In Philip K. Dick’s The Man In rhe High Castle, Nabusuke Tagomi is a Japanese businessman in San Francisco whose consciousness has been changed by the events leading up to a day when he buys a piece of jewelry from an antique store. After contemplating his life while sitting in a park, he walks to the road to hire a pedecab. He is unable to see one even though other people can see them in abundance. He also notices a concrete highway ramp that he has never seen before; when he asks a stranger about it, the man explains that everybody has hated it for a long time because it is so ugly. Tagomi suddenly becomes aware of something that everybody else had known about. But there is nothing wrong with Tagomi. He is like everyone else in that we don’t see everything that is objectively present to us because we aren’t making a conscious effort to see everything. Our perceptions of the objective world come to us in pieces and fragments. We see things that others don’t and they see things that we don’t. Thus this novel poses the question of how we can form a solid moral foundation to guide our actions when our perceptions of reality are haphazard at best.
The story is an alternative history taking place after World War II, examining what American would be like if Germany and Japan had won the war. The USA has been divided into four new countries. The West Coast is part of Japan, the Northeast is part of Nazi Germany, the middle states are what is left of America, and the Southeast is left to rot as a neo-Confederate backwater. Racist hierarchies have been ratified into law and the strictly hierarchical Japanese culture has become the norm on the West coast.
Like Mr. Kurtz in Heart of Darkness, The Man In the High Castle, Hawthorne Abendsen, does not appear until the end. He is the author of a book called The Grasshopper Lies Heavy which is an alternative account of World War II in which he describes what would have happened if America had won the war. So, yes, Philip K. Dick wrote an alternative history novel that revolves around a fictional alternative history novel within the plot. This book is all the rage because most people are familiar with it whether they have read it or not. The irony is that the characters who haven’t read it think they know what happens in the book and they are invariably wrong. This is a brilliant framing device that works on the premise that readers will know how World War II ended before reading Dick’s novel. It takes your mind off into several directions at once and then demands that the reader sort out the mess. This is not literature for shallow people who like being spoonfed entertainment.
But getting back to Mr. Tagomi, the businessman acts as a liaison between two secrets agents, one a Japanese official and the other a German working for the anti-Nazi resistance who has learned that the Nazis have plans to betray their Japanese allies in a catastrophic way. The Nazis are on to the German agent and send some thugs out to kill him in the presence of Tagomi.
The Nazis are also on to a craftsman and businessman named Frank Frink. He runs a fledgling jewelry business with a partner and it is the products they make and sell that act as a link between most of the major characters in the novel. The Nazis want to execute Frink because they think he is an enemy of the state and part of a Jewish plot to dominate the world. In reality, Frink just wants to run a successful business so he can impress his ex-wife and get her to come back to him.
Thus the plot threads are individually easy to follow, but there isn’t one thread that stands out above all the others so saying that there is a plot supported by subplots is a mischaracterization. Even though all the story lines are clearly articulated and the characters mostly cross paths with each other, it is the equal weighting of all the elements that makes the book a bit frustrating to read.
So Frink passes through the life of a store owner named Childan, a dealer in Americana and antiques. Frink comes into the store to alert Childan that some pistols he has in stock are not authentic relics from the Civil War, but are, in fact, forgeries manufactured by a company that Frink once worked for. Frink, the honest businessman, appears to be motivated to sabotage the counterfeit market. Later Childan buys a stock of Frink’s jewelry and sells a uniquely shaped pin to Mr. Tagomi, the same pin that the Japanese man meditates on in the park when his life gets disrupted. Frink’s jewelry is another clever narrative device as the introduction of his products into the collectibles market causes everyone who comes into contact with them to re-evaluate their lives.
Childan carries two important philosophical themes in the narrative. One confronts the meaning of monetary values as well as the value of objects in geenral and the other examines the subjective moral ambiguity a person faces when thrown into an existentially uncomfortable position. Childan and Tagomi play off of each other because they both experience a crisis in their subjective orientation to the world. The former of Childan’s two themes happens when he learns about the counterfeit guns in his store. If a customer believes that a pistol is an authentic artifact from the Civil War, does it matter if that is not the reality? And why would a similar gun made at the same time but not used in the Civil War be of lesser value? The truth is that the value of the item is in the mind of whoever owns it or wants it. The guns have no inherent value of their own and that estimation of their value may be based on illusion, fantasy, lies, or ignorance. So how is it possible to form a moral judgment on how to sell an item when its valuation is based on an inaccurate perception of what it truly is? Philip K. Dick poses this question without answering it.
The latter dilemma involving Childan addresses the issue of maintaining a sense of self-worth in a humiliating situation. When Childan goes to visit some clients, a Japanese couple who are enamored with Americana, he feels as though their attempts to embrace American culture are superficial and patronizing. Even worse, they latch onto aspects of American culture that he despises like jazz. Childan’s problem is that, being American means having lost the war to Japan and Germany so Childan feels ashamed of some things that are authentically unique to America, especially in regards to people who aren’t white. Instead he admires German classical music and opera in an attempt to identify with the Nazis who defeated America. He sees them as being culturally superior because of their victory. The problem isn’t that Childan has any inhrent sympathy for fascism or Nazism; since he lives on the west coast and is subjected to the rigid hierarchies of Japan that have been imposed on California, a small business owner like himself is relegated to a mid-level social status with the wealthier and more powerful Japanese people over him. Because of this he feels humiliated after losing the status he held before the war. In an attempt to compensate for his humiliation, he embraces the cause of fascism in an act of bad faith. He suffers from the dilemma of finding refuge in any available port during a storm. That post just happens to be the Germans. In this way, Dick isn’t justifying Nazism. He is explaining why a confused individual might embrace it under uncomfortable circumstances like during the visit he makes to his Japanese customers’ apartment.
Then Childan agrees to sell Frink and his partner’s jewelry on commission from his store. As the jewelry begins to circulate among the other characters in the book, their perceptions of reality begin to change.
Finally, Frink’s wife Julianna goes on a trip through Colorado to find Abendsen, the author of The Grasshopper Lies Heavy. Simply put, she is on a mission to alert him because she learns the Nazis have hatched a plot to assassinate him. The Nazis in this book are reckless, treacherous backstabbers on a path to self-destruction and possibly the annihilation of the world in their quest for power.
One final narrative device worth considering is the presence of the I Ching, the ancient Taoist book of vaguely worded verses that act as an oracle for all the characters in the story. In a world characterized by uncertainty and unpredictability, they turn to it as a means of guidance. Really it acts as a literary chorus to move the plot along like the witches in Macbeth. It also serves as an explanatory device when there is nothing better to rely on which is a weakness in this book. For example, when Julianna meets up with Abendsen, they consult the I Ching to answer a question of importance to the story. They receive an answer but we are expected to accept it as true because the oracle says it us true and no further explanation is given. It seems that Dick had no further explanation to offer so he just used the I Ching as a means of filling in the gap, rendering the meaning of its answer pointless. This is a form of narrative cheating and something that makes the ending almost irrelevant.
In the end, for a novel with so much to unpack and so many significant ideas, it could have been better. The pacing is slow and laborious. The characters all have flat affects. The plot lines become tangled in ways that make the result look like the end of a frayed rope rather than a cohesive work of writing. The pieces of the story just don’t hang together very well. It is an awkward book written by a young writer whose genius would come out in his later works of fiction.
The Man In the High Castle is certainly worth reading. It presents the abstract concept of what it means to live in a world where morality can never be certain since it based on faulty perceptions of reality. All the main characters exemplify this problem in the way they make choices while navigating through the world. In the end, there is no solution to this problem of certainty other than doing what they think is right even though they risk making costly mistakes in the end. It isn’t one of Philip K. Dick’s best works, but it is still good enough to read at least once. Just be patient as you read.
