Well, from the moment you open the book, you know this is no Harry Turtledove novel.

Man in the High Castle is an alternate world novel by Phillip K. Dick. Unlike much of Turtledove's (and therefore most modern alternate history) books, this is not a grand, sweeping, epic of Great Personages involved in Great Events. This is a quiet story set in an ugly alternate world. (Major bonus: It's not such a "sweeping epic" that you need a scorecard to keep track of the characters. No Dramatis Personae list required. I prefer novels of characters to novels of events and a "dramatis personae" is usually an indication of the latter).

What's interesting about this book is that while BIG EVENTS happen, the main characters are only barely involved in them.

On the 0-4 star scale I've been using, I only give this 2 stars. It almost made 3 stars but I had a few problems with the book.

PKD does a great job of fleshing out the characters, most of 'em kept my interest, but...#1)I didn't care for the ending much and #2)the dialogue is occasionally awful (Where big, blue-collar, "hairy armed" Ed Smith refers to Childan as a "poop-head" just made me cringe, to give one example.)

As I said, the characters were deftly drawn and I really liked the "slice of life" approach PKD used, but parts simply felt unpolished.

A synopsis of the story doesn't follow:

There's one heck of a story here, but I'm finding it hard to give a coherent synopsis. Part of the problem is there are so many intertwining stories which are made of so many small events that I don't know a good way to do justice to the book in a synopsis. To PKD's credit, he juggles all the threads masterfully.

It's a alternate world, one where the Axis won WW2. In this world, the west coast has been taken over by the Japanese and the east coast by the Nazis. Most of the action takes place on the west coast.

It's pretty hard to give a synopsis of the book so I'm going to just list some about the book without going much into the story itself. The basic upshot of the big plot is that Hitler's successor dies and there's serious political upheaval. Most it is behind the scenes.

The world of The Man in the High Castle diverges from ours when, a year into his first term, FDR is assassinated (whathisname...Zengara? doesn't miss here).

The characters who most interested me were:

Frank Frink, a Jew who's changed his last name to avoid detection. He's currently a machinist who makes phony antiques on the side.

Robert Childan, antique dealer. An utterly unlikable character early on, his growth is one of the strongest points in the book. He starts as a toadying, cringing, sycophantic bootlicker and his transformation, although not smooth, is extremely well handled.

Julianna, Frank's ex-wife, now living in Colorado. She's lonely and meets up with an Italian veteran, who may be more than he seems.

There are two things that all the characters deal with: the I-Ching, a form of fortune-telling that involves throwing sticks or coins and interpreting their patterns and #2)a book-inside-the-book called The Grasshopper Lies Heavy written by Hawthorne Abendsen who is said to be living in Cheyenne, in an impregnable fortress, is The Man in the High Castle. The novel is about a world where FDR wasn't assassinated, and, because of that, the Allies won WW2. The book is apparently a powerful piece of prose, as the Nazis have banned the book.

Some thoughts:

• PKD's got an interesting writing style. Although his use. Of sentence. Fragments. Got old quickly. Although it's not as distracting as Zelazny's use of the same.
• Somehow the constant use of the I-Ching bugged me. It's certainly crucial to the story, but it'd be like reading a story where everyone assumed astrology worked. I kept wanting the Amazing Randi to show up and give the characters a stern lecture. (Except it may work here....)
• I can't get over PKD's ability to weave lots of minute plot threads together into a unified whole. Is this typical of his work? Can anyone recommend any other books he wrote?
• I didn't like the ending. I was very satisfied with the resolution of Frink's story, I loved the ending of Childan's, but Julianna's bugged me. She fights to get to Abendsen to warn him but he already knows the danger he's in. Then it turns out that the I-Ching wrote his novel? And that fate somehow went wrong to end the characters in the world they're in? Huh? The characters learn that they're part of the story? I just didn't get it.
• PKD's Japanese-English dialect didn't "sound" right. Somehow reminded me more of Heinlein's dialect from Moon is Harsh Mistress. Not bad enough to distract, but still made some jarring moments.
• I really liked the scene where Tagomi ended up in our timeline. His confusion and distress was very clearly portrayed.
• In my edition, the only way that a scene cut is notated is a single extra blank line between paragraphs. I found this extremely annoying. Several blank lines would have been better, or a line of dashes or...something. One other minor nitpick: Julianna starts out in Caņon City. It was spelled Canon (no ~ over the n) throughout the book. I'm from Colorado and it kept bugging me. .

  Next up: Clifford Simak's Way Station

  Steve