Philip Dick is an author I have liked for a long time without having read any of his books.  I have seen many of his works as movies, like Blade Runner, Total Recall ( a remake of which is in the works,) Minority Report and most recently, Adjustment Bureau.  As you have realized by now, Dick is a science fiction author who has used that genre to explore deeper questions of being human and the reason for existence.

In The Man In the High Castle, Dick (winner of the 1963 Hugo Award) explores one of the more interesting questions of our time, “What would have happened if Germany and Japan had won WWII.”  Our story begins in 1962, 20 years after the war. The US is now occupied by Japan and Germany and a new kind of society has emerged with Japanese and Germans as the dominant class, slavery re-instituted  Jews hunted and eliminated and all other Americans considered second class citizens with limited value.

We follow several different characters, a Japanese diplomat, an American antique store owner, a two silver craftsman who are trying to create something new in a time where that is not appreciated, an German spy.  The characters struggle with their place in this world as each face crises: a diplomatic crisis, a spy trying to move under the radar, a woman who needs to make a better choice, and a Jew who wants to unleash his creative power in a world where he must remain unknown, and they are all touched in some way by a manuscript which portrays a world where the Germans and Japanese have lost WWII, written by someone know only as the man in the high castle.

Dick has created a unique blend of cultural realism in this world from the description of the use the I CHING for the divination of choices that face our characters and to their own sense of superiority if they are Japanese or German or an overwhelming sense of worthlessness if they are not.  Although new inventions have occurred, plastic, a uniquely American product has not been invented and the lack of that is an interesting part of building this alternative reality.

Although I loved the world Dick created and the questions the characters wrestled with interesting, the characters themselves were hard to relate to.  They seemed wooden or  like caricatures throughout most of the book. Towards the very end I felt like I had finally begun to make a connection with a couple of characters, the Japanese diplomat in particular, but then the book ended and ironically I felt short changed.

In spite of that I think the book is well worth reading just to get a feel for what the world might have been like if Japan and Germany had won the war.

Brenda’s Rating: ***(Three Stars)

Recommended this book to: Ken, Keith and Lauren

Book Study Worthy: Maybe…with some history buffs and with lots of wine!

Read this as an ebook.