapo member who is on a murderous mission, and a woman who (along with nearly everyone else in the book) is reading a banned and subversive novel that imagines an Allied victory in World War II and what the world would have been like. Meanwhile, there is a mysterious figure—the man in the high castle. He is Hawthorne Abendsen, the author of that banned book, “The Grasshopper Lies Heavy,” and he is in grave danger.
Through it all, the characters each struggle in their own ways with discerning their identity in this new world, as well as trying to wrest the most power each can in a society when almost all of them are powerless. They are all seekers as they wrestle with the past, while trying to glimpse the future and figure out their place in it.
This is a highly philosophical novel, examining such questions as reality vs. perception and truth vs. deceit with much of it wrapped around Eastern philosophy, especially the I Ching.
This book, which won the esteemed Hugo Award for Best Novel in 1963, is considered a science fiction classic in American literature. I give Philip K. Dick credit for his imagination, which is why I am giving it four stars, but I found it to be a dark, weary novel that left me more bored than entranced.
