earlover58 's review for:

The Man in the High Castle by Philip K. Dick

4.0

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The process of reading this book didn’t really get exciting till the end, but afterward, It took me some pondering to think about what the hell I just read. Most of the plot takes place in 1967 San Francisco in an alternate reality in which Germany & Japan won the war. Within the story, there is this book “The Grasshopper Lies Heavy” that explains what would happen if the U.S.A & the British won the war. As we read about an alternate reality of ww2 so do the characters in our book. The use of the oracle/ I Ching in this book is really trippy. The overall theme of perception & the question of what is it that makes a thing or us “real” was debated through the lens of the historicity of material artifacts. When the antique merchant Robert Childan is faced with the fact that one of his historical American war guns is a fake he has a reality crisis, as continues to be the case throughout the novel in the varied cast of characters. Not only do some characters use the oracle to eventually find out that their reality “didn’t actually happen” (in my interpretation) but Mr. Dick himself used the I Ching to write the novel. I love endings that actually f*ck your mind & this did that very well.