Jonathan Spencer's Tales of Ordinary Wisdom
Politics, Poetry, Psychology, Rants and Recipes
The Man in The High Castle – Phillip K. Dick
Please God they don’t turn one of the best modern novels into some awful misrepresenting film, before you get to read it
Philip K Dick always wanted to be a mainstream novelist but those he wrote in that genre did not get wide circulation until after his death. The Man in The High Castle however whilst sold as a science fiction novel is really a mainstream one. One that could be said to have re-popularised the modern genre of alternate history novels -Philp Roth has recently had success with an alternate WW2 history Novel: The Plot against America -
The Man in the high castle however is more than just an alternate history, it in fact takes things a step further…
The Man In The High Castle (S.F. Masterworks)
…in that whilst the novel is set in a world where it appears that Germany and Japan have won the war, many of the characters in the book are reading “The grasshopper lies heavy”, a book written by “the man in the high castle” as an alternate history novel, but banned by the authorities. This alternate, alternate reality is the aspect of the book that gives it its depth, for in “grasshopper” things are not as they are in our world.
The other elements of this book, that are not always apparent in Dicks other books are connected to his usaul theme of what is real. However, when he approaches the themes of what is real and what is reality; he seems to suggest that whatever reality is our humanity creativity and integrity or evil, violence and destruction bind us together despite our perceptions of the nature of the world we live in.
The only other author I know that has approached this in a similar way is Christopher Priest in The Separation.
Interestingly Dick also uses the I Ching (the book of changes) as a theme in this book, suggesting that there are ways to determine the truth of reality perhaps because we have a fragile faith in what s/he sees or what actions s/he must take.
The Majority of the main characters in the book consult the I Ching and it is central to the denoument. At one stage Mr Tagomi suggests like other books such as the bible that the I Ching is alive.
Finally the other theme I enjoyed in the book is that of culture as reality, as the story unfolds, we see the influence of Japanese culture on American life, and the lack of understanding of parts German culture for the subtleties of the Japanese outside of the theatre of war.
As usual Dicks obsession with the Nazis is there but in The Man in the high Castle it is softened by his view of Americans obsession with history and antiques and the subtleties of eastern spirituality.
My view is this book was Dicks finest work, being a beautiful critique of modern life in the 1960s, and more specifically of the creation of history that led to the 1960s. Through this book Dick suggests we can create our own reality or allow others to create it for us, and that perhaps what we are told as fact (history) is merely just another reality…that perhaps Germany and Japan had won the war, that Americans were obsessed with having a history (represented by antiques).
However much like the fore mention Mr Roth, Philip K Dick points up that for ordinary people whilst it may appear that it doesn’t really matter who is in power because life goes on anyway, this is not true if you are jewish…or black or some other persecuted minority and in the final analysis novelists weren’t necessarily in ivory towers but the only ones deep enough in the grass to see that the grasshopper lies heavy.
Related posts:
Related posts:
- Little Gidding – T.S. Eliot
- A View of Christmas
- Dream a new world – the power of dreams, a dream date
- The Templars
- We need to do something about government…
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