The Man in the High Castle, by Philip K. Dick, G.P. Putnam’s Sons 1962
A friend more fluent in science fiction recommended years ago Philip K. Dick’s popular novel Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? Actually coming to read one of his novels was much more serendipitous than a suggestion. A vacation to Asheville, North Carolina meant a customary visit to a local bookshop. Malaprops Bookstore/Café was a charming gem, and its “Blind Date with a Bookseller” was too inviting to say no to. Each book on this shelf is wrapped and detailed to entice.
Among others, “resonant” and “haunting” are pitch-perfect descriptors for this 1962 novel. It’s an intersection of narratives traversing across the nonpareil what-if scenario of the twentieth century, wherein the Axis powers defeat the Allies in the second World War. Japan and Germany’s Third Reich supplant the United States and Soviet Union as the global superpowers. Both nations’ dominance has burgeoned into holding split control of the United States.
Philip K. Dick orchestrates his plot from multiple vantage points, including a German double agent, American shop owner, and a Japanese government official. Their lives illuminate the fears, discontents and volatility of an imagined world, both routine and grandiose in scale. In 1962, his characters reflect the Cold War mentality of the latter half of the 1900s. While the players in his fictionalization are different, the harrowing potentials oscillate toward the actual. Most unsettling is how suggestive they are of our past and present. Like Philip K. Dick’s cast, we harbor today, as we have for over seventy years, an acute fear of dubious regimes and nuclear proliferation.
The singular grace against such portentous times is the characters’ inclinations to retract faith in the State, and bestow it onto the personal liberations of relationships, literature, and religion. Still, the same characters succumb to, and are victimized by, the same prejudices that arise from generations of unrest and war. Regardless of the variant of government or political party holding power at any given present, such prejudices have waned little, if at all.
The Man in the High Castle is a tautly-written account where after our sigh of relief of what did not come to pass, we hold our breath, imagining what still may.