I enjoy science fiction and Philip K. Dick ... I'd been meaning to read The Man in the High Castle for a while, and with the Amazon TV series based on the novel coming out I thought it would be a nice chance to finally read it. I read the book pretty much at the same time as I watched the TV shows ... to the point of occasionally getting confused when trying to recall whether a particular event happened in the book or in the TV series--the shows are only very loosely tied to the book, but some of the nitty-gritty details are oddly similar even though many of the big picture issues are not. I figure that many people coming to this book now are doing so with only the TV shows as a reference, and might not have read PKD before, so I thought I'd write this review with that in mind.
Perhaps the first thing to be aware of is that the novel is leisurely and relatively free of dramatic action. The main "action" occurs between the characters' ears--it is the inner monologues and terse dialogues where most of the action occurs. Despite often being held up as an exemplar of the genre of alternate history, I'd even go so far as to say that the novel isn't even really a "thought exercise" in the sense of exploring answers to the question of: "If the Axis powers won the war, what would things be like?" I'd argue that this is where the TV series shines--imagining such an alternate reality and setting characters loose in such a setting, with attending assassinations and intrigues. This is not to say that PKD is not interested in such issues, and he has well thought-out detail as to how the Allied powers could have lost, and what the dynamics in the upper echelons of US and German politics would've been before, during, and after the war. But to focus on questions like "I wonder what Japanese-occupied San Francisco would be like?" would only be a superficial reading of what PKD wants the reader to think about--the setting is the vehicle, not the destination. Dick's interests lie in broader and more universal issues like "What is reality?" "What is authenticity?" "What does it mean to be human, and what is humanity?" These are themes that repeat themselves over and over in his works, and as a result his books are best savored rather than rushed through just to find out "what happens next".
As a result, Dick's works (such as this one) are more philosophy than they are suspense and adventure. There is action, but Dick is more interested in meaning, motivation, and aftermath than pure cause and effect. There are answers, but they are often ambiguous and open to interpretation, like the lines in the I Ching. And, as such, this book will not speak to everyone--I imagine some fans of the TV show might not like the book, and vice versa. Personally, I like them both, but for different reasons--the book is perhaps the yin to the TV show's yang. That said, I wish the TV show had a little more of the book's philosophizing, and as a reader I wouldn't mind if the book had a little more of the TV show's action and exploration of the alternate history setting. What I would hope, though, is that fans of the TV show who are skeptical of the book give it a chance, just like Tagomi and the piece of Edfrank jewelry he contemplates first with no expectations, despair, and only a small, blind grasping at hope ... the hope that perhaps it *will* speak to him, transform him, and sure enough, without even realizing it ... it does.
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