Reviews - Le Maître du Haut Château

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4.05k reviews for:

Le Maître du Haut Château

Philip K. Dick

3.4 AVERAGE

crisnomai's review against another edition

3.0

Plot and characters are brilliant, should have been longer or had a sequel

germy_ldn's review against another edition

2.0

reflective sad slow-paced

Plot or Character Driven: Character

Strong character development: Yes

Loveable characters: No

Diverse cast of characters: Complicated

Flaws of characters a main focus: Yes

This author is not for me.

howdyshoeb's review against another edition

4.0

challenging reflective tense medium-paced

Plot or Character Driven: A mix

Strong character development: N/A

Loveable characters: Complicated

Diverse cast of characters: Yes

ed_moore's review against another edition

2.5

dark tense slow-paced

Plot or Character Driven: Character

Strong character development: Complicated

Loveable characters: No

Diverse cast of characters: No

Flaws of characters a main focus: No

“It is not hubris, not pride; it is inflation of the ego to its ultimate—confusion between him who worships and that which is worshiped. Man has not eaten God; God has eaten man.”

Phillip K Dick’s ‘The Man in the High Castle’ presents a speculative dystopian where the Nazis and Japanese won the Second World War and the holocaust is carried out in its entirety and expanded upon. Dick really didn’t focus on what I expected him to however. I assumed the ‘man in the high castle’ of the title was a ruling Hitler however in 1960 Hitler is already dead, and rather the novel focuses on a fictional inversion of itself, a book called ‘The Grasshopper Lies Heavy’ which presents a fictional world where the allies won the war, interposing reality within the dystopian. Dick focuses on the personal far more than the political in this work, and though the dystopian world-building is really promising I feel it wasn’t fully engaged with or explored. Instead Dick charts his characters reactions with the book, and the eponymous ‘man’ is rather referring to the ‘Grasshopper’s’ author.

This lack of exploration into the political system he creates left the set-up of the nazi regime confusing, its relationship with Japan never really being fully explained and left rather muddled. Additionally, while it focused on the personal I didn’t engage with any of the characters, although many subtly resist the totalitarian regime. A fair few blended together in their lack of distinction and generally weren’t very well developed. The ending also made absolutely no sense.

I felt this had so much promise and presented a very interesting meta-textual inversion but in so many places Dick failed to deliver.