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A review by yak_attak
The Man in the High Castle by Philip K. Dick
5.0
I've been waffling whether to give this book full marks for some time, and am even now not quite convinced - partially when push comes to shove I'm not sure I could cogently explain what's so compelling about the thematic thrust here, Dick's sensuous multilayered experience doesn't easily unfold to something you can sum up in a sentence, but if I tried it might go something like this: Dick blends alternate history in which Nazis defeated and overtook America, repeated discussions of art, verisimilitude, and fate to get at something fundamentally fascinating about personal drive, influence, artistic expression.... something about how society intakes and is changed by it? I dunno, I'm losing steam here. Point is, it is a typically dense Dickish melange of meaning, one that you're absolutely going to chew on for ages.
To deliver it, Dick writes a hell of a treatise on world-building, giving us insight into his alternate reality point by point, sentence by sentence, but without ever stopping and saying outright "This is what happened, this is how it went down." Everything is implied, but nothing is difficult to suss out - a masterwork of the old Show don't Tell style. Everything is real and evocative without being overwhelming. This extends to the characters too, though it seems from other reviews this is pretty contentious - we don't really get heaps of characterization and in some ways it could be definitely read as thin, but I'm not wholly convinced they are - point being, you might find them a bit lacking, that's okay.
The main thing to keep in mind though is the big ol' blazing content warning. Again, this is about a world ruled by Nazis - and it's not done in some boilerplate goose-stepping, machine guns and flags way. This is a world where their philosophy and theology has permeated the social culture, and *every* character is infected by it. There's hardly a paragraph goes by without some horrendous racial epithet or musings based on eugenics. If you have any line whatsoever when it comes to this stuff just assume that PKD crossed over it and kept on marching. Incredibly uncomfortable to read, but utterly engrossing.
Let it settle in, focus on it, consider it, and maybe it will change things for you.
To deliver it, Dick writes a hell of a treatise on world-building, giving us insight into his alternate reality point by point, sentence by sentence, but without ever stopping and saying outright "This is what happened, this is how it went down." Everything is implied, but nothing is difficult to suss out - a masterwork of the old Show don't Tell style. Everything is real and evocative without being overwhelming. This extends to the characters too, though it seems from other reviews this is pretty contentious - we don't really get heaps of characterization and in some ways it could be definitely read as thin, but I'm not wholly convinced they are - point being, you might find them a bit lacking, that's okay.
The main thing to keep in mind though is the big ol' blazing content warning. Again, this is about a world ruled by Nazis - and it's not done in some boilerplate goose-stepping, machine guns and flags way. This is a world where their philosophy and theology has permeated the social culture, and *every* character is infected by it. There's hardly a paragraph goes by without some horrendous racial epithet or musings based on eugenics. If you have any line whatsoever when it comes to this stuff just assume that PKD crossed over it and kept on marching. Incredibly uncomfortable to read, but utterly engrossing.
Let it settle in, focus on it, consider it, and maybe it will change things for you.