The Man In The High Castle!

I've been meaning to read The Man in the High Castle by Philip K. Dick for many years and have finally gotten around to doing it. It was at once what I expected and very surprising as well. Residing now comfortably in the 21st Century it's probably difficult if not downright impossible for most folks, save those of us of a certain age, to comprehend the impact of World War II. Now it's just another of those dusty historical events, shoved together with "The Great War" and "The War Between the States". It's been long enough that some of the old poison which invested the enemies of WWII with such awful power has returned to the public discourse. The hatred of the "other" rules the passions of too many people in our society and that hatred will ultimately destroy our society as it did the society of Germany overcome by the Nazi dogma. 

On the off chance you don't know about The Man in the High Castle, the story takes place in an alternate United States which is no longer united. When FDR was assassinated the whole of history was altered and the result was that the Nazis won the war and eventually conquered the Eastern half of the continent. The Japanese took control of the West Coast while in the Rocky Mountains a fragile territory exists not under the control of either foreign power. We follow several characters who are trying to live and prosper in this strange old world of 1962. The story tracks an antiques dealer, a jewelry maker, his estranged wife who teaches judo, a trucker with a dark mission, a venerable Japanese representative, and a mysterious Swede who has a secret that will shake the planet. The titular "Man" from the title is a mysterious figure who wrote a book titled The Grasshopper Lies Heavy which is a bit of a sensation where it can be sold. It is banned in Germany-controlled regions. It speaks of a world in which the Allies won the war, and the Axis was defeated.

Published in 1962 (the same year it is set) the novel won the Hugo for best novel in 1963. It is of course one of the great classics of science fiction. I've bought it a few times over the decades, but only now have I successfully read this rather short novel. The fault is entirely mine. Dick said he was inspired to some degree by Bring the Jubilee by Ward Moore which speculate about a United States in which the Confederacy prevailed. I cannot recommend this novel enough. It shows what life is like under a government which as policy enslaves part of the population and routinely murders others. The utter nihilism of the Nazi philosophy is laid bare, and we get a peek into the foul world such hatred brings to one and all. 

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We!

We by Yevgeny Zamyatin was written in 1924 in the freshly minted Soviet Union and was published in English in America. This seminal 20th Century dystopian novel wouldn't be published in its original Russian in the territory of Zamyatin's birth until 1988 when the Soviet Union collapsed. The novel is considered a significant influence on the much more widely known 1984 by George Orwell, an influence Orwell readily acknowledged. In fact, it was a reading of We in French by Orwell that kickstarted his own dystopian classic. 

I read We decades ago when I found a copy tucked away in a used bookstore, but I have recently revisited it again in a push to revisit a number of dystopian novels. With the world shaping up in ways that are unfortunate to say the least, a refresher course in what one might expect seems prudent. The structure of We is a journal kept by a single member of a distant future society which has rebuilt itself after some catastrophe. 

The story of We is pretty simple. A man lives in a society in which people are given numbers only and literally live in glass houses so that the state can more readily keep tabs on them. The people are trained to be numb to their emotions save perhaps for periodic sexual satisfaction which is divorced from romance. D-503 is our hero, a man who when we first meet him is happy as a clam and busy working on a spaceship named INTEGRAL. This project is what makes him the target of a woman named I-330 who tempts in any number of ways with her unusual habits. She wants to tempt him to allow her and her cronies, part of a group called Mephi to gain control of INTEGRAL and use it to destroy a great wall which isolates the society from the larger world. 

There are more details of course and other characters, but that's the core through line of this story. The echoes found in Orwell's are remarkable and I won't go into them so as to not spoil either novel for a new reader. We is not easy to read in the sense that I found keeping up with the characters a tad confusing at times since they didn't have actual names. To be fair to the novel, my understanding was inhibited also by a long break between beginning the novel and finishing it. But that aside, since our narrator doesn't often understand what's happening to him, it is easy for me as reader to get confused as well, which perhaps was part of the intent. 

I recommend We to anyone curious about these kinds of tales and what they suggest about the nature of our society. I always find that when the details of a novel like this begin to remind me of news items of the modern day, that I get more than a little distressed. Perhaps like D-590 I need to wake up. Maybe we all do. 

To read We immediately go here. 

They made a movie version a few years ago. Check out the trailer here. Sadly, the movie has not been released as far as I can tell. And Colin Jones tells me the BBC adapted it to radio some years back. Here's a link to the Internet Archive for that one. I'll be giving it a listen today. 

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