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Title: The Man in the High Castle
Author: Philip K. Dick
Publication Date: 1962 (book), 2025 (audio)
Producer: Recorded Books
Narrated by: Edoardo Ballerini
Recording Time: 8 hours, 9 minutes
THE PLOT
via wiki:
In 1962, it has been fifteen years since Imperial Japan and Nazi Germany won World War II. In San Francisco, in the Pacific States of America, Japanese judicial racism has enslaved black people and reduced the Chinese residents to second-class citizens. Businessman Robert Childan owns an antique shop there that specializes in Americana for a Japanese clientele who is obsessed with cultural artifacts of the former United States. One day, Childan receives a request from Nobusuke Tagomi, a high-ranking trade official, who seeks a gift to impress a Swedish industrialist named Baynes. Childan cannot fulfill Tagomi’s original request (a civil war recruiting poster) but is able to present alternatives because he is well-stocked with counterfeit antiques made by the metal works Wyndam-Matson Corporation.
Recently fired from his job at a Wyndam-Matson factory, Frank Frink (formerly Fink) is a secret Jew and war veteran who agrees to join a former co-worker to start a business making and selling jewelry. In the Rocky Mountain States, Frank’s ex-wife, Juliana Frink, works as a judo instructor in Canon City, Colorado and, in her private life, has begun a sexual relationship with Joe Cinnadella, an Italian truck driver and ex-soldier.
Frink blackmails the Wyndam-Matson Corporation for money to finance his jewelry business, threatening to expose that they are supplying counterfeit antiques to Childan. Tagomi and Baynes meet, but Baynes repeatedly delays conducting any real business because he awaits a third party from Japan. The Nazi news media announce that Chancellor of Nazi Germany Martin Bormann has died after a short illness. Childan takes some of Frink’s “authentic metalwork” jewelry on consignment to curry favor with a Japanese client, who, to Childan’s surprise, says it possesses much Wu, spiritual awareness. Juliana and Joe travel by road to Denver, Colorado, but en route Joe impulsively decides that they take a side trip to Cheyenne, Wyoming, to meet Hawthorne Abendsen, the mysterious author of The Grasshopper Lies Heavy, a novel of speculative fiction that presents an alternate history of World War II wherein the Allies defeat the Axis. The Nazis banned the book in the U.S., but the Japanese allow its publication and sale in the Pacific States of America. Supposedly, Abendsen lives in a heavily guarded estate named the High Castle. The Nazi news media inform the public that Joseph Goebbels is the new Chancellor of Nazi Germany.
After much delay, Baynes and Tagomi meet their Japanese contact, while the Sicherheitsdienst (SD), the security service of the SS, is close to arresting Baynes, who is a Nazi defector, Rudolf Wegener. Baynes warns his contact, a Japanese general, of the existence of Operation Dandelion, Goebbels’s plan for a Nazi sneak attack upon the Japanese Home Islands, with the goal of destroying the Empire of Japan. Frink is exposed as a crypto-Jew and arrested by the San Francisco police. Elsewhere, two SD agents confront Baynes and Tagomi, who uses his antique American pistol to kill both agents. In Colorado, Joe changes his appearance and mannerisms before the side trip to the High Castle in Wyoming; Juliana infers that Joe intends to assassinate Abendsen. Joe reveals himself to be a Swiss Nazi when he confirms his intention; Juliana kills Joe and goes to warn Abendsen.
Wegener flies back to Germany and learns that Reinhard Heydrich (a member of the faction against Operation Dandelion) has launched a coup d’état against Goebbels, to install himself as Chancellor of Nazi Germany. Tagomi is shocked at having killed the SD agents and goes to the antiques shop to sell the pistol back to Childan; instead, sensing the spiritual energy from one of Frink’s jewelry creations, Tagomi buys the jewelry. Tagomi then undergoes an intense spiritual experience during which he momentarily perceives an alternative version of San Francisco, evinced by the Embarcadero freeway, which he has never seen and by the fact that white people do not defer to Japanese people.
Tagomi later meets with the German consul in San Francisco and compels the Germans to free Frink, whom Tagomi has never met, by refusing to sign the order of extradition to Nazi Germany. Juliana has a spiritual experience when she arrives in Cheyenne. She discovers that Abendsen lives with his family in a normal house, having abandoned the High Castle because of a changed outlook on life; thus the possibility of being assassinated no longer worries him. After evading Juliana’s questions about his literary inspiration, Abendsen says he used the I Ching, a Chinese book of divination, to guide the writing of his novel. Before leaving, Juliana infers then that Truth wrote the novel to reveal the Inner Truth that Imperial Japan and Nazi Germany did lose World War II in 1945.
The Review
The Man in the High Castle is a brilliant, plausible, deeply philosophical, and highly immersive alternative history of a post World War II America, wherein the reader gets to experience the lives of several characters who are living in a world wherein the Axis Powers won the war. Dick manages to paint a picture of German, Japanese, and Italian victory, while explaining how changing only a few of the details from real history led us to that result. The most impressive part of the story though is how he immerses his characters in the post-war era. This is particularly effective as we experience the lives of characters who have been forced to embrace Japanese culture outwardly while wrestling with their own lack of comfort in that culture internally. The plot spends a lot of time with characters using the Chinese I Ching (a type of divination exported to the U.S. via the Japanese) to guide decision-making.
The problem with this novel is the human element. Dick applies all of his abundant cleverness to his world-building, and to his musings on society and philosophy, and then he neglects to give me a reason to really care about any of his characters. I read the novel, from start to finish, waiting on something to happen. The conceit of the plot is that in a world wherein the Germans and Japanese won the war, there is a mysterious guy in the Rocky Mountain buffer zone between German and Japanese lands who wrote a popular alternative history – The Grasshopper Lies Heavy – wherein the Allies won the war. The discussion of and interest in this book is the primary thing Dick’s characters and plot threads have in common. There is a sense of build-up throughout the novel as we wait to finally meet this author and receive a mind-bending realization. The problem is that when we finally meet him, he’s an ordinary guy and we learn he wrote the book using I Ching, because it directed him to do so. Ultimately he is as lost as everyone else. What does it mean that the I Ching wrote a book indicating that the real losers of the war were the Germans and Japanese? We are left to contemplate as the novel ends, with nothing much having changed for any of Dick’s characters or for us as readers. Our job – it seems – is to think through what all of this means.
I definitely do recommend the book, particularly if you are a history buff who enjoys studying World War II. It’s fascinating to be presented with two alternative histories by Dick – his novel as well as the novel within his novel – that are both plausible and both quite different from what actually happened. The recurring theme of the novel is that small changes can lead to unpredictable greater ones. As a reader, I enjoy thinking through the implications of that reality. Should we put great store in our small decisions, too? Or should we flippantly pass through life without regard for the long term implications of our small choices? Does Dick’s story present a disconcerting amount of bureaucratic similarity in our lives, in a world wherein “the bad guys” won the Second World War? On the other hand, is it also disconcerting how much global horror can result from a few small changes that led to a different war victor? Do we all just kind of rely on our own ideas of fate to absorb both the good and bad, and to absolve us of the consequences of our choices? If our choices matter so much, how should we make them? These are the types of questions that the novel will present you with, and they’re worth your consideration.
