The Man in the High Castle

An Occasional Book Review

Once in a while I will review a book that I happen to come across. Today that is Philip K. Dick’s 1962 classic novel of oppression and liberation, The Man in the High Castle.

We don’t know why we read what we read, nor what a novel will do to us: and that is the premise of Dick’s story. On the surface it is about the aftermath of German-Japanese victory in the Second World War. But its real subject is reading and world-making.

The other night in Prague I had a few minutes to myself, and chanced to see the mint-colored spine of The Man in the High Castle. Something moved my hand. I was planning to run the next morning on a hill called “Vyšehrad,” which means “upper castle.” Was it that? I was about to go on stage and speak about freedom; perhaps I sensed that Dick had something to say about the subject.

I knew that the The Man in the High Castle was about a German-Japanese occupation of the United States. I had always assumed that the titular figure was a German with a secret to keep. I was wrong. He is an American novelist who had written a counter-factual novel that appears within Dick’s counterfactual novel. The dominant story is that of “reality” -- the German-Japanese victory. But the other version -- the “novel” -- asserts itself ever more over the course of the book.

In the beginning, we have no reason to expect this. We are drawn in to the world of defeated Americans in San Francisco. Dick does not directly describe the Japanese occupation regime. We get the the inner experiences, all too plausible, of Americans for whom life was elsewhere. The Americans have internalized their own subordinate position, each in a way that corresponds to a specific set of character traits. Their language adapts to the way the Japanese speak English; even their thoughts do.

Dick makes imperialism in California seem unproblematic. The place has been run from all sorts of distant power centers, so why not Tokyo? By completely normalizing Japanese rule, Dick achieves something very interesting, which is to show us how other novels set in California, let us say a Raymond Marlowe detective story, normalize American rule.

There is no apparent resistance to the Japanese; what we see is more like the creative protection of individual interests that historians might call “agency.” The Japanese are interested in prewar Americana, much as Americans might have been interested in Native arts and crafts. And so some of the characters produce and sell fake antiques for the Japanese market. A pair of Americans (one of them Jewish) break away from the scam and produce contemporary jewelry and try to sell it as such. A potential Japanese buyer sees the jewelry as suitable only for a global colonial market: as mass-market trinkets, in other words. A lesson is being taught in the relationship between power and taste. The Japanese are themselves buying fake junk, which become masterpieces because they are the masters. Authentic art becomes mass-market trinkets for the same reason.

It all might have been different, Dick seems to be saying, because had it been different it would have been very much the same. Various prejudices can be mobilized to the same effect, different hierarchies can be enforced into the practical invisibility of everyday life, and we would take it all for granted. Most of the culture would simply bend; but perhaps not all of it.

We would need something, a special kind of art, perhaps a book of a different sort, to help us see through our own reality to some sort of other possibility. The man in the high tower, the novelist Hawthorn Abendsen, has written a counterfactual history, a bestselling novel, about a world in which the British and the Americans actually won the war. And so we have a novel within the novel, which turns up everywhere, and of which we are given some striking passages. This book works its magic not only on the Americans but on everyone who reads it, including Germans.

Our view of them is even more askance. We see only a few Germans from the inside. We have very little access to the Nazi puppet regimes in the eastern United States nor Nazi rule anywhere else in the world -- though we are given to understand that the Nazis have continued the Holocaust in America and have tried to exterminate every inhabitant of Africa. Another crime of a similar scale is in the works.

The Nazis are at once sure of themselves and psychologically vulnerable, caught in a cycle of spectacular crimes that distract them from tedious infighting. By 1962, when the book is set, Hitler has gone mad from syphilis, and has been succeeded by Martin Bormann. After Bormann’s sudden death, the remaining Nazi leaders struggle for power, the main contenders being Goebbels, Göring, and Heydrich.

Dick’s counterfactual presentation of Nazism seventeen years after victory is very good. He knew the essentials of what could be known about the mass killing of Jews, about the Hitlerian fixation with Ukraine, about divisions within the regime.

Although Berlin is distant, the succession struggle ripples through across the Atlantic and across North America to the Japanese-dominated west coast. A German from the Abwehr (military intelligence) has come to California undercover (hiding from other Germans, mainly) in order to reach a faction of the Japanese government. The chaos in Berlin makes his mission more complicated. He has to urge the Japanese to support Heydrich, whose enormous crimes he knows very well, because it appears that Goebbels would be more likely to commit the next great atrocity.

The military intelligence officer sees himself as among choices that are worse than imperfect, but that nevertheless must be made. He is pursued by the Sicherheitsdienst or SD, which is ultimately Heydrich’s organization; at their low level, they are just doing their job. He himself sees the Heydrich fraction as the worst of the worst, but it so happens that in one crucial respect that are less awful than the Goebbels fraction, and so in this particular conjuncture must be supported. “We can only control the end by making choices at each step,” he reflects.

The major act of resistance in the book is carried out by someone who has contact with all three zones -- the Japanese, the buffer, the German. She is a woman, a survivor of sexual violence, who over the course of the story moves from being almost mute to the most articulate character in the book. Julianna Crain has left her husband, one of the jewelry makers, for reasons that are private and unclear; they seem to like each other, but something has not worked. That he is Jewish matters to her approach to Nazis. In the Colorado of the buffer zone she encounters, at first unknowingly, an undercover Nazi agent who has been sent to kill the novelist Hawthorn. She does with him what she believes she needs to do.

The puzzling ending is better not described in detail. The gist, though, is that the world in which the story unfolds is one possible view of things, and the world of the novel within the novel is another possible view of things, but that neither exhausts all the possibilities. The last chapter can be understood in various ways, one of which is this: the Americans are, in fact, their own Japanese and their own Germans.

It might be, Dick seems be telling us, that the apparent premise of the book is illusory: it matters not so much who actually won and who actually lost a war as what we do with ourselves afterwards. We don’t need defeat to a foreign power to adapt to everyday authority or to invite atrocious violence; we Americans might do this without any excuse beyond self-delusion.

And while that might seem a dark conclusion, it is also an empowering one: the story, in the end, is ours. Power over us depends on a certain kind of charisma, ultimately on a “bluff.” This does not mean, Dick seems to be saying, that everything is easy; his most effective characters take the chances they are given and are aware that every choice is fraught with risk. It does mean that many of the restraints upon us are the ones that we choose, and that we are more likely to take practical action when we can imagine a world that is very different.

(PS: I should clarify that this review is of the novel, which I have just read, and not of the miniseries, which I have not seen; I believe that its plot is different.)