Ursula K. Le Guin: The Left Hand of Darkness

Can’t remember how this book turned up in our house, but we own it. It must be the mister again. I like Ursula K, although I think she can be a little uneven as a writer. Her Earthsea books are of course classic. It took me ages to read them, I didn’t get around to it until I was an adult, and then I read them all in one sweep. The differences between the first ones and the last in the series became very apparent then. The first ones are, really, better as fantasy novels, since the latter ones are more argumentative. I’d hate to use the word preachy, but I had only four hours of sleep so I will, since my brain can’t find me another word. However, I haven’t actually read a lot of her books. That becomes clear now that I’m looking at her website, and seeing the very impressive bibliography. The library probably has it all, amassed during the decades of authorship, so I’ll just have to dedicate myself. (Speaking of library, I managed to run in today after work, and wasn’t allowed to borrow a book since I had a 55 kr debt on my card for late books. Embarrassing. They’d all been returned though (my lovely husband comes through once again!), so it was just a matter of giving them what coins I had to get the debt under 50 kr, which is the magic limit. Take heed, and learn from my absentmindedness!)

Anyway, according to said bibliography The Left Hand of Darkness is also part of a series (although I’m guessing more loosely held together) – the Ekumen novels. The Ekumen is a sort of space UN of the future, that with tremendous patience sends emissaries to non-member planets, to establish some form of peaceful relationship, simply for knowledge really. They only send one, because one alien will not be seen as an invasion. Enter Genly Ai, a (probably black) human who has come to the planet Winter, or Gethen, as an emissary of the Ekumen, a planet curious in that the inhabitants have no gender, and that it should really be too cold to sustain life. It is almost always winter. Only when Gethenians are “in heat”, in kemmer, which occurs on a cyclical basis, do they develop full-grown genitalia. But this kemmer-induced gender is not static. One person can both father children and give birth to them during a lifetime. The planet has two main large countries, one a traditional monarchy ruled by despotic and insane royals, who nevertheless give their subjects a lot of personal freedom compared to the other, a Soviet-type modern state that appears open and forward-thinking – until you’re sent to a prison camp, naked. Genly Ai unwittingly becomes a political pawn, and ends up depending on the only person he was sure he couldn’t trust.

Ms Le Guin wrote the novel expressly to explore the subject of gender and duality. Is gender necessary? What happens if there is no gender, if we’re not ruled by our gender roles? If they become meaningless? Gethenians cry freely, but can be tough too. In my opinion the novel has become rather dated in its handling of the subject. Genly Ai thinks too much like a human of the 1960s, which jars a little when we’re supposed to imagine him in a completely different time. He talks about his masculine pride being wounded, whereas I can already see that men are coming away from such notions. So those weren’t my favourite bits. But that aside, it’s quite a marvellous, different secondary universe Le Guin has created here. I really must read the book again some time, I think I missed lots. It’s surprisingly dense, and doesn’t explain much – preferring to throw you right into the story. My favourite type of fantasy/sci fi!

And here’s the baby, so the end for now….

The Left Hand of Darkness, re-read

I re-read it just now, and discovered that passages and ideas I remembered as dated or weak were less so, and that bits that I'd found perfect weren't. I really like this book. It's the same but a little different whenever I read it.

Agatha Christieand Dorothy Sayers x 2, also Ngaio Marsh and Joseph Smith Fletcher x 1, respectively

What I'm actually reading now, to sound like a tv chef, is Alice Munro (for my book discussion club). It's just that my recent setback at work left me not only very down (although I'm better now) but also with a strong hankering for detective fiction, my old love. More specifically for the vintage, Golden Age type of detective fiction that don't over-analyse things and revel in upholding the status quo. Escapism, in other words. I only kept away from Tolkien (the ultimate escapism) because it, frankly, makes me cry, and from The Left Hand of Darkness because I felt I was being too pathetic re-reading that again so soon (at least, it feels as though I re-read it very recently). So detective fiction it was.

Ursula K. LeGuin: The Dispossessed

I’m on a bit of a Le Guin kick at the moment I think. She’s pushing all the right buttons for me: credible secondary universes, moral dilemmas, excellent characters, wonderfully evocative environments… I especially liked that this book takes place a long time before The Left Hand of Darkness, since the ansible which is used to communicate over the distance of many light years in that novel is only just in the starting blocks of invention in this one. The universe is in other words the same, with the same people, even though the Ekumen is not that advanced yet. I was very pleased with that, and it spurs me to read more, because I want to learn more about the different species in the Le Guin worlds.

Our main character is a physicist named Shevek, who lives on the barren planet Anarres in an anarchist society, where humans are bonded together to live without laws and instead work together for survival. The Anarresti left their home, the sister planet Urras seven generations ago. Urras is a a pathriarcial class society with strong state control and a history full of horrible acts of cruelty. (In one memorable scene Shevek sees the cloak once worn by an Urrasti queen - made from the skin of executed rebels, she wore it in public to humiliate, terrorize and shame the survivors.) Shevek now finds that his own world is developing unwritten laws of its own, despite having no structured government. When his own highly innovative research is thwarted by jealous and power-tripping colleagues he becomes the first to return to the home world, in an attempt to broaden and share his research.

There is a little too much theorizing in the book, with Shevek and others holding forth at length about the ideas behind a lawless world where personal responsibility is the only moral code – that, and the overall rule of sharing. Since I’m snatching reads between patrolling at work etc. I found it a little hard to concentrate. Nevertheless it’s thought-provoking and maybe a little provocative. I love stuff like this, heartily recommended!

Ursula K Le Guin: Worlds of Exile and Illusion

Three novels in one, Rocannon's World, Planet of Exile, City of Illusions. 

Rocannon's World just isn't very good, somewhere half-way through I just lose interest. You can tell that she hadn't found her voice and style yet, but was writing something much more generic. Planet of Exile was a lot more enjoyable, and I really liked having City of Illusions to read directly afterwards, since they're connected. As novels they are a little lacking, they lack tempo a bit and towards the end lose detail and sort of just peter out.

It's very interesting, and I think Le Guin has written about that herself somewhere, that she can be so comparatively daring (for that time) as to have the exiled Earthlings be all black, but it was hard to imagine a society without clear divisions between men and women - with women at the bottom (clearly this is based on some human patriarchal cultures). I mean, even though we don't want to be we are trapped into certain ways of thinking by our culture and upbringing. I think I wrote that this aged The Left Hand of Darkness too - it was very difficult for a writer in the sixties to imagine that a lot of the gender-specific ways of behaving and reacting would disappear.

Mary Rinehart, a new favourite

I have a new love, thanks to my Aldiko eBook reader. Mary Roberts Rinehart (read about her here!) is a pioneer in mystery writing, the Agatha Christie of the US, or so Wikipedia says. I had never heard of her, of course. Although reading her books I definitely get a familiar Hitchcocky feeling, which I suppose either means that Hitchcock was inspired partly by Rinehart, or that I've seen something of hers filmed. Well, it's not one of the four books I've read so far, so I think it's probably the former, and to be fair it's really only the first book I read, The After House, that feels really Hitchcocky.

Let's get some things straight first. We don't read these books for the plots. They're not - so far - stellar, although maybe they'll pick up in her later books. We read these for the awesome timewarp they are, for the early Americanisms, for the history. I love it! I've bookmarked (a handy feature of the app, I might add) about a million pages. And I have to go through all these bookmarks and write about them, this is so me and for the love of God how I'd like the blog to be about something that is me and not just lame microposts to keep up with what I'm reading. Ahem.

Library visit

I'm back baby. For the first time in I don't know how long I went to the library today. Figured I should stock up for the two nights I'm working next week. Sadly I forgot to bring a list of "books I meant to read", so I ended up browsing rather randomly. And I couldn't even find the science-fiction, which is where Ursula K. LeGuin normally is to be found (I think there is a special shelf anyway. Am now beset with horrible suspicion that perhaps they were integrated with normal fiction), which I wanted because I re-read The Left Hand of Darkness and enjoyed it even more than the first time. Such a wonderful creation of a brand new world! It's only marred by the underlying theme of gender, which is too rooted in the time it was written and thus holds no credibility as being ideas of the future. It's to preachingly done, and should have been dropped. I got a random seletion of other books though, several of which I think I've read. But one (by Mil Millington) is definitely unread, so I'm just going to have to double-check the others and return them if they seem to familiar.

In an embarrassing echo of my previous LeGuin post I wasn't allowed to borrow the books at the self-service desk, because I owed 136 crowns and had been blocked. Remind me not to lend my husband my library card again.