Book review by Michael Isenberg.
Season 3 of The Man in the High Castle dropped on Amazon this past weekend. I binge watched it and found it to be an exciting ten episodes, with important character development for most of the leads and a gripping climactic scene. Politically there's something for everybody. My left-of-center friends will no doubt see themselves in the Resistance, and will also be gratified that the writers delivered on the hint they dropped in Season 2 that one of the characters will come out as gay (as will several others). My right-of-center friends, meanwhile, will see chilling parallels to current events in the Nazi plan to wipe out American history by destroying statues and other memorials to our past.
Philip K. Dick is not generally thought of as part of the 1960’s New Wave movement in science fiction. Nevertheless, he contributed to New Wave anthologies like Harlan Ellison’s Dangerous Visions. More importantly, his work shared the salient characteristics that distinguished New Wave works from earlier generations of sci fi: the writing is exceptional, intended for a more literary, avant garde audience. And it had more imaginative plotlines; it didn’t limit itself to the earlier “Space travel—yay!” kind of story. Both features are to be found The Man in the High Castle.
For those not familiar with the series, MITHC takes place in an alternate universe where the Axis won World War II. It is by no means the first alternate history of the War. Stories of a Nazi-dominated dystopia began appearing in print almost as soon as the guns fell silent, beginning with Laszlo Gaspar’s We, Adolph the First (1945). Isaac Asimov touches on the theme in his 1956 short story, “Living Space.” So although this was well-worn territory by the time The Man in the High Castle was published in 1962, MITHC is definitely one of the best entries in this sub-sub-genre, and thanks to the Amazon series, has definitely become the best-known.
In the world of MITHC, the victors have carved up America between them. The Greater Nazi Reich rules the East Coast and the Midwest; the Japanese control the Pacific States of America. The Rocky Mountain States, a wild and lawless throwback to the Old West, serve as a much-needed neutral zone between the fascist powers, whose relationship is often uneasy. That relationship is expected to only grow more hostile, now that a senile Hitler has been packed away to a nursing home and the remaining Nazi leaders jockey for power.
The Germans and Japanese have brought to America all their loathsome ideologies about the superiority of their own races, along with the hideous practices of their secret police. The Jews in the East have been exterminated; those in the West are subject to extradition if caught. But some time has passed since the war, and for the most part Americans have come to terms with being second class citizens in their own country, and are getting on with their lives.
Then a bestselling novel threatens to disrupt everything. The Grasshopper Lies Heavy depicts an alternate alternate universe in which the Allies won the war. This alternate history within an alternate history is a clever plot device. Freely circulated in the Rocky Mountain States, banned by the Germans, inexplicably enjoyed by the Japanese, Grasshopper seems so realistic that absolutely everybody is talking about it. Many dare to find hope in its pages for a different future. Little is known about its mysterious author, Hawthorne Abendsen, but according to the cover, he has taken refuge in a High Castle, bristling with defenses to protect himself against the onslaught of Nazi assassins. But as the heroine of MITHC, Juliana, will learn, Abendsen is not what the marketing hype says he is.
Fans of the Amazon series will notice that some parts of this is familiar, others not so much. The Grasshopper Lies Heavy was a collection of films in the series, not a book, and Abendsen was collecting them, not creating them (although there’s a new twist on that last point in Season 3). The same sense of familiar-yet-different applies to the characters and plotlines. Many characters from the series are in evidence—the Jewish machine operator Frank Frink, his friend Ed, his love interest Juliana, her love interest Joe, the antiques dealer Childan, Trade Minister Tagomi, and his “Swedish” visitor Baynes—yet they aren’t the same. Frank and Ed have a very different plotline from the series; in the book, Ed and not Frank is the stronger character, and the leader of the duo. Childan is far more layered, thanks to the power of novels to tell us what the characters are thinking.
Some characters from the series don’t appear at all, which is to be expected when a 250 page book is made into 30 hours of television and counting. Takeshi Kido, the Inspector Javert of the Kempeitai, is nowhere to be found (sadly, IMHO. He's one of my favorites). The story takes place entirely in the PSA and the RMS, so the New York and Berlin characters don't appear either. No Smith Family Fascism, no Obergruppenführer discount Christopher Walken, Hitler Youth Wesley Crusher, or Desperate Housewives of Nazau County. I'm less sad about that; I despise Nazis regardless of how hard the writers work to make them sympathetic. Especially American Nazis. F--king collaborators. (Mr. Dick planned a sequel to MITHC. He never finished it, but two chapters appear in The Shifting Realities of Philip K. Dick: Selected Literary and Philosophical Writings. The first takes place in upstate New York, and elements of it are found in Season 3 of the series.)
But it is Juliana who differs the most. Even her name is different. She’s Juliana Frink in the book. Frank’s ex-wife. Not his girlfriend. He doesn’t even know where she is. “She was wrong for me,” he realizes, “I know that.”
Juliana—the best-looking woman he had ever married. Soot-black eyebrows and hair; trace amounts of Spanish blood distributed as pure color, even to her lips… Beyond everything else, he had originally been drawn by her screwball expression: for no reason, Juliana greeted strangers with a portentous, nudnik, Mona Lisa smile that hung them up between responses, whether to say hello or not. And she was so attractive that more often than not they did say hello, whereupon Juliana glided by. At first he had thought it was just plain bad eyesight, but finally he had decided that it revealed a deep-dyed otherwise concealed stupidity at her core…[But] he still never saw her as anything but a direct, literal invention of God’s, dropped into his life for reasons he could never know. And on that account…he could not get over having lost her.
Clearly Book Juliana is very different from TV Juliana—a knockout with a size 38 bust where TV Juliana is slim and merely pretty. Book Juliana is stupid where TV Juliana is cerebral, and she has a bit of gold digger in the mix, as we learn when Joe takes her up to Denver for a big spending spree. And yet some things are the same. As Abendsen tells his wife in the final pages,
She’s doing what’s instinctive to her, simply expressing her being. She didn’t mean to show up here and do harm; it simply happened to her, just as the weather happens to us. I’m glad she came.
In both the book and the series, Juliana, without planning to, puts the story in motion and a lot of people get hurt.
Given the whole familiar-yet-different vibe, fans of the series should enjoy the book, and yet still feel like they’re getting something new. If you finished Season 3 and still want more, I highly recommend you read it.
It’s almost as if the characters you know and love are in an alternate universe.
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Michael Isenberg drinks bourbon and writes novels. His latest book, The Thread of Reason, is a murder mystery that takes place in Baghdad in the year 1092, and tells the story of the conflict between science and shari’ah in medieval Islam. It is available on Amazon.com
Photo credit(s): Amazon.com |
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