Philip K. Dick‘s “The Man in the High Castle” was the third alternative history novel I read recently where Nazi Germany (and Japan) won WWII. (The other two was Robert Harris‘ Fatherland and Jo Walton‘s Farthing.) However this was the oldest, written in 1962, while the other two are from 1992 and 2006 respectively. Two more comparisons than I stop, I promise. As it is set more or less in the same year it was written it had more of a sense of alternative reality as opposed to alternative history. Dick was writing what could have been his own life or presence, while the others put the settings behind the safe veil of the past. If the plot is set in the past, then it is possible to develop a story line for sequels, where the Nazis’ power declines in some way. (This was the implication in Fatherland’s ending, but not necessarily of Farthing’s.) On the other hand the novel is set in the here and now (i.e. in Dick’s 1962) one is less secure what kind of world can come after the events described in the book are over.
The final comparison of the three books I want to mention is the location. Fatherland is in Germany, Farthing is in England, but High Castle is in the US. A US that has been divided between Germany and Japan’s sphere of influence. It is a country broken into three parts with twenty years of political and cultural divergence. Slavery is legal and practiced again, Jews can hide for a while under assumed identities in the Japan West Coast area, but not in the nazi controlled East Coast part (and they are best of ni the wide buffer zone between the two); and the i-ching became a tool for decision making at all levels of society where Japanese set the cultural norms.
There is so much politics is revealed and going on in the novel that I felt that story line and characters are just tools for introducing and enhancing the political climate. Instead of summarizing the story (which you can find elsewhere), let me point out that unlike many other Philip K. Dick books, this has not been translated to Hungarian. I wonder why. Maybe its subject topic is too controversial in a country where nowadays a clearly racist (and occasionally antisemitic) political party enjoys a 15-20% support. Or Maybe it is too philosophical not enough action happening to have wide enough appeal for a publisher to justify the publishing. Or maybe people don’t want to read about living in an oppressive regime, after having lived under communism. Either way I’d be interested in the public’s reception of the book in my native country.
My own reception was mixed. I was occasionally confused by the language and the structure, but rereading always cleared the issue up. The ending and the “man in the high catsle” himself made me think which part of the novel was the dream, where are the borders of reality in a science-fiction book. These are exactly the right kind of questions when reading such a book, so Dick’s purpose has been fulfilled: it made me question my own reality for a second or two.
I was wrong. The book has been published in Hungarian in 2003:
http://www.agavekonyvek.hu/ism_dick.html