1962, reprinted by The Library of America in Phillip K. Dick: Four Novels of the 1960s, 229 pages

After watching the news of the latest federal land grab in Nevada I was reminded of Philip K. Dick’s novel The Man in the High Castle, and picked it back up for another read. The setting was the early 1960s, in an alternate reality where the Japanese and Nazis had been victorious in WWII. The U.S. has been split into the Japanese-controlled Pacific States of America. The Reich-controlled U.S. does not include the Rocky Mountain States, an independent nation. The Japanese are settling in to a polite imperial milking of the PSA, to which assignment by the Imperial Civil Authority is seen as a cherry assignment for members of the young Japanese elite. The Nazis though, are bent on what we would now call globalism.

Japanese rule is seen through the eyes of, Mr. R. Childan, a San Francisco antique dealer, his client, Mr. Nobusuke Tagomi, and Frank Fink, a Jewish malcontent who starts a business crafting replica Old West firearms for Japanese collectors, which he crafts on order for Mr. Childan. Mr. R. Childan is even willing to sell the mummified head of Buffalo Bill Cody!

The action swings from high level political schemes that focus on a Reich plot to simultaneously nuke the Japanese Home Islands and support a U.S. invasion of the Rocky Mountain States. Out in the Rocky Mountain States Frank’s ex-wife Juliana is on a fling with a hunky Italian thug who is up to no good as their trip takes them toward the home of the moral leader of the RMS, a Mr. Abendsen; ‘The Man in the High Castle’.

Dick makes The Man in the High Castle work on all levels through realistic dialogue, the personal angst of his well-wrought characters, and his insane attention to details. Seeming minutia such as the etching of knockoff American historical relics, and a Japanese official’s obsession with the I Ching [Book of Changes], gradually gives way to an examination of the emotional subtext of living as a circumscribed citizen of a nation under alien occupation. From the acts of Nazi plotters, to the boldness that seizes many a woman when she finds herself free of a husband and begins taking man-like risks, Dick’s gift for insight into the state-limited human condition is as prescient as usual, and his genius for crafting a novel as an oblique allegory is peerless.

The Man in the High Castle is an odd masterpiece that brings to mind the current tightening of the authoritarian American sphincter as much as any hypothetical Japanese-Nazi rivalry over a post-WWII America.