The Man in the High Castle is a speculative narrative – what would the world be like if the allied forces lost WWII? What would a life under a Nazi Germany and Japanese regime look like?
The story loosely revolves around Frank, a pawn show owner is San Fran who trades in authentic American memorabilia. He is also, secretly, Jewish. Though he’s changed his physical appearance and voice so as to go undetected.
Going into this novel, I hadn’t seen the TV series so cannot make any comparison. But I can only assume that they made liberal interpretations of this tale to make it translate well to the screen because this book was.. pretty darned dull.
While I think I was expecting more slice-in-the-life alternative history insights, maybe some spy drama, what I got instead was a navel-gazing contemplation of existence and the metaphysical value of trinkets. Mystical forces (the Oracle, which features throughout) seem to have a firm grip on society, which was interesting, but not enough to make up for the generally dull narrative.
Speaking of Meta, the titular Man in the High Castle is an author who, in the book, wrote his own speculative fiction novel where the allied forces won. So that’s kinda interesting…
I found this very hard to get in to. Indeed, the only part of the book that really grabbed me at all was towards the end, when Frank’s estranged wife has a tense run-in with a moody spy. I wish it went further!
I’m finding it hard to really say much about this chore of a novel, so I’m giving up. I did learn a bit so, just for that, I’ll give it 1 out of 5 silver horseshoe pins.