The Man in the High Castle

The book completely confirmed that I am not a fan of PKDs work!.He is the darling of the brand of SF that yearns for literary respectability,so the more downbeat,baffling and enigmatic the work is the better!It was fairly interesting,but overall tailed off,with a weak ending,and I felt the work overdid the irony, it wasnt truly effective.There may be lots of themes about identity,false/ true reality,the whims of fate,the helplessnesss of humanity in the grasp of the vagaries of history etc,but it never gripped me.The convoluted worldbuilding seemed confused,(probably deliberately,but I didnt like it)and the book may have started off a whole new genre of alternate history,but I didnt take to more than two or three characters. The book rested on an ancient book,the I Ching,where people's lives are ruled by arbitrary tossing of sticks and dice and reading abstruse aphorimss to make important decisions of life.I was disappointed too that I struggled at the start of the book to make the effort to understand the strands of history.We have the strand of what we know of the real history of WWII.Then we have the strand of the "reality" of the story which is set in an America divided up by Japan and Germany after they won WWII. Within the book a man has written a novel which speculates on what if Japan and Germany had lost the war. This strand is quite a bit different from the history of our real world.Then halfway through the book all this is pretty much tossed aside,and arbitrary events occur,yes ironic,but to me it was just irritating!

Ah well,just not my cup of tea I supposebutt fairly interesting.