The Man in the High Castle

The Man in the High Castle is hard to review. Part of the issue is that I read it over the course of many months so keeping the narrative line was hard. It wasn't the book's fault that it took so long to read; it was a life problem. The story is not fast paced or particularly engrossing, but it isn't a hard read or uninteresting either. It simply wasn't interesting enough to keep me up at night.
Structurally, it follows multiple, loosely intertwined, story lines. The central characters of each story line cross paths, but only one character's actions has impacts across multiple story lines. This makes the story hard to follow and muddies the conceptual waters. In many ways, the novel is more like several short stories weaved together. That may be one of the points of the novel since life, in many ways, is just a weave of short stories. One person's narrative bleeding into others and together forging reality....
The novel also looks at yin and yang, activity and passivity, forging destiny or accepting it. The oracle plays a large part in how the characters decide what to do and interpret what is happening. There is a central question about if the oracle is prescriptive or descriptive. Do you accept what the oracle says, or do you use it to determine your path? The other major point dealing with this is the conflict between East, Japan, and West, Germany. The Japanese are much more soft in their direction of the world while the German's charge ahead convinced of their own righteousness.
The novel never resolves the tension. The man in the high castle doesn't have an answer. He has accepted fate and does not attempt to forge it. The character that stands in judgement of him, chooses the middle path.
If I had to choose, I'd choose the middle path.