Reviews - The Man in the High Castle

You need to sign in or sign up before continuing.

4.15k reviews for:

The Man in the High Castle

Philip K. Dick

3.4 AVERAGE

brinreadstowrite's review against another edition

2.0

dark mysterious reflective tense slow-paced

Plot or Character Driven: Plot

Strong character development: Complicated

Loveable characters: No

Diverse cast of characters: Yes

Flaws of characters a main focus: Yes

crownh8's review against another edition

2.0

Perhaps my most controversial rating? Surprisingly, most of the people who I talked to about this book felt similarly. Really not sure how this ended up as his second most popular book on Goodreads. I'm sure the TV show adaptation boosted the numbers significantly, but I imagine it was already popular enough pre-2015 for Amazon to even make a show out of it. Perhaps someone saw the potential in the book and decided to give it the coherent justice it deserves? I guess I won't know until I watch it. This was absolutely nothing like the the two previous PKD books I read (DADOES? and A Scanner Darkly), which I loved dearly for their quirkiness and deadpan absurdist humour. No, this was much different. In a mostly-bad way.

I liked the idea that Dick was playing with here, the meta commentary and the raw, sometimes wildly offensive cultural worldbuilding, but as a story, this book is nothing but threads. This is not a plot book. It's barely a character driven book (although I did at least enjoy the story threads of Robert Childan, Nobosuke Tagomi, and Juliana Fink). If you think really hard about the meta aspect of it, you can make a good case for its genius, but I can't excuse the fact that it was just not enjoyable to read. There were some small blips of humour of profundity here and there that made me think or chuckle, but it was overall an incoherent slog. There were so many scenes (especially concerning the German characters) where I just tuned out because I didn't know who anyone was or why they were talking. I enjoy an abstract narrative but I also have limits for the pain I must endure to piece it all together. At best, The Man in the High Castle was an interesting thought experiment, but it was too borderline-psychotic to make its ideas digestible. I think some prior context for what Dick was trying to achieve here would have increased my enjoyment, but unfortunately I don't think it's worth a re-read.

I'm not giving up on my boy Phil though. I have five more of his books in my unread pile right now and I'm sure some of them will connect with me the way DADOES? and A Scanner Darkly did.

fueledbyfercho's review against another edition

3.5

adventurous dark sad medium-paced

Plot or Character Driven: A mix

Strong character development: Yes

Loveable characters: Complicated

Diverse cast of characters: Yes

Flaws of characters a main focus: No

This book answers to the biggest 'what if?' question and that is what would have happened if the Axis won WWII and we find ourselves in an occupied USA with a buffer zone in between German and Japanese.

anagmartins's review against another edition

3.0

A ideia deste livro é muito boa, já as personagens e a história em si ficaram muito aquém das minhas expectativas. É uma pena, mas o meu livro preferido do Philip K. Dick continua a ser o primeiro que li, o Ubik.