Erik's Reviews > The Man in the High Castle

A good book is like a Trojan horse.

And no I don’t mean it helps commit genocide, thanks no thanks mein kampf.

Rather, I mean a good book must function like a Trojan horse. It needs some exterior elements that make us want to open the gates of our minds and invite it in. An interesting plot. Some thrill. Some suspense. A character or two to root for. Humor works too. Maybe great worldbuilding. Even unique voice can sometimes do it. Y’know, something that makes the novel FUN and ENJOYABLE to read.

But once the novel has gotten inside, it needs to deploy some hidden depths. Maybe a critique of free will. Or an exploration of non-standard pathologies. Or an analysis of the self-destructive nature of imperialism. Something that makes the novel WORTH reading, something to challenge and expand the reader’s mind.

If a novel fails at either task, then it’s not worth reading. Which, unfortunately, includes most novels. It’s challenging to find an author with both skillsets. Philip K. Dick is one such author.

But Man in the High Castle is not one such book.

I don’t want to say that Man in the High Castle has no plot. It does. Stuff happens. Characters have arcs. But none of it is compelling or interesting.

Which isn’t surprising, given what we know about how PKD developed this book’s plot. Famously, he was guided by the I Ching (aka fortune-telling). To give him credit, here’s exactly what he wrote: “I used it in The Man in the High Castle because a number of characters used it. In each case when they asked a question, I threw the coins and wrote the hexagram lines they got. That governed the direction of the book.”

The characters cast the I Ching maybe 10 times throughout the whole book? And of course PKD used his writerly skills to translate the vague lines into plot. In a D&D game, the dice rolls don’t create the story, the DM (and players) do. So I don’t think it’d be fair to say the plot was written randomly.

But I do think the mere fact that he opted to use the I Ching AT ALL tells us something about whether PKD had a strong plot in mind when crafting this book. Obviously, he didn’t. Or he wouldn’t have used the I Ching, right?

And it shows. There’s 4 or 5 points of view, and there’s some ostensible connections between them. But for the most part, they don’t intersect.. Neither are the character arcs themselves particularly dynamic.

That much for the entertaining exterior. But what about the book’s hidden depths?

Not particularly good either. As I cited in my review of his Flow My Tears, the Policeman Said, PKD is interested in two questions: “what is real?” and “what constitutes the authentic human being?” In other words, ontology. Does Man in the High Castle help us answer these questions?

No more than, say, Lord of the Rings does.

Because while, yes, this book takes place in an alternate history in which the Axis won WW2, it contains the least explicit and implicit exploration of ontology of any PKD book I’ve read. Probably why it won the Hugo - because it’s one of his simplest and least strange books.

So the book isn’t terrible. There’s some good lines. I enjoyed the characters’ musings on race and the cognitive dissonant racism that many characters have toward their Japanese conquerors. The overall alternative history conceit is cool.

It’s just, every other PKD book I’ve read is better than this one. So… yeah. Go read one of them instead. Ubik, Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch, Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep, etc.