Count Your Blessings - "The Man in the High Castle" Chapters 1-8

TMBC Week 1

Melissa’s Comments:

Getting into this one was tough. I find PKD’s books difficult to begin reading—they start off very dense, with a strange new world to figure out and a bunch of characters to keep track of. It usually takes a few chapters of hard work before they start getting fun. I was just about ready to chalk this one up as another failed Thinking Man Book Club attempt until somewhere around the fifty-page mark, when I started really enjoying it.

This book is a slow burn. There’s some minor antiques-counterfeiting drama and the intrigue of The Grasshopper Lies Heavy. However, the main thing that kept me reading (besides the looming book club deadline) was the world. There’s a lot of food for thought here.

There is, of course, the absurd and terrifying prospect of a Nazi-run United States. Racial tensions are high (obviously), and the tolerance and freedom that characterizes the US is completely gone. There are some stranger details, too. The Mediterranean Sea has been drained and turned into farmland. If I’m not mistaken, I think I read that Nazi scientists were doing experiments on people in Africa (this one hits a little too close to home).

It actually got me thinking about George Orwell. I can’t remember the exact quote (and I’m tired so I won’t be looking it up), but in one of his essays (I think it was “The Lion and the Unicorn”), Orwell criticized people in England during WWII who believed that “things could be no worse off under Hitler,” and thus accepted the possibility of fascist rule. It’s an important reminder. Don’t take your liberties for granted; things could always be worse.

The book was full of questions with no definitive answers. I’m going to throw a couple quotes at you. Think about them. See what you think.

“Afraid I do not care for modern art,” Mr. Baynes said. “I like the old prewar cubists and abstractionists. I like a picture to mean something, not merely to represent the ideal.” He turned away.
"But that’s the task of art,” Lotze said. “To advance the spirituality of man, over the sensual. Your abstract art represented a period of spiritual decadence, of spiritual chaos, due to the disintegration of society, the old plutocracy… Those times are over; art has to go on—it can’t stay still.”

“We are absurd,” Mr. Tagomi said, “because we live by a five-thousand-year-old book. We set it questions as if it were alive. It is alive. As is the Christian Bible; many books are actually alive. Not in metaphoric fashion. Spirit animates it. Do you see?”

We didn’t get the chance to look at the I Ching this week. However, I wonder why Dick chose it to be featured so heavily in The Man in the High Castle. Is he speaking to the breakdown of Christianity (and its replacement with Eastern spirituality)? Does he believe in the power of the I Ching? Furthermore, is the power in the book itself, or in the simple power of making a decision and sticking to it?

Let us know what you think. I’m looking forward to finishing this book (and I don’t think it should take long, now that the initial ‘slog’ is over). Stay tuned and follow along; we should be wrapping this one up next week!

John’s Comments:

So far, I’m liking the book—a far cry from anything said on the last two book club picks. I will be the first to admit that it is not the most engaging things Philip K. Dick ever did. It’s not Eye in the Sky-level tough to get through (that’s a PKD book I had to put down before finishing), but it’s no Ubik or Flow My Tears. The book is definitely interesting. The world-building our Dick has done has been one to behold.

I enjoyed the breaking of the fourth wall during the dinner party scene at the Kasouras. Alright, it may not exactly be breaking the fourth wall, but I was amused to see the Kasouras explaining The Grasshopper Lies Heavy to Childan. It seemed like Dick knew that The Man in the High Castle would be considered sci-fi just because he was known as a sci-fi writer. It’s something that this book, Valis, and even Ubik fall prey to. “Oh no,” Betty disagreed. “No science in it. Nor set in future. Science fiction deals with future, in particular future where science has advanced over now. Book fits neither premise.” Well, fifty years later I plucked this book off the sci-fi shelf at Barnes and Noble. Sorry, Phil.

The highlights of this book have all been situations in which Dick was not afraid to make things uncomfortable: Childan’s thoughts while at dinner with the Kasouras, the conversation between Juliana and Joe while they talked about Joe’s war experience and the mysterious book. I wasn’t envisioning this thing going the antiques biz route, but Dick’s books usually go against the grain. I’m looking forward to getting to the ending. I have no idea where this will go, but I feel like we’ll end up at the High Castle in one way or another.

Thanks so much for following along with us. We’re planning on getting to the end by next Thursday.

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