The Man in the High Castle
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| Author | Philip K. Dick |
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| Country | United States |
| Language | English |
| Genre(s) | Alternate history |
| Publisher | Putnam |
| Released | 1 January 1962 |
| Media Type | |
| ISBN | ISBN 0-244-15180-6 |
The Man in the High Castle is a 1962 alternate history novel by science fiction writer Philip K. Dick. The novel is set in the former United States, in 1962, fifteen years after the Axis Powers defeated the Allies in World War II and the U.S. surrendered to Nazi Germany and the Empire of Japan.
While not the first piece of alternate history fiction, the novel defined that type of story as a genre of literature. It won the prestigious Hugo Award and helped make Dick well-known in science fiction circles. It is one of Dick's most tightly-structured and character-focused novels.
Contents |
[edit] Plot
[edit] Back story
The Man in the High Castle underwent its point of divergence from our own world due to the assassination of President Franklin D. Roosevelt in 1933. He was succeeded by Vice President John Nance Garner, who was subsequently replaced by John W. Bricker. Neither man was able to revive the nation from the Great Depression, and both clung to a isolationist policy related to the oncoming war.
Due to poor U.S. economic performance and isolationism, Britain and the rest of Europe fell to the Axis Powers. Russia collapsed in 1941 and was occupied by the Nazis, while most of the Slavic people were exterminated. The Slavic survivors of the war were confined to "reservation-like closed regions". The Japanese completely destroyed the United States' Pacific fleet in a much more expansive attack on Pearl Harbor. Due to Japan's expanded military capabilities, it was able to invade and occupy Hawaii, Australia, New Zealand and the Southwestern Pacific in the early forties. After this, the United States fell to the Axis, with many important cities suffering great damage.
By 1947, Allied forces had surrendered to Axis control. The Eastern Seaboard was placed under German control while California and other western states ceded to Japanese rule. The Southern United States was revived as a quasi-independent state (as a Nazi puppet state like Vichy France). The Rocky Mountain States and much of the Midwest remained autonomous, being considered unimportant by either of the victors, as well as a useful buffer. At the end of the war, the British leaders and generals were tried for war crimes (e.g. the carpet bombing of German cities) in a parallel of the Nuremberg Trials.
After Adolf Hitler was incapacitated by syphilis, the head of the Nazi Party Chancellery, Martin Bormann, assumed the leadership of Germany. The Nazis created a colonial empire and continued their mass murder of races they considered inferior, murdering Jews in the puppet United States and other areas they controlled and mounting massive genocide in Africa. However, unlike the Nazis, the Japanese had no policy of cleansing the occupied areas of "unwanted" races.
Nazi Germany continued their rocketry programs, so that by 1962, they had a working system of commercial rockets used for inter-continental travel and also pursued space exploration, by sending rockets to the Moon and Mars. The novel also mentions television as being a new technology used in Germany.
Meanwhile Japan continued more peaceful, but certainly not democratic rule, over much of Asia and territories within the Pacific Ocean. Like the United States and the Soviet Union after our own world's World War II, the Japanese and the Germans are distrustful of one another. Nazi Germany and the Japanese Empire both possess nuclear weapons and are mired in their own Cold War.
During the novel, Martin Bormann dies and other Nazis such as Joseph Goebbels and Reinhard Heydrich challenge to become Reich Chancellor (German: Reichskanzler). Various factions of the Nazi party are described as either seeking war with Japan or being more interested in colonizing the solar system.
[edit] Characters
Rather than present a linear story, the novel follows each of its characters as they pursue their lives. There are connections between them, some direct, some indirect, and some barely perceptible. Three of the main characters use the I Ching to guide their lives.
- Nobusuke Tagomi is a representative at the Japanese Trade Mission in San Francisco.
- Frank Frink (born Fink) initially works at the Wyndham-Matson Corporation, a company specializing in reproduction (i.e. fake) Americana.
- Juliana Frink, Frank's ex-wife, is a teacher of judo.
Other characters are guided differently.
- Robert Childan is the proprietor of "American Artistic Handicrafts", a store which sells antique Americana to collectors, mostly Japanese. Childan obtains some of his stock from Wyndham-Matson Inc. but believes these items to be genuine. Because he deals with Japanese, Childan has adopted Japanese manners, Anglicized versions of Japanese modes of speech, and even thought patterns similar to the Japanese. Tagomi is one of Childan's best customers, both for himself, and for gifts he "grafts" onto visiting businessmen.
- Wyndham-Matson himself, Frank's boss, appears briefly to muse on the difference between a real antique and a reproduction, and to introduce, via his girlfriend, the novel "The Grasshopper Lies Heavy".
- "Mr. Baynes", actually Captain Rudolf Wegener of Reich Naval Intelligence, is travelling to meet Mr. Tagomi, expecting to meet an important Japanese representative through him. He is taken aback when Tagomi greets him and gives him a gift of a "genuine Mickey Mouse watch", which he has bought from Childan.
[edit] Storylines
The Man in the High Castle has no one central plot but rotates between several somewhat interconnected storylines:
- "Mr. Baynes" travels to San Francisco under cover as a Swedish trading merchant. He confers with Mr. Tagomi, but must stall in pursuit of his true mission and avoid capture until the mysterious Mr. Yatabe arrives from Japan. Yatabe is actually General Tedeki, formerly of the Imperial General Staff. The real mission is to warn the Japanese that a faction of the Nazis, lead by Joseph Goebbels, has a plan (Operation Löwenzahn/Dandelion) to use nuclear weapons against the Japanese Archipelago (known as the "Home Islands" within the book). In addition the mission of Mr. Baynes, actually an agent of the German Abwehr, is to persuade the Japanese to support Reinhard Heydrich, chief of the Sicherheitsdienst and the SS against Joseph Goebbels.
- Robert Childan tries to retain honor and dignity while catering to an occupying force. Although often obsequious in their presence and ambivalent in his own feelings towards the war and his occupiers (whom he both loathes and respects alternately), Childan eventually finds a sense of cultural pride. He also investigates widespread forgery within the antique market amidst the increased Japanese interest in 'genuine' Americana.
- Frank Frink and a friend, Ed McCarthy begin a jewelry business, creating some of the first authentic pieces of American art in several years. Their works have a strange effect on the Americans and Japanese who view them. Frink attempts to hide his Jewish ancestry from local police but is arrested after he attempts to sabotage Wyndham-Matson's business by telling Childan that the items he sells are fakes.
- Frink's ex-wife Juliana, living in Colorado, begins a relationship with Joe, a truck driver who claims to be an Italian veteran of the war who wishes to meet the titular Man in the High Castle, Hawthorne Abendsen, author of The Grasshopper Lies Heavy. She travels with him, but discovers that Joe is actually a German assassin. She attempts to leave, but Joe bars her way. Distressed beyond reason, she automatically slashes his throat with a razor she is holding, having contemplated suicide. She continues the journey alone and finally meets Abendsen, inducing him to reveal the truth about his novel.
- Mr. Tagomi has a crisis of faith about the righteousness of the core principles of modern day Japanese and German society and his own Buddhist beliefs. When "Baynes" and "Yatabe" confer, he becomes further disturbed. Unable to think about the things he has heard, he finds solace in actions, first defending against Nazi agents who attempt to shoot Baynes, using his "fake" Colt Army revolver which he bought from Childan. Then he retaliates against the local Nazi authorities by directing that Frank Frink, who is scheduled for deportation, be released. Tagomi never meets Frank.
[edit] The Grasshopper Lies Heavy
Several characters in The Man in the High Castle read a popular novel called The Grasshopper Lies Heavy, a novel within a novel. The author, Hawthorne Abendsen, describes an alternate history in which the Axis Powers lost the war. Although closer to our own history, the novel portrays a third scenario. The novel is banned in areas under German occupation, but its publication is legal in the areas under Japanese occupation.
In Abendsen's novel, Roosevelt survives the assassination attempt but does not run for reelection in 1940. The next president, Rexford Tugwell (who, in 'our' reality, never ran for the presidency), mitigates the bombing of Pearl Harbor by sailing the U.S.'s Pacific fleet, so the U.S. enters the war with greater naval power.
In the novel, Great Britain retained much of its military and industrial strength and made a greater contribution to the Allied cause than it did in our world. This alternate Second World War is determined by several pivotal events. As in our own world, one of them is British victory over Erwin Rommel in Northern Africa, but in Grasshopper's alternate world, there is a British advance through the Caucasus and, after surviving Soviet troops join them, British and post-Soviet forces win a victory at Stalingrad. As in the historical scenario, Italy turns against the Axis Powers. British tanks storm Berlin at the end of the war, much as the Red Army did in our own world.
After the war, Winston Churchill still leads Britain. Due to its greater military and industrial strength, the United Kingdom doesn't lose its empire and the United States has a strong trade relationship with China, as Chiang Kai-shek and Nationalist forces defeated Mao in this universe. The British Empire remains racist while the U.S. solves its race issues by the 1950s, which causes tension between the two superpowers.
Eventually, as in our own Cold War, two superpowers struggle for global hegemony, but both are capitalist liberal democratic societies. However, the British ultimately overcome the United States, and become dominant superpower on this world.
The book's author, Hawthorne Abendsen, is rumored to live in a highly guarded fortress; his nickname is "the Man in the High Castle," from which the novel itself is named.
[edit] Use of the I Ching
Dick claims that he wrote The Man in the High Castle, using the ancient Chinese philosophical text the I Ching (or Book of Changes) to decide on plot development. He even blamed the I Ching for plot details that he was unhappy with in one interview.
The I Ching is featured throughout The Man in the High Castle. It spread through the Pacific States after the Japanese began their occupation. Several characters, both Japanese and American, consult it for important decisions. Like Dick in our world, Hawthorne Abendsen used the I Ching to write The Grasshopper Lies Heavy in his timeline.
[edit] Themes
The most prominent theme in The Man in the High Castle is the question of the penetration of true reality into a false reality. This can be seen in several aspects of the novel.
- Robert Childan discovers that many of his antiques are fakes and becomes paranoid that his entire stock consists of counterfeits. This is a common theme for Dick. He sometimes causes counterfeits to become real, but in this case the "counterfeiting" is so good that it calls into question the meaning of "real". For instance a counterfeit Colt 45 is indistinguishable from a genuine antique by all except an expert. It is also functional, as Mr. Tagomi demonstrates.
- Frank's former boss, himself a collector, has a Zippo lighter which is documented to have been in FDR's pocket when he was assassinated. He compares this to an identical lighter for his girlfriend, inviting her to "feel the historicity". Of course his fortune rests on producing counterfeits.
- Several characters are spies, traveling under false names and pretenses. Even Frank Frink is using an assumed name, the real one being "Fink", regarded as a Jewish name.
- Although not describing our own alternate world, The Grasshopper Lies Heavy, the book-within-a-book, does refer to a third alternate world where the Axis lost the Second World War, and the Allies won, albeit with an alternative sequence of events.
- The jewelry made by Frink and McCarthy more closely resembles actual 60s American folk art, rather than Japanese or German works. The connection between these pieces and a deeper reality manifests itself through the effect the pieces have on several characters.
- The Grasshopper Lies Heavy is essentially the alternate-history counterpart of The Man in the High Castle in that, to the characters inhabiting the fictional world, the world of The Grasshopper Lies Heavy is the fiction. This implies the penetration of two false realities, and suggests that even the idea of two realities, true and false, is incorrect and that there are multiple realities.
- The Man in the High Castle of the book's title lives in a normal house. He once lived in a fortified home, but realized that it was more of a prison. He allowed the myth about his isolation to continue, however.
- At the novel's end, Hawthorne Abendsen and Juliana Frink consult the I Ching, and discover that their own world is fictional.
- Mr. Tagomi seems to briefly become cognizant of our own alternate world. After he meditates on one of Frank Frink's creations, a small pin which contains Wu/Satori, a form of inner truth, he is briefly transported to an unfamiliar San Francisco. This version has an Embarcadero Freeway, and Caucasians do not defer to those of Japanese descent, indicating that he has experienced either our own alternate world, or one very much like it.
With this theme, Dick suggests the questions, who or what is the agent causing this inter-penetration of realities? And why does that agent desire that this reality be known as an artifice? This theme is addressed further in several subsequent Dick novels, including Ubik, Flow My Tears, The Policeman Said, and VALIS.
The Man in the High Castle also deals with themes of justice and injustice (through Frink's fleeing from Nazi persecution), gender and power (through Juliana's relationship with Joe), shame and identity (through Childan's new confidence in American culture from the limiting, backwards-looking obsession with nostalgia and antiquities), and the effects of fascism and racism on culture (throughout the novel, especially sections in dealing with the lack of value of life in the wake of Nazi dominance of the world, and assumptions of ethnic superiority and racism that several Japanese, American and German characters occasionally indulge in).
[edit] Trivia
- In Japanese-dominated San Francisco, Frink smokes a mood-altering marijuana cigarette branded as "Heavenly Music." This term was used as the name of a track on an album by Brian Eno and Robert Fripp called "No Pussyfooting." The track is called "The Heavenly Music Corporation."
- Dick later explained that he got the idea for this book from reading "Bring the Jubilee", by Ward Moore(1953), which is set in an alternate United States and twentieth century,after the Confederate States of America won the American Civil War in the 1860s.
[edit] Sequel
Dick revealed in a 1976 interview [1] that he planned to write a sequel to The Man in the High Castle: "And so there's no real ending on it. I like to regard it as an open ending. It will segue into a sequel sometime." He stated that he "started several times to write a sequel" but never got far because he was too disturbed by his original research for The Man in the High Castle and couldn't stand "to go back and read about Nazis again."
He also suggested that the proposed sequel would be a collaboration with another author: "Somebody would have to come in and help me do a sequel to it. Someone who had the stomach for the stamina to think along those lines, to get into the head; if you're going to start writing about Reinhard Heydrich, for instance, you have to get into his face. Can you imagine getting into Reinhard Heydrich's face?"
Two chapters of the intended sequel were published in a collection of essays about Dick, called The Shifting Realities of Philip K. Dick (ISBN 0-679-74787-7). In these chapters, it is revealed at a meeting of the highest Nazi officials that the Gestapo has made visits to a parallel world in which their bid for world conquest was defeated. More importantly, scientific superweapons exist in that world for the taking, including a bomb of awesome capability. (But here, the manuscript ends abruptly.)
The title of the proposed sequel was at one point said to be "Ring of Fire," and would detail the emergence of a hybrid Japanese/American culture that arose as the two distinct groups merged over time.
On one occasion, Dick said that his novel "The Ganymede Takeover" originally started out as a sequel to The Man in the High Castle which simply would not take shape. Specifically, the Ganymedians occupying Earth in the novel started out as Japanese occupying the United States.
[edit] Other examples of Nazi victory fiction
(See also below) Nazi/Axis global domination is also explored in Fatherland by Robert Harris, SS-GB by Len Deighton, and in an episode of Star Trek: The Original Series: The City on the Edge of Forever, based on an original script by Harlan Ellison. Norman Spinrad's The Iron Dream was set in an alternate world where Hitler emigrated to the United States and became a fantasy author, creating a fascistic fantasy novel entitled Lord of the Swastika. In this world, the absence of Nazism led to communist revolutions throughout Western Europe without a Second World War, leading to US/Japanese alignment against a rapacious Greater Soviet Union.
[edit] See also
- In the Presence of Mine Enemies
- The Iron Dream
- It Happened Here
- The Ultimate Solution
- 1945 (novel)
- SS-GB
