Frigid Reads, book reviews. : February 2025

The Man in the High Castle

By Philip K Dick

A quick note before I start: I am not going to include the author's information because I’ve already written a look at the life of Mr. Dick and I will include the link to that at the bottom of this review. So let’s turn our attention to the novel in question, shall we? Also, there will be some spoilers below.

The Man in the High Castle was first published in 1962 and was something of an experiment for Mr. Dick. You see, many of the characters in the book, when they are troubled or facing a momentous decision, turn to a rather ancient book, the I Ching. The I Ching is a Chinese divination manual written between 1000 and 750 BC in the Western Zhou period. When you intend to use the book, you frame the question in your mind and throw yarrow stalks or coins, and these produce sets of random numbers which correspond to passages in the book. The characters then try to interpret the passages to figure out what they should do next. Mr. Dick, never a man to embrace halfway measures, wrote the book by actually consulting the I Ching and writing the result into the story, which would decide the character's actions. I don’t know if anyone else has done anything like this, but it’s a hell of a literary experiment.

The Man in the High Castle is an alternate history in which the Axis won World War II. This happened because Roosevelt was assassinated and his successors did not continue his policies, leaving America still mired in the Great Depression and under-armed when World War II kicked off. This US pursued a strict policy of neutrality, which meant that, without Land Lease, the UK and the USSR were isolated from each other and defeated. The Axis then turned on the US, with Washington D.C. being atom bombed so badly that it’s still cordoned off and no one is allowed near it.

Following their victory, Imperial Japan and the Nazis divided the world between themselves. This includes dividing the United States, which has been divided into four governments. The first of these is referred to as just the South, which is the Confederacy turned up to 11. It is easily the most pro-Axis government and seems to operate with the most freedom. The remaining parts of the US, east of the Mississippi are occupied by the Germans and is basically a puppet state. The Western Seaboard is a Japanese protectorate called the Pacific States of America. In between the PSA and the German section of the US is the nominally independent Rocky Mountain States, which serve as a buffer zone of sorts. The book takes place in the PSA and the Rocky Mountain States, and we never see east of the Mississippi.

The main action of the book is the struggles of characters such as American businessman Robert Childan, who makes his living selling American art and historical artifacts to the Japanese, who have developed a passion for owning past works of American culture. things like Mickey Mouse watches and Civil War pistols are equally valued and sought after. This of course has led to a thriving counterfeit industry, which until recently employed our second character Frank Fink, a secret Jew hiding in the PSA from the Nazis. Frank’s divorced wife, Juliana, moved to Colorado, where she teaches Judo.

Frank and Robert’s stories are heavily intertwined. Frank decides to quit his job making fakes and instead go into business with a coworker to make jewelry. While he’s very nervous about this, he does seem to feel it’s cleaner work. Robert agrees to sell the jewelry when he finds out the sheer depth and breadth of the counterfeiting industry and realizes that, sooner or later, the Japanese are going to figure it out. This would bring the whole scheme crashing down, so he’d better start diversifying his stock right away. Robert at first doesn’t think much of Frank’s work, but when a Japanese client identifies a piece as having a lot of emotional/spiritual weight, Robert comes to see it as a piece of real American craftsmanship and comes to be appreciative of the value of the jewelry, working to sell and spread it around.

Meanwhile, Juliana gets pulled into a plot to track down a writer who has written an alternative history work, The Grasshopper Lies Heavy. In this book, the Axis lost World War II, but I was thrilled to see that it wasn’t our history but an entirely different speculative history. In this timeline, Roosevelt survived but didn’t run for a third term. Instead, a left-wing advisor of Roosevelt ran for and became President in 1940, continuing Roosevelt’s policies and winning the war. However, the Soviet Union didn’t survive the war, leading to a victorious British Empire dominating Europe and becoming hostile to the US.

The book is banned in Nazi-dominated nations, but the Japanese and neutral nations allow it to be printed and it is a best-seller. This leads to the writer being marked for death by the Nazis. Juliana realizes that she has been pulled into an assassination plot and decides to try to thwart it. She also finds out that the writer, much like Mr. Dick, constantly used the I Ching to write the book, so The Grasshopper Lies Heavy is in a sense the novel that the I Ching wrote.

There are also Japanese and German characters. One, Nobusuke Tagomi, is a highly placed trade official who helps run the PSA, and another is a gentleman traveling under the name of Baynes. Mr. Baynes is coming with a warning for the Japanese Empire: the new leader of the Nazi Empire, Goebbels, is getting ready for a surprise attack on Japan, planning to hit the Home Islands with enough atomic bombs to render it a burning wasteland. A coup is being planned to stop this, but it’s up in the air if it will succeed without Japanese aid.

This storyline gets the least amount of focus despite having the most consequences, which I found interesting. Most modern books would have focused on the possibility of World War III ending civilization on Earth, but instead, the focus of the book is on the American characters and the rather smaller stakes they’re playing for. However, we’re shown those stakes are incredibly important to them: Robert and Frank’s success or failure is going to mean either living a decent life or ending up in the gutter, while Juliana is literally playing life or death stakes, just on a smaller scale.

Another interesting thing is, whether he meant to or not, Mr. Dick gives us a good look at the effects of colonialism on the colonized people. Robert fully accepts the superiority of Japanese culture and the Japanese people over his own. He echoes the Japanese government line that it was a good thing that the US lost the war, as well as the spiritual superiority of the Japanese people over whites. At the same time, he resents this and struggles to try and understand what the Japanese people he deals with actually want from him. He takes part in looting his own culture for profit, as many colonized cultures had their art and culture looted by their colonizers, but considers Japanese art to be superior. He wants to be treated like an equal, but cannot think of himself as an equal in his own mind.

Mr. Dick does a fantastic job here in showing that colonialism isn’t just something that happens on a national or cultural level, but also on an individual one. He also shows through this that colonialism isn’t just a physical phenomenon, it’s a mental, emotional, and even spiritual one. This is further shown by the American characters who have abandoned the traditional beliefs of their people like Christianity, instead turning to Asian spiritualism like the I-Ching.

Frank is another example of this. He is being hunted for being Jewish even though he has abandoned all Jewish beliefs and practices. He doesn’t pray to the God of Abraham, Moses, and David, he turns to the I-Ching. Robert doesn’t turn to a Church or a Synagogue, he turns to the I-Ching. The spiritual traditions of the West have been abandoned, and the spiritual traditions of the US conquerors have been adopted. This is something that has often happened in colonized nations in our history, as they abandon their native traditions and adopt parts of the colonizing nations that conquered them.

One thing I didn’t like, though, is that most of the plots aren’t really brought to a good conclusion. We don’t know if Robert and Frank’s business will succeed or not. We don’t know if World War III is successfully prevented. The only plot brought to a satisfying conclusion is Juliana’s, as, after warning the writer of The Grasshopper Lies Heavy, she announces that the book is the truth, that Japan and Germany did lose the war, and simply heads out into the night. So I’m left thinking that, for Mr. Dick, Juliana’s enlightenment is what matters here.

This book is an interesting read: it starts slow, but the build-up ends up pulling you along. My frustration here is that only one out of three plotlines gives a satisfying ending for me. Also, if I’m going to be honest, Mr. Tagomi is written with some really odd speech patterns, and sometimes I had to stop to figure out just what the hell he was saying. That tended to jar me out of the story. So I’m going to be giving Man in the High Castle a B. It’s a very interesting experiment of a book, but I don’t think I would be thrilled to see more books written in this style.

I hope you enjoyed this review, this was voted for by my ever-wise patrons. If you would like a vote on upcoming content consider joining their ranks for a dollar a month here: https://www.patreon.com/c/frigidreads

Read about Philp K Dick here: https://frigidreads.blogspot.com/2019/02/philip-k-dick.html

Watch the companion video https://youtu.be/sE_yCWG68fY?si=mv0OMB6tJAqU7a3f

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