The Man in the High Castle - Philip K Dick

I first read The Man in the High Castle in grad school. It wasn’t my first encounter’s with his fiction (that was, bizarrely, the largely forgotten We Can Build You) but I hadn’t read much of him at the time, and while I liked it, it didn’t grab me the way his other seminal works did (especially Ubik). That’s a bit surprising, as I’m a sucker for alternative history, and on rereading I found it displayed many of Dick’s usual strengths: nuanced characters understated but eloquent description, heady concepts. There is always an iceberg quality to Dick’s fiction, in that you sense you’re seeing only the small portion of the story peeking above the surface, while a mountain of detail lurks below, unexposed but supporting the visible tip.

The premise of High Castle is pretty well known: the Japanese and the Nazis won World War 2 and now fight for hegemony in a conquered America. Interestingly, the characters are all fairly unremarkable people: a Japanese bureaucrat, a store owner specializing in Americana fetishized by the Japanese, a fired metalworker, a judo instructor. As always with Dick’s work, tiny, fascinating details lurk in the corners: in this case, it’s society’s fascination with the I Ching, a Chinese book of divination that guides the behavior of many of the main characters.

The titular Man in the High Castle, Hawthorne Abendsen, only appears at the very end, though he looms throughout as the author of a book called the Grasshopper Lies Heavy, which posits an alternative alternative history in which the Us and Britain (but not Russia) won WW2. The Nazis are as expected not fans (they never did like books much), and attempt to assassinate him. Such attempts originally drove him to retreat to the eponymous High Castle, but one of the characters (Juliana Frink, Judo instructor) finds him living in a regular house, having resigned himself to whatever fate may bring him.

It is here that Dick’s universal fascination with the nature of reality—a cornerstone of essentially all his fiction—peeks through, just a little. Despite being a book about an alternate reality, the nature of what is true doesn’t feature in High Castle the way it does in, say, Ubik or Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? or A Scanner Darkly. That is, we presume throughout the novel that what we are reading is, in the context of the story, true. It is only at the very end, when Abendsen reveals to Juliana that he used the I Ching to compose every bit of the Grasshopper Lies Heavy. This leads Juliana to suggest that the I Ching actually used him, and through his words told a fundamental truth deeper than reality: that Germany and Japan actually lost the war. This is such a Dickian idea—that there exists a reality more true than the factual universe the characters are experiencing, and that such a truth mirrors (but is distinct from) the universe of the reader—and I’m embarrassed to say I missed it the first time around.

Dick truly is one of the great American writers of the Twentieth century. I’ve always bristled at the notion of some genres as more inherently “literary” than others, but if that term means anything, it is the idea of words and stories being able to convey a deeper understanding of humanity and the world. And Philip K Dick’s novels do that as well as anybody’s.

The Country Girls: Three Novels and an Epilogue - Edna O'Brien

I picked up this book in large part because I watched the Ken Burns documentary on Hemingway, and Edna O’Brien was the “talking head” I liked best. I picked the first book I found in the Ottawa Library website, which also seems to be her most famous. Somewhat confusingly, The Country Girls is one of those multi-novel sagas that gets repackaged as a single book, so I wasn’t sure at first if it was truly a collection of several works or merely styled that way—especially given the part about the epilogue, which wouldn’t make sense to publish independently.

In truth, the three books that make up The Country Girls were indeed distinct novels, each published two years apart. The first, also called The Country Girls, introduces us to the eponymous girls: Caithleen “Kate” Brady, a self-conscious and wounded girl who narrates the book and its immediate sequel; and Bridget “Baba” Brennan, her brasher, more worldly friend. Their relationship is fractious, with Baba being outright cruel to Kate at times, but beneath their occasional hostilities runs a deep and unbreakable cord of friendship that binds the three books together. The Country Girls introduces us to Kate’s and (to a lesser extent” Baba’s home lives. showing Kate’s long-suffering mother and abusive alcoholic father. Baba’s family, though more outwardly prosperous—her mother is a glamorous figure and her father a veterinarian, while Kate’s family are struggling farmers—have struggles of their own, and happiness is in short supply. The two girls go to the convent—Kate on the strength of a scholarship, Baba through her parents paying the tuition—where they struggle to adapt to the oppresive atmosphere. Kate maintains an illicit and largely unconsumated relationship wit hthe older Mr. Gentleman, and the book concludes with her being left high and dry when hoping to run off with him.

The Lonely Girl features much less Baba, and is mainly a story of Kate’s relationship with Eugene, a sophisticated, agnostic documentary film-maker. Though fully grown, Kate remains in many ways the girl referenced in the title, as she struggles between the countervaling forces of her father and her would-be husband.

In Girls in Their Married Bliss, the perspective shifts to Baba, who narrates some passages while a third person narrator continues on with Kate. We learn that baba is unhappily married to a financially successful but ignorant and abusive contractor. Her fatalistic view of her own situation and pragmatism contrasts with kate’s doe-eyed optimism, as both women model the worldviews first forged by their own mothers. Much of the book involves a custody battle between Kate and Eugene over their son, Cash. Though still well-written, the book is arguably the weakest of the three, meandering in places and lacking the clear arc of the first two books. The epilogue is once again narrated by Baba, whose now thoroughly jaded view of the world seaps through in a caustic string of asides and invective. It sloshes about it places, but is a powerful conclusion, and serves to bind the three novels—linked but discrete—into a distinct whole.

O’Brien’s writing is crisp and strong. Perhaps it is simply because of where I first heard of her, but Hemingway’s influence seems to hang over much of the first book, fading as she progresses, until a style much her own emerges at the book’s conclusion. it was an interesting exercise to read the books in sequence, watching subtle changes in her cadence. Overall, the books were quite good, and Iwill probably pick up another by her at some point.

The Guns of August - Barbara Tuchman

I checked out The Guns of August expecting a history of World War I, but the book actually views the ocnflict throug ha much narrower lens. First, it provides a brief outline of the geopolitical history of Europe leading up to the war. Next, it gives a detailed accounting of the political maneuvering of the variosu combatants, as a cavalcade of treaties and alliances nudged them—sometimes willingly, sometimes not—into armed conflict. Lastly, it provided a detailed military history of the war’s first thirty days or so—the titual Guns of August, so obvious in retrospect—leading up to the Battle of the Marne, where the Allies denied Germany a desicive victory over France, and the war descended into the four stagnant years of trench warfare for which it is most notorious.

In its focus on negotiations, planning, and other minutae of governanc,e it reminded of The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich, a book far large and scope but with a similar emphasis on the tiny, almost clerical decisions on which nations turn and tumble. This wash of detail can get a little overwhelming at times, but is carried along smoothly enough by Tuchman’s deft prose. Likewise, the battles are described using the common convention of military history, in which the movement of each formation is discussed. There is an audience for this sort of thing, and while I’m not exactly part of it, I’m interested enough in the subject matter to play along and enjoy it for what it is (though I’ll never truly be able to read those maps of battle maneuvers with anything like fluency).

The book was good overall, though its strongest passage was probably its first, where Tuchman uses the event of King Edward’s funeral as a fitting prelude to the carnage that would follow a few short years in his wake. She makes no claim to greater causality, but rather seizes on the event as a rich symbol for what was lost in those final years of European peace, and a meditation on how long and bloody the road to regaining it would ultimately be.

One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest - Ken Kesey

I first read One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest when I was maybe 19. It made a strong impression on me at the time, and remained at the back of my mind as an example of a Great Novel. Picking it up again at 33, I realised how much of my recollection was on the broad strokes of the plot, and on Randle Patrick McMurphy as a character. McMurphy is a solid character, a prototypical 60’s system-bucking hero, and it’s not surprising that we would become the focal point of the novel for most readers. But as I read through the book a second time, I found my attention drifting more and more to the narrator, Chief Bromden.

Books like Cuckoo are written in what we creative writing workshop dorks call “first person pedestal.” This means that the narrator is a character in the story, but unlike a standard first person novel, the narrator and the hero are not the same person. First person pedestal works to give an intimate portrait of an exceptional person from someone who knows them well, but whose own light shines a little less brightly. The Great Gatsby and To Kill a Mockingbird are probably the two most famous examples. Cuckoo is another.

But while Nick Carraway and Scout Finch can never match the allure of Gatsby and Atticus, I actually found Chief Bromden to be an even more interesting character than McMurphy. Kesey drops in details of the Chief’s past life with elegant restraint, and paints an evocative picture of his madness. A lesser author would take the fact that he pretends to be a deaf-mute as a simple narrative device and make his thinking otherwise normal, but it is clear that Bromden really does suffer from some sort of psychological ailment, quite possibly schizophrenia. Much of the narrative richness comes from Bromen’s interpretation of emotional states as affected by the Combine, a nefarious mechanism that controls everything it touches. The recurring images of machinery and fog play into common tropes among schizophrenic patients. It is interesting that Bromden’s paranoia seems to heighten rather than obscure his perception—we don’t question that Nurse Ratched controls the ward, even if we don’t take Brmden’s insistence that she does so through a fog machine literally. This device might not be medically accurate, but it makes for very rich prose.