| Article: 432
From: dani@netcom.com (Dani Zweig)
Newsgroups: rec.arts.sf.reviews
Subject: REPOST: Belated Reviews PS#26: Ursula K. Le Guin
Organization: Netcom Online Communications Services (408-241-9760 login: guest)
Date: 17 Nov 93 05:15:42 GMT
Belated Reviews PS#26: Ursula K. LeGuin
I'm going to stick my neck out again. If you try to review a prolific,
respected, widely-read, and more-or-less contemporary author, you're
sticking your neck out. (Not least because enough other people have read
the same books, and can perform a sanity check on your comments.) For a
change of pace I'll let someone else lead off, and start by quoting what
my copy of "Rocannon's World" has to say about Ursula LeGuin:
We once wrote that while only a few women wrote
science-fiction they made up in quality what they lacked
in numbers. Certainly among the ranks of the most highly
esteemed artisans of fantasy fiction will be found the
names of Andre Norton, Leigh Brackett, C.L. Moore,
Margart St. Clair, and Marion Zimmer Bradley. "Rocannon's
World" introduces the first book by another of that
select group, Ursula K. LeGuin.
Mrs. LeGuin lives in Portland, Oregon, and has made
her first sales to the magazines. That she has talent will
be evident on reading, for the s-f reader will find in
this vivid interplanetary fantasy elements reminiscent not
only of the soaring imagery of the above-mentioned but
hints of the fantasy of the Tolkien or Merrit type. This
may seem extravagant praise for a beginner, but we hope
that the reader will sense this for himself and wait,
hopefully, for her next novel. -- D.A.W. (1966)
There's been three decades worth of water under the bridge since "Rocannon's
World" was written. And it's been almost that long since LeGuin was last
the subject of such faint (and condescending) praise. The eight years after
that introduction was written saw an outpouring of excellent novels -- some
of which have stood the passage of time better than others. Among the best
of these are:
"A Wizard of Earthsea" (****). This is a superb juvenile. (For all that
I think highly of the book, I realize that some readers don't care for
juvenile fiction, however good. You've been warned.) The first book of
the 'Earthsea' trilogy, it introduces the Archipelago of Earthsea, and the
young Sparrowhawk -- the character who connects the books of the trilogy.
It would not be unfair to call "A Wizard of Earthsea" a coming-of-age
novel. We first meet Sparrowhawk as a child with incredible magical
potential. He receives magical instruction -- the foundation of which is
that to know a thing's true Name is to control it -- and progresses
swiftly -- too swiftly: One day he casts a spell which is, if not beyond
his power, far beyond his wisdom, and summons a Nameless evil. He
survives the experience, and continues to progress after that, but his
ability to deal with reavers and with dragons is mocked by his continuing
inability to Name and recapture the entity which he loosed -- and which
continues its attempts to hunt *him* down.
There is a tale told in the East Reach of a boat that ran
aground, days out from any shore, over the abyss of ocean.
In Iffish they say it was Estarriol who sailed that boat,
but in Tok they say it was two fishermen blown by a storm
far out on the Open Sea, and in Holp the tale is of a Holpish
fisherman, and tells that he could not move his boat from
the unseen sands it grounded on, and so wanders there yet...
Fantasy was still reeling from Tolkien in the late sixties, and the
explosion of authors who were imitating Tolkien or reacting against him
had begun. Part of the attraction of "A Wizard of Earthsea" was how
little it owed to "Lord of the Rings". Today, it's still a relief to go
back to a world of villages and islets, rather than cities and forts, and
of dragons who are cunning and eloquent (albeit voracious), and not just
Fafnir clones. If you enjoy this book, you'll definitely want to read the
rest of the trilogy -- "The Tombs of Atuan" (***) and "The Farthest Shore"
(***+). (Interestingly, the viewpoint shifts with each novel, so we see the
adult Sparrowhawk, and later the old Sparrowhawk, through different eyes.)
A fourth book, "Tehanu" (**), is more recent. Opinion is sharply divided
as to whether it's a fitting addition to the trilogy or a mockery of it.
My own opinion falls somewhere between: It's not a bad book, albeit not
special, either, but it fits poorly with the other three. "Tehanu" could
have been written to better advantage without recasting familiar characters
and places in an unfavorable light.
"The Left Hand of Darkness" (***+) won the Hugo *and* the Nebula awards
for 1969, which leaves a reviewer who is less than enthusiastic about it
with a burden of explanation. It's a good book, I'll grant, and worth
reading. In it, we see the world of Gethen through the eyes of Genly Ai,
an envoy sent by the interstellar Ekumen to invite the nations of Gethen
to join it. The most notable characteristic of Gethen, from the human's
standpoint, is that its humanoid inhabitants are hermaphroditic, rather
than male or female. Almost until the end, Ai continues to perceive
almost everyone on Gethen as male, and is constantly being brought up
short when his preconceptions misfire. (In constructing a plausible
society that lacks sexual dimorphism, LeGuin implicitly holds up a
thought-provoking mirror to our own society. Even aside from the implicit
critique, the world-building is one of the best aspects of the novel.)
The book deals with other apparent dichotomies as well. One of the two
nations of Gethen is a monarchy and another is totalitarian, but their
reactions to the prospects represented by the envoy are remarkably
similar. Perhaps the greatest illusory gulf is that between Humans and
Gethenians. The book begins with Genly Ai looking upon Gethen from the
outside, as a traveller or anthropologist. One gets the feeling that his
idea of diplomacy consists of talking to the natives in words of one
syllable. By the book's end he is still thinking of Estraven, the
Gethenian with whom he establishes the strongest ties, as male -- but he
has obviously stopped thinking of him as anything other than 'people'.
"No, I don't mean love, when I say patriotism. I mean
fear. The fear of the other. And its expressions are
political, not poetical: hate, rivalry, aggression. It
grows in us, that fear..."
"The Dispossessed" (***+) is LeGuin's other magnum opus. If I had to
compare, I'd say that it's not as good as "The Left Hand of Darkness", but
that I enjoyed it more. It's also placed in the universe of the Ekumen,
on the twin worlds of Anarres and Urras. (The Ekumen plays a minor but
important role, mostly in the background of the novel. Anarres and Urras
have nothing like the Ekumen's technology, but their mathematics is
superior, and promises to lead to a faster-than-light breakthrough.)
Annares is a habitable moon of Urras, much poorer, settled two centuries
earlier by anarchistic utopians. Actually, the term 'anarchistic' is
imprecise, not least because these utopians bundled cooperation and lack
of property into the same concept.
Although the novel is split between the experiences of Shevek -- an
Anarrean mathematician -- on Anarres and on his journey to Urras, Urras
serves mainly as a foil to Anarres. The most interesting aspect of the
book is Annarean society, and what it has become over two centuries.
Annares is by no means a failed utopia, but there is a tension between its
ideals of freedom and cooperation -- the latter being what ameliorates the
worst weaknesses of anarchism -- and there seems to be a human process which
causes political power to accumulate at their points of intersection.
Annares is evolving what are effectively political institutions in spite
of itself, and is uncomfortable with the process. Worse, cooperation
seems to shade easily into pressure to conform and thence into coercion --
and freedom shades into a lack of protection for the non-conformist and
for the unpopular. Still, by the end of the book, and with Urras for
comparison, we see that Anarres is trying to hold onto something valuable
-- and possibly viable.
He wiped his eyes with the backs of his hands and held
the knuckles out to show Sadik. "See," he said, "they're
wet. And the nose dribbles. Do you keep a handkerchief?"
"Yes. Don't you?"
"I did, but it got lost in a washhouse."
"You can share the handkerchief I use," Sadik said after a pause.
The Earthsea trilogy, "The Left Hand of Darkness", and "The Dispossessed"
represent the high points in Ursula K. LeGuin's writing. Almost nothing
she's written is actively bad, so if you enjoy those and want to read her
other books -- novels or anthologies -- you can't go too wrong whichever
you try. My own first encounters with her writing were her early Ekumen
novels, "Rocannon's World" (**+) and "Planet of Exile" (**+), both of
which I thoroughly enjoyed. Looking back on them now, I'd say they lack
the depth and the skill of her later writing, but are eminently readable.
"City of Illusions" (**) was interesting more as a postscript to "Planet
of Exile" than for its own merits. I never cared much for "The Word for
World is Forest" (*+) -- in which a bunch of American Villain Stereotypes
commit ecological, economic, cultural, and sexual rape on another world --
or for "The Lathe of Heaven" (**) -- in which a Man Who Can Work Miracles
comes under the control of someone who isn't wise enough to play God --
though I know many think highly of the latter.
There are also a few books it's probably worth mentioning without trying
to rate. "Always Coming Home" is not a novel, but a world-building
exercise -- an anthropologist's look at a future (effectively low-tech)
Pacific-coast society. I found it admirable, but not interesting or
enjoyable. "The Language of the Night" is a collection of essays on
fantasy, the best known of which is "From Elfland to Poughkeepsie", on
modes of speech in fantasy. (I wish I'd thought to refer to it for
examples when I was raving about Eddison's "The Worm Ouroboros".) I don't
share LeGuin's belief that fantasy speaks to something deeper within us
than other forms of fiction, but I *would* recommend this collection to
introspective readers of fantasy. (It's a pain to find copies, but
they're around.) "Very Far Away From Anywhere Else" is a novel of young
romance written to appeal to the bookish, the intelligent, and the
self-dramatizing. I thoroughly enjoyed it -- and then threw it as hard as
I could against the wall, because (IM OH SO HO) it was so manipulative of
the reader.
There are other books. In particular, as I observed in passing, I've
slighted her shorter fiction. If you haven't read LeGuin's writing, I'm
not promising that you'll enjoy it -- but I will promise that you'd be
making a mistake not to try it.
%A LeGuin, Ursula K.
%T A Wizard of Earthsea
%O There are three sequels in this trilogy
%T The Left Hand of Darkness
%T The Dispossessed
=============================================================================
The postscripts to Belated Reviews cover authors of earlier decades who
didn't fit into the original format -- whether because the author seemed
an inappropriate subject, or because I was unfamiliar with too much of the
author's work, or whatever -- or sometimes just isolated works of such
authors. The emphasis will continue to be on guiding newer readers
towards books or authors worth trying out, rather than on discussing them
comprehensively or in depth. I'll retain the rating scheme of ****
(recommended), *** (an old favorite that hasn't aged well), ** (a solid
lesser work), and * (nothing special).
-----
Dani Zweig
dani@netcom.com
Should 'anal retentive' have a hyphen? - unidentified passing t-shirt
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