When one is afraid of heights, and terrors are in the road the almond tree blossoms, the grasshopper drags itself along and desire fails because all must go to their eternal home, and the mourners will go about the streets
Ecclesiastes:
Welcome to your alternative nightmare.
Let me set the canvas, Allies have lost the war, Japan and Nazis have divided up the fallen countries, Jews and other groups are still being hunted down, Slavery is legal again. Nazis have mastered space travel and colonized Mars and Venus,
And all these tidbits are like magician's hot assistant, Don't get distracted. Focus on the story.
There are three stories here, Three distinct story arcs which overlap each other with the help of shared characters and I Ching, an ancient book which acts as an oracle.
Also, there is a novel: Grasshopper lies heavy, A novel which many characters in this story read,
A novel within a novel,
If Man in the High Castle is a cracked reflection of the world after WWII where Axis power took control, then Grasshopper lies heavy is another broken reflection where Allies won the war.
Don't be confused. Grasshopper lies heavy is not our history, It is an alternative history where Allies won the war in a different set of circumstances,
Do you know what's remarkable I am reading a novel which paints an alternative history where the Axis won the war and the characters inside that very novel are reading a book where Allies won the war.
The story is set in, America, One story arc tells the story of the dealers and makers art and artifacts after the war while another arc deals with a mysterious Italian man and a woman's fascination with the author of Grasshopper lies heavy.
My personal favorite is the story arc which deals with the relationship between Nazi Germany and Japanese, The reason for this fascination is because this arc had everything! Mystery, action, philosophy, moral ambiguity and strong characters,
As for the other two arcs, I did like them, But parts of it were predictable and too philosophical for my taste, Nevertheless, both arcs concluded quite strongly, if not bizarrely,
I think Philip K Dick loves to screw with people in the very end, In his other famous novel, Does Android dream of electric sheep, he closed his last act with some crazy stuff, Man in the High Castle does the same,
It's not a book for everyone.
It's uneven and too philosophical at times, It is also a kind of book which leaves you with many questions rather than answers, I think a quote from this novel itself sums up Man in the High Castle perfectly,
“ What is it Philip K Dick Abendsen wanted to say Nothing about his makebelieve world, Am I the only one who knows Ill bet I am nobody else really understands Man in the High Castle Grasshopper but me they just imagine they do.
”
Nope, I don't claim to understand this book, Hermann Göring, the second most powerful man in Nazi Germany after Hitler, fancied himself an art collector and scoured Europe to acquire masterpieces.
In, his collection was seized by the Allies while he was on trial at Nuremberg, Among many other works of art, they found The Supper at Emmaus, signed by Johannes Vermeer, Görings favourite, The origin of that painting was then traced back to a Dutch art dealer named Han van Meegeren, who consequently was arrested and charged with the crime of collaborating with the Nazis.
A few weeks into his trial, van Meegeren confessed: the Vermeer was a forgery, a fake he had painted to fool Göring and the Nazi art experts.
As the judges, incredulous, asked him to prove his claim, he requested that a canvas and some painting be brought to his cell.
He painted a beautiful Vermeer, Van Meegerens charges were dropped, and he became a Dutch national hero, Göring committed suicide.
In Philip K Dicks Man in the High Castle, one of the early novels of his career, there is a major storyline about an art and antique dealer, named Robert Childan, who sells old American artefacts to Japanese amateurs.
He eventually teams up with a skilled jewellery craftsman, Frank Fink, They both end up involved in a counterfeit antiques business, Just as in the van Meegeren anecdote, its almost impossible to tell the difference between the authentic pieces and the fake ones, But the former have “historicity”, the latter dont,
In fact, Dicks whole novel deals with this question:
the nature of history and reality, the nature of time, In this book, Dick depicts a world where the Axis powers chiefly the German Reich and the Empire of Japan have won World War II.
The cause of this complete geopolitical reversal is an event of practically no account: in, the anarchist Giuseppe Zangara manages to assassinate U.
S. President Franklin D. Roosevelt he was in fact arrested before he could carry out his plan, As a result, the United States withdraw into isolationism and let Nazi Germany and Japan conquer the world and become superpowers,
Whats even more interesting is the mise en abyme, Inside Dicks novel, there is another book, titled The Grasshopper Lies Heavy, written by the mysterious “man in the High Castle”, which depicts yet another alternate reality, where Germany and Japan have lost the war, and the U.
S. and the British Empire gain hegemony over the world, And, on top of it all, there is still another book, sitelinkThe I Ching or Book of Changes, which some of the characters use as an Oracle to try and read their fate.
It is interesting to note that The Grasshopper has in fact been written using or more exactly by the I Ching.
Too, it is said that Dick himself used the hexagrams in the I Ching to write The Man in the High Castle.
In the end, what is the nature of the actual reality we live in Does it have more “historicity” than other possible, virtual, fictional, “fake” realities other hexagrams As Dick puts it to conclude his novel: “there must be world after world unseen by us, in some region or dimension that we simply do not perceive”.
To say that this book is puzzling is an understatement, Ridley Scotts production of the Amazon TV show is loosely inspired by Dicks plot line, but still very entertaining, I enjoyed reading this story overall and was intrigued by the alternative history concept, We are in the plot of a conquered and divided America in every sense of the expression, The suppression of ideas, conformity of the masses, and the loss identity are common PKD themes found in this story, Yet there remains hints of boiling tension such as the revered "man in the high castle", the I Ching, and the various randomseeming human interactions.
The mystical and mysterious "man in the high castle" who serves as a beacon of hope, the I Ching that correlates to superstition and uncertainty about the future, and human interaction: daily, business, and even intimate.
Initially I complained this story didn't go into further detail about the alternate history, I felt there were no 'whys' or 'hows' that led to the current American situation presented in the book, Now that I've read other PKD novels, this is exactly what makes him a gifted writer, What is presented in the book is enough to leave the reader to fill in the blanks with his/her imagination,
Overall a very intriguing book I enjoyed, Thanks!.
Snag The Man In The High Castle Penned By Philip K. Dick Accessible In Publication
Philip K. Dick