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In an alternate 1960s where the Axis powers won WWII, a handful of characters in very different positions stumble their way through life in the partitioned United States with the help of the same two books: the I Ching and a popular sci-fi novel called The Grasshopper Lies Heavy which imagines an alternate history where the Allies won the war.
This is a very clever book. I’m impressed by it, I recognise its cultural significance, and I admire the author’s skill in achieving exactly what he set out to do - but I simply didn’t enjoy it at all. Which is a shame, because on paper it really sounds like something I should love. It’s exceptionally good at portraying a dystopia that no one knows is a dystopia, a nightmare world whose horrors are neatly rug-swept by the survivors. A second holocaust, off-screen, has decimated the whole African continent; Nazi racial theory has been utterly normalised even in areas of the world outside Germany’s control. Dick does interesting things with his character voices, going so far as to write large chunks of the novel in an invented dialect of English that is meant to suggest either a translation from Japanese or some new kind of heavily Japanese-influenced English pidgin - I couldn’t tell which it was (and in neither case did it strike me as especially faithful to the real-world Japanese language), but it doesn’t really matter, because the effect is the same either way. It gives the sense that you’re reading the words of an unfamiliar culture in translation, and that the linguistic differences betray subtle but profound differences in thinking and worldview. It’s a fascinating, extremely effective manipulation of language.
But that’s where my trouble starts, because once I’d absorbed and duly admired the point of the device, it just became a chore to read. Even the sections written in standard English were abrupt and ugly. I realise this is a me thing. Self-consciously challenging prose has never appealed to me, and this isn’t the first time I’ve bounced off a renowned classic because its efforts to be clever on a technical level distracted me from forming any emotional investment. Dick is also very concerned with The Nature of Reality Itself(TM), which is a topic that interests me only very slightly more than zero and which made the long tracts of philosophical musings an absolute drudge for me to get through. I thought the pacing was impressively lifelike - most of the characters were small, quiet, ordinary people who had no idea they were part of major world events until the plot suddenly exploded in their faces - but the lack of suspense or obvious direction this created in the first half of the novel was, again, not particularly fun to read. It could have been, if the characters were people I liked or found interesting, but they weren’t. There was nothing wrong with most of them. They just didn’t grab me.
But I do say “most” rather than “all”. The one actual criticism I have that’s more than an issue of personal taste is: ughhhh, the way Dick writes women. Or woman, I guess, since in this novel at least he only really attempts one. While the various male leads concern themselves with work and politics and status, Juliana’s entire life revolves around her sexual availability to men. She used to fuck one guy, now she’s fucking another, and there’s a third who wants to fuck her but doesn’t. We know little about anyone else’s physical appearance, but we know Juliana’s numerical cup size. Her personality and motivations weren’t clear to me - she seems to just go along with whatever the nearest man wants from her, placidly accepting his judgements of her character and his plans for her future. The misogyny wasn’t even that egregious by important-literary-men-writing-women standards, but I just don’t have any patience for that particular brand of male bullshit at the moment. I honestly think I would have preferred it if he didn’t include any women at all.
So, yeah. Not sorry I read it, not closed to reading more of the author’s work sometime in the future, but it wasn’t really what I wanted.
This is a very clever book. I’m impressed by it, I recognise its cultural significance, and I admire the author’s skill in achieving exactly what he set out to do - but I simply didn’t enjoy it at all. Which is a shame, because on paper it really sounds like something I should love. It’s exceptionally good at portraying a dystopia that no one knows is a dystopia, a nightmare world whose horrors are neatly rug-swept by the survivors. A second holocaust, off-screen, has decimated the whole African continent; Nazi racial theory has been utterly normalised even in areas of the world outside Germany’s control. Dick does interesting things with his character voices, going so far as to write large chunks of the novel in an invented dialect of English that is meant to suggest either a translation from Japanese or some new kind of heavily Japanese-influenced English pidgin - I couldn’t tell which it was (and in neither case did it strike me as especially faithful to the real-world Japanese language), but it doesn’t really matter, because the effect is the same either way. It gives the sense that you’re reading the words of an unfamiliar culture in translation, and that the linguistic differences betray subtle but profound differences in thinking and worldview. It’s a fascinating, extremely effective manipulation of language.
But that’s where my trouble starts, because once I’d absorbed and duly admired the point of the device, it just became a chore to read. Even the sections written in standard English were abrupt and ugly. I realise this is a me thing. Self-consciously challenging prose has never appealed to me, and this isn’t the first time I’ve bounced off a renowned classic because its efforts to be clever on a technical level distracted me from forming any emotional investment. Dick is also very concerned with The Nature of Reality Itself(TM), which is a topic that interests me only very slightly more than zero and which made the long tracts of philosophical musings an absolute drudge for me to get through. I thought the pacing was impressively lifelike - most of the characters were small, quiet, ordinary people who had no idea they were part of major world events until the plot suddenly exploded in their faces - but the lack of suspense or obvious direction this created in the first half of the novel was, again, not particularly fun to read. It could have been, if the characters were people I liked or found interesting, but they weren’t. There was nothing wrong with most of them. They just didn’t grab me.
But I do say “most” rather than “all”. The one actual criticism I have that’s more than an issue of personal taste is: ughhhh, the way Dick writes women. Or woman, I guess, since in this novel at least he only really attempts one. While the various male leads concern themselves with work and politics and status, Juliana’s entire life revolves around her sexual availability to men. She used to fuck one guy, now she’s fucking another, and there’s a third who wants to fuck her but doesn’t. We know little about anyone else’s physical appearance, but we know Juliana’s numerical cup size. Her personality and motivations weren’t clear to me - she seems to just go along with whatever the nearest man wants from her, placidly accepting his judgements of her character and his plans for her future. The misogyny wasn’t even that egregious by important-literary-men-writing-women standards, but I just don’t have any patience for that particular brand of male bullshit at the moment. I honestly think I would have preferred it if he didn’t include any women at all.
So, yeah. Not sorry I read it, not closed to reading more of the author’s work sometime in the future, but it wasn’t really what I wanted.
