2013 read #147: The Man in the High Castle by Philip K. Dick.

The Man in the High Castle by Philip K. Dick
229 pages
Published 1962
Read from November 28 to November 30
Rating: ★★★★ out of 5

For some reason I'm struggling to communicate my thoughts in a concise manner today. The words squirt away whenever I try to squeeze them into shape. Hopefully it's just a temporary thing; I'm always paranoid I'm just gonna lose my perspicuity one day (such as it is). Bear with me.

It's no surprise that reading all these books this year has cultivated my tastes. I'm no longer so readily impressed by middling works in any genre; "pretty good" fades into a kind of steadily rising background radiation, requiring ever higher standards to blip up above the baseline. I have little patience now for anything just going through the motions, unless it appeals to some quirk or weakness of mine.

Contrarily, gaining a better historical grounding in my favored genres -- fantasy especially, but also science fiction -- contributed substantially to my appreciation for this book. I don't think I've ever known how to approach Dick. Years ago, I read Martian Time-Slip and almost immediately forgot it; I don't have any recollection of reading it, but there it is on one of my year-end book lists. Clearly it didn't leave much of an impression on me back then. Early this year I read Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? and Ubik; I liked them a great deal, but underneath my appreciation I kind of felt that I was missing something, some ingredient to Dick's booming more-than-cult popularity. Now that I've finally gotten around to another of his books, with a whole heap of newfound worldliness to aid me, I wonder if I would appreciate Ubik and Electric Sheep more now, if somehow I could read them for the first time.

Something about this book clicked with me. It was as if I could sense the Theodore Sturgeons and Cordwainer Smiths and Jack Vances working around Dick, the vibe of his time and place tuning each page. Perhaps it helps that Dick hadn't yet gone over entirely to his New Wave obsessions, God and drugs and altered-state messiahs, true and false realities; prototypes of those themes are prominent, but High Castle rises above them all to be its own thing, tell its own kind of story. Usually I'm not keen on alternative histories -- a brief Turtledove phase in my teens inoculated me against the theme -- but in Dick's hands it feels fresh and disturbing, shivering with tension and discomfort. The characters seemed several steps above Dick's usual casts, a diverse lot that for the most part felt real -- in the case of the Nazi-sympathizing antiques dealer, unnervingly so. (The exception, of course, is the token woman character, but I don't think anyone knew how to effectively write women at the time; nonetheless, Juliana still felt more fully realized than any other Dick woman I've read.)

Is it heresy to say I maaaaaay have liked this just a bit better than Electric Sheep?

My main objection to The Man in the High Castle is, well, the Man in the High Castle. The idea of everyone -- Nazi, occupying Japanese, American civilian -- obsessing over Abendsen's alternate history novel felt forced, a premature bit of metafiction. Even though that's kind of the whole point of this book, I guess.