Bookblog #62: More UKLG
Ursula K Le Guin, The Farthest Shore (1972, Bantam
1975)
---, The Left Hand of Darkness (1969, Ace 1975)
---, The Dispossessed (1974, Avon 1985)
---, The Beginning Place (Harper & Row 1980)
---, Illustrated S D Schindler, Catwings (Orchard Books 1988)
Months ago, I mooched four books by Ursula K Le Guin from BookMooch , and have been reading them semi-assiduousy since. I've waited until I'd read them all to do a combined post.
A
sufficient interval having passed since reading The Tombs of Atuan, I
moved on to the third of the Earthsea books and was not disappointed. It
reminded me at some moments of The Voyage
of the Dawn Treader, probably because both books feature a ride in
a boat that goes on and on and on. There's no character as irritating as
Reepicheep, however, and though the final destination was fairly clearly
signalled, I didn't have the oppressive sense in this book that all was
predetermined, as I did in the C S Lewis book. (If you haven't read VDT,
don't let these remarks put you off. I believe many people found it utterly
delightful, and Reepicheep among its finest elements.)There are really only two
characters in this book: Sparrowhawk, now the Archmage of Earthsea, and young
Prince Arren who comes to ask Sparrowhawk's advice on a problem in his home
island, and stays to be his companion in seeking out the cause of the problem --
much bigger than Arren knew -- and in the end overcoming it. The relationship
between the two men, old and young, is a things of great joy. Arren is described
early on as falling in love with the old, wise man, and I can't help lamenting
that the moral panic about paedophilia that has corrupted our culture in the
last 30 years has made such a description feel risky. I didn't care very much
about the villain: though the final confrontation with him wasn't written
perfunctorily, I read it without any particular commitment. On the other hand, a
splendid non-human character makes its first appearance less than ten pages from
the end, completely convincing, completely memorable. How does she do that?
Incidentally, the author biog in this book answers the question about the author's middle initial: the K stands for Kroeber, the name of her anthropologist father and writer mother.
Then I moved on to a couple of adult books, to both of which I brought preconceptions.
I knew The Left Hand of Darkness had a lot of gender-bending,
and I had a subliminal assumption that it was a bit of a women's liberation
tract. I didn't expect to be out of sympathy with its sentiments, I just didn't
relish the idea of 300 pages of right-on propaganda from forty years ago. I
needn't have worried. UKLG is a story teller with a great gift for aphorism (my
mooched copy has quite a bit of pencilled underlining of sentences like 'A
profound love between two people involves, after all, the power and chance of
doing profound hurt') and a miraculous capacity for world-building. On the
planet Winter, the humans become sexual for only a couple of days each month
unless they are pregnant, and there's no telling whether a given individual will
be male or female in any given month. This holds a distorting mirror up to our
assumptions about the primacy of gender for human identity, but there's no
preaching, and the reader is not told what to think about it all. The visitor
from a planet where sexes are differentiated much as ours are (perhaps he's
actually from Earth) develops a close bond with a member of the other species,
and is alone with him (every individual is referred to as him, even when
pregnant) for several months -- we know that he will be in 'kemmer', kind of
like oestrus, during their time together, and the sexual tension will be huge.
Not only that, but it's clear that the shape of the book requires that their
relationship reach a new level of intimacy. In the hands of a lesser writer this
could have led to erotico-bathetic disaster. Not so here. The author plays
completely fair; the tension is resolved; intimacy is achieved; nothing is
icky.
If I had subliminally prejudged The Left Hand of Darkness to be 60s
feminist polemic, The Dispossessed was filed in my brain under Anarchist
Agenda. I may have actually read an excerpt when it first came out, in which
there was a lot of exposition about the workings of anarchism on the planet
Anarres. As expected, the book was a joyous surprise. The society founded by the
followers of the sage Odo is, if anything, more profoundly challenging to our
assumptions about human possibilities than the 'bisexual' characters of The
Left Hand. These are people who learn from babyhood that you can't own
anything, that 'excess is excrement'. They speak not of 'my mother' but of 'the
mother'; they have trouble grasping the concept of class or understanding the
function of a state; they refer to the society on their twin planet/moon Urras,
from which they are in voluntary exile, as archist and
propertarian; and they find institutionalised sexism
puzzling:
So yes, I guess you could read the book as utopian anarchist propaganda, but it's much more impressive and engaging than that. The word 'magisterial' comes to mind. In Odo, who died two centuries before the action of the book, Le Guin has created a great visionary anarchist. We are given snippets of her life and works; the characters are steeped in them, quote chapter and verse, argue their meaning in a changed context -- all in ways that make her a completely believable presence in the society based on her thinking
But the Odonians haven't got everything right. Shevek, a brilliant temporal physicist (that is, one who deals in the physics of time -- Shevek's general theory of Simultaneity will transform space travel possibilities) can't get his theoretical work published because the Odonian opposition to 'egoising' has congealed into a bureaucratic stymying of creativity, and sometimes wells up into mob hatred of anyone who challenges received ideas. Facing down accusations of treachery -- and dodging hurled bricks -- he goes to Urras to further his work. Chapters telling of his life up to the point of departure alternate with those narrating his culture shock, seduction and eventual disillusion among the propertarians. The book is still powerful and inspiring after all these years, bodying forth the truism that how things are is not how they have to be forever. I suspect that fans of Ayn Rand would see it as ridiculous fantasy from beginning to end, but then ...
What do you do after you've written something as profound as The
Dispossessed? I hope Ursula Le Guin managed to rest on her laurels for at
least a little moment. it may have been a mistake for me to move straight on to
another book of hers, away from the 'Hainish' world of the last two, because
The Beginning Place seemed very pale by comparison. It is fantasy love
story rather than political science fiction, and if it wasn't written in
impeccable, musical prose, it would be too long by half for its simple, and
predictable, story. But predictable is sometimes just another word for
archetypal, and there's plenty to surprise and delight. Having just intimated a
couple of paragraphs back that I was relieved at the absence of a sex scene in
The Left Hand of Darkness, I should say that the sex scene in this is
handled with a degree of frankness that all the same manages to avoid disrupting
the story. We do have this sentence, however, as a warning that sex is dangerous
to write about (the characters are fully clothed at this very serious point in
the narrative): 'His desire for her stood up and throbbed against her belly, but
his arms held her in a greater longing even than that, one for which life cannot
give consummation.'
Some
time in the middle of my Le Guin Readathon, a friend said she'd read everything
by UKLG in her Anarchist youth. I rushed from the room and brought back the
first two Catwings books -- this book and Catwings
Return -- which she admitted she hadn't heard of. When she brought
them back a couple of days later she said she'd enjoyed them, but two were
enough: no need for Wonderful Alexander and the Catwings and Jane on her
Own (neither of which I've read, so it seems I agree with her). Before
putting them back on the shelf where we keep books for visiting children, I
re-read just this one, and found it just as magical as the first time. I believe
the idea for this book came to Ms Le Guin while she was standing in a queue at a
supermarket, and she drew a sketch of a cat with wings on the back of her
shopping list. Indeed, S D Schindler's convincingly realistic illustrations are
a large part of the book's charm. This was probably my 15th reading, and the
last line still brought tears to my eyes.
---, The Left Hand of Darkness (1969, Ace 1975)
---, The Dispossessed (1974, Avon 1985)
---, The Beginning Place (Harper & Row 1980)
---, Illustrated S D Schindler, Catwings (Orchard Books 1988)
Months ago, I mooched four books by Ursula K Le Guin from BookMooch , and have been reading them semi-assiduousy since. I've waited until I'd read them all to do a combined post.
A
sufficient interval having passed since reading The Tombs of Atuan, I
moved on to the third of the Earthsea books and was not disappointed. It
reminded me at some moments of The Voyage
of the Dawn Treader, probably because both books feature a ride in
a boat that goes on and on and on. There's no character as irritating as
Reepicheep, however, and though the final destination was fairly clearly
signalled, I didn't have the oppressive sense in this book that all was
predetermined, as I did in the C S Lewis book. (If you haven't read VDT,
don't let these remarks put you off. I believe many people found it utterly
delightful, and Reepicheep among its finest elements.)There are really only two
characters in this book: Sparrowhawk, now the Archmage of Earthsea, and young
Prince Arren who comes to ask Sparrowhawk's advice on a problem in his home
island, and stays to be his companion in seeking out the cause of the problem --
much bigger than Arren knew -- and in the end overcoming it. The relationship
between the two men, old and young, is a things of great joy. Arren is described
early on as falling in love with the old, wise man, and I can't help lamenting
that the moral panic about paedophilia that has corrupted our culture in the
last 30 years has made such a description feel risky. I didn't care very much
about the villain: though the final confrontation with him wasn't written
perfunctorily, I read it without any particular commitment. On the other hand, a
splendid non-human character makes its first appearance less than ten pages from
the end, completely convincing, completely memorable. How does she do that?
Incidentally, the author biog in this book answers the question about the author's middle initial: the K stands for Kroeber, the name of her anthropologist father and writer mother.
Then I moved on to a couple of adult books, to both of which I brought preconceptions.
I knew The Left Hand of Darkness had a lot of gender-bending,
and I had a subliminal assumption that it was a bit of a women's liberation
tract. I didn't expect to be out of sympathy with its sentiments, I just didn't
relish the idea of 300 pages of right-on propaganda from forty years ago. I
needn't have worried. UKLG is a story teller with a great gift for aphorism (my
mooched copy has quite a bit of pencilled underlining of sentences like 'A
profound love between two people involves, after all, the power and chance of
doing profound hurt') and a miraculous capacity for world-building. On the
planet Winter, the humans become sexual for only a couple of days each month
unless they are pregnant, and there's no telling whether a given individual will
be male or female in any given month. This holds a distorting mirror up to our
assumptions about the primacy of gender for human identity, but there's no
preaching, and the reader is not told what to think about it all. The visitor
from a planet where sexes are differentiated much as ours are (perhaps he's
actually from Earth) develops a close bond with a member of the other species,
and is alone with him (every individual is referred to as him, even when
pregnant) for several months -- we know that he will be in 'kemmer', kind of
like oestrus, during their time together, and the sexual tension will be huge.
Not only that, but it's clear that the shape of the book requires that their
relationship reach a new level of intimacy. In the hands of a lesser writer this
could have led to erotico-bathetic disaster. Not so here. The author plays
completely fair; the tension is resolved; intimacy is achieved; nothing is
icky.
If I had subliminally prejudged The Left Hand of Darkness to be 60s
feminist polemic, The Dispossessed was filed in my brain under Anarchist
Agenda. I may have actually read an excerpt when it first came out, in which
there was a lot of exposition about the workings of anarchism on the planet
Anarres. As expected, the book was a joyous surprise. The society founded by the
followers of the sage Odo is, if anything, more profoundly challenging to our
assumptions about human possibilities than the 'bisexual' characters of The
Left Hand. These are people who learn from babyhood that you can't own
anything, that 'excess is excrement'. They speak not of 'my mother' but of 'the
mother'; they have trouble grasping the concept of class or understanding the
function of a state; they refer to the society on their twin planet/moon Urras,
from which they are in voluntary exile, as archist and
propertarian; and they find institutionalised sexism
puzzling:He knew from Odo's writings that two hundred years ago the main Urrasti sexual institutions had been 'marriage', a partnership authorised and enforced by legal and economic sanctions, and 'prostitution', which seemed merely to be a wider term, copulation in the economic mode.
So yes, I guess you could read the book as utopian anarchist propaganda, but it's much more impressive and engaging than that. The word 'magisterial' comes to mind. In Odo, who died two centuries before the action of the book, Le Guin has created a great visionary anarchist. We are given snippets of her life and works; the characters are steeped in them, quote chapter and verse, argue their meaning in a changed context -- all in ways that make her a completely believable presence in the society based on her thinking
But the Odonians haven't got everything right. Shevek, a brilliant temporal physicist (that is, one who deals in the physics of time -- Shevek's general theory of Simultaneity will transform space travel possibilities) can't get his theoretical work published because the Odonian opposition to 'egoising' has congealed into a bureaucratic stymying of creativity, and sometimes wells up into mob hatred of anyone who challenges received ideas. Facing down accusations of treachery -- and dodging hurled bricks -- he goes to Urras to further his work. Chapters telling of his life up to the point of departure alternate with those narrating his culture shock, seduction and eventual disillusion among the propertarians. The book is still powerful and inspiring after all these years, bodying forth the truism that how things are is not how they have to be forever. I suspect that fans of Ayn Rand would see it as ridiculous fantasy from beginning to end, but then ...
What do you do after you've written something as profound as The
Dispossessed? I hope Ursula Le Guin managed to rest on her laurels for at
least a little moment. it may have been a mistake for me to move straight on to
another book of hers, away from the 'Hainish' world of the last two, because
The Beginning Place seemed very pale by comparison. It is fantasy love
story rather than political science fiction, and if it wasn't written in
impeccable, musical prose, it would be too long by half for its simple, and
predictable, story. But predictable is sometimes just another word for
archetypal, and there's plenty to surprise and delight. Having just intimated a
couple of paragraphs back that I was relieved at the absence of a sex scene in
The Left Hand of Darkness, I should say that the sex scene in this is
handled with a degree of frankness that all the same manages to avoid disrupting
the story. We do have this sentence, however, as a warning that sex is dangerous
to write about (the characters are fully clothed at this very serious point in
the narrative): 'His desire for her stood up and throbbed against her belly, but
his arms held her in a greater longing even than that, one for which life cannot
give consummation.'Some
time in the middle of my Le Guin Readathon, a friend said she'd read everything
by UKLG in her Anarchist youth. I rushed from the room and brought back the
first two Catwings books -- this book and Catwings
Return -- which she admitted she hadn't heard of. When she brought
them back a couple of days later she said she'd enjoyed them, but two were
enough: no need for Wonderful Alexander and the Catwings and Jane on her
Own (neither of which I've read, so it seems I agree with her). Before
putting them back on the shelf where we keep books for visiting children, I
re-read just this one, and found it just as magical as the first time. I believe
the idea for this book came to Ms Le Guin while she was standing in a queue at a
supermarket, and she drew a sketch of a cat with wings on the back of her
shopping list. Indeed, S D Schindler's convincingly realistic illustrations are
a large part of the book's charm. This was probably my 15th reading, and the
last line still brought tears to my eyes.Posted: Mon - April 6, 2009 at 04:54 PM |
Quick Links
About this Blog
This started out as a patchy journal about family life with my mother-in-law, Mollie, who has Alzheimers and was then living with us. Mollie has moved, first into a "low-care facility" then, in July 2004, into a nursing home. As these and other events have overtaken us, the blog has moved on ...
A note on comments: You can read comments on the same page as the entry rather than in a pop-up window, by clicking on the category button ("Mollie" etc) at the end of the entry and then on the "Read more" button.
A note on comments: You can read comments on the same page as the entry rather than in a pop-up window, by clicking on the category button ("Mollie" etc) at the end of the entry and then on the "Read more" button.
Latest comments
Categories
Currently reading and seeing
Powered by Feed2JS @ Modevia Web Services
Archives
XML Feed
eXTReMe Tracking
Calendar
| Sun | Mon | Tue | Wed | Thu | Fri | Sat |
Search the blog
Library search
Who's near here
Creative Commons License
From My Library
Links
Statistics
Total entries in this blog:
Total entries in this category: 423
Published On: Apr 09, 2009 07:50 PM
Total entries in this category: 423
Published On: Apr 09, 2009 07:50 PM