A 'Telling' review turned intro to the multiple universes in one magnificent head

If my life depended on naming any one writer in a myriad as my "favourite", it would have to be Ursula K. Le Guin.
This storyteller from Oregon has been a friend and constant companion down the decades almost since the thumb came out of my mouth and I found real pleasure in reading words of more than two syllables for myself.
When French publishers took even a fine translation of Ursula's 'Earthsea Quartet' out of print for several years, just as the Kid was approaching an age to enjoy this one of her many worlds, I was furious.
"They'll be back," one store assistant told me. "They can't not be! Except of course for 'Tehanu'. That was rubbish compared to the rest, don't you think?"
"I most certainly don't! Why on earth do you say that?"
"Well, who's really interested in a wizard who has lost all his power? The last one is boring because it just doesn't have the magic of the others."
"Mmm. I think you may have missed the point!"
Anyway, the Quartet did come back, with 'Tehanu' in its rightful place alongside its predecessors. And the Kid was soon as hooked as I was 30 years ago.
Once her English is up to it, I'll invite her to explore more of Le Guin's imaginative domains and the poetry too; she's already made a passing acquaintance with another of those parallel universes, the Ekumen.

Parallel? Oh yes. Though neatly labelled by over-ordered minds as a "fantasy and science fiction writer," there's not a novel or short story in all her prolific work where Ursula isn't really writing about us, our human condition and other creatures with whom we share our fragile world, however far she may seem to steer her words into other dimensions and remote places and times.
Last night, I finished 'The Telling' (2001; Gollancz, out in paperback last year). The cover of my copy calls it "a novel of the Hainish", but that's a misleading description serving merely to situate the tale in one of Le Guin's mental spaces.
The Hainish play only a small part in a story about Sutty, an Observer of Anglo-Hindu origin who is granted permission by the rulers on Aka, a government known as the Corporation, to leave the capital on an exploratory mission to a backwoods town in the foothills of a soaring mountain range.
While to Corporation officials whose planet is a newcomer to Ursula's Ekumen community of worlds, Okzat-Ozkat may be a backwards place by a remote upstream stretch of river, Sutty swiftly starts to discover far more than she expected.
Within a few days, she has begun to meet the "maz", the "tellers" of the town, sometimes physicians, sometimes teachers, sometimes akin to the priests of our Terra. All are guardians of banned traditions, old languages and a history white-washed off the very walls of Aka's brave new egalitarian world of consumer-producers.
Sutty bears a painful past of her own. On the earth she left, the proselytising religions and superstitions effaced on Aka in the name of scientific progress had gained the upper hand, bringing fanaticism, book-burning -- and the violent death of the love of her life.
But it's not until she is given leave to extend her stay in the hinterland and travel up into the mountains that Sutty comes to confront her own true enemy, in the shape of a zealous Corporation official, the Monitor initially tasked to spy on her.

As in so much of Le Guin's work, it's impossible for the captivated reader's mind to fail to see analogies to the history of our own world and its ways. Aspects of Aka recall the China of the years after the Cultural Revolution and if the parody is laid on with less subtlety than has been Ursula's wont, some characters more sketchy than usual, such thick brushwork serves mainly as backdrop for the confrontation that comes to the fore.

This is not Le Guin at her brilliant best, but she doesn't oversimplify a near collision of cultures in the fashion only too current in contemporary political circles, while several challenging passages attain the heights of her more extensive books.

The finesse of Le Guin's satirical strokes is never more immediately apparent than in one of her masterpieces, a book I have read several times and often given away, 'The Dispossessed.'
In that profound, prize-winning story -- written in the grim mid-term of the Cold War -- Ursula stripped the social concept of anarchy bare of all the nonsense that still surrounds it in widespread abuse of the true meaning of the term. She presents as a model for living rather than an ideology like so many others.
Anarres, the settled lunar world of 'The Dispossessed', is a genuinely anarchist society for the simple reason that the moon's scant resources, economic fundamentals and dependencies render it impossible for any other way of living to survive and function effectively.
It's when a brilliant young physicist on Anarres, Shevek, makes headway with the Principle of Simultaneity and its far-reaching implications for applied science that his problems begin. Hindered by jealousies and rivalries in his homeland, Shevek decides to take his theory to the moon's home planet, Urras.
With an initial naïvety almost as risky as Candide's in Voltaire, our hero soon discovers that while Urras is by no means the "hell-planet" conjured up by the exiles on Anarres, it's a dangerous place. People in what we might call the "free world" are just as determined to use and exploit him as those living under more evidently authoritarian regimes.
The parallels between Urras and the earth we inhabited between the end of World War II and the collapse of the communist bloc are never forced in 'The Dispossessed', but I can think of scarcely no other novelist who can tackle politics and conflicting ideologies with the grace, ease of style and lack of dullness as Ursula K. Le Guin.

Back in the 1970s, long before the Net made it possible to steal pictures like Marian Wood Kolisch's portrait of the author, Oregon and the fact that Ursula lives there were my two best reasons to want someday to visit the United States, knock on the door of a "stranger" and plant a big smacker on each cheek to say "Thank you".
That little dream remains unrealised. The nearest I've come to tracking this wonderful story-teller down has been in largely successful quests to find even the rarest of her works. Getting a copy of 'Always Coming Home' (Victor Gollancz, 1986), for instance, an immensely rich "archaeology of the future" and collection of writings from and about a valley people known as the Kesh, was a challenge ending in a real stroke of luck.
'The Telling' is not a long book like that anthology, but it's as intriguingly populated in its smaller way because if there one's subject of never-ending interest to Le Guin, it is people, rounded human beings with all their weaknesses and their glories. The focus this time is on two protagonists. A few of the people on some of her worlds seem very alien, others are not human animals at all, but Ursula has the talent to breathe life into stone should she want to.
The climax of this particular story lies less in a clash of ideologies and cultures than the confrontation of two individuals, one with every reason to wish to take an eraser to history and a whole past, the other determined to safeguard memory and recall, the skills of the "telling" itself. Though barely touched on as such, a theme long close to Le Guin's heart and a staple of her concept of consciousness -- even and perhaps especially in her "children's books" like the Earthsea volumes -- underpins "The Telling" and even its title: the naming of things and the power of Names, a characteristic of cultures as diverse as some Native American ones and the little that we really know of the Druidic.
A rose may well be a rose by any other name, but without any name, then what might a rose be to minds such as ours? Could, then, we know it at all?
This key aspect of all the magic practiced in Ursula's "fantasies", however, is less important in 'The Telling' than a meeting, ultimately and without a foregone conclusion, of world-views and outlooks. This is the kind of thing she was already tackling back in short stories of the late '60s and early '70s, like some gathered into the 'Orsinian Tales' (Gollancz, 1978). In those days, Le Guin was one of a handful of American authors as curious to delve into people's thinking and feelings the "wrong side" of the Iron Curtain as she remains in observation of environments closer to home.

Rare indeed is a writer who can convincingly take you straight into the mind of a tree, as Le Guin did in the brief 'Direction of the Road', a deliciously funny and clever take on relativity theory, no less, gathered into 'The Wind's Twelve Quarters, vol. 2' (1975).
Even that almost throwaway piece of literary verve is marked by another of the finest features of her work, the woman's unsparing and tough compassion. There is no more lack in Le Guin's oeuvre of vengeance, evil, bloodshed and sometimes shocking violence than there is in this world of ours, and she's no facile sentimentalist with a heart-easing taste for a happy end. She can handle steel and veins of uncut diamond with the same deft skill as she brings to the light falling flutter of a feather.
Ursula takes on complex notions of religion and faith, blind or otherwise, with the deceptively easy clarity she was already bringing to such heated matters as patriotism, homosexuality, prejudice and rights at a time when the broad wake of writers like Simone de Beauvoir (Philosophy Pages) was still making waves and Germaine Greer (Radical Tradition) was busy dropping sizeable rocks into the turbulent tides of "sexual politics".

Thus, to pigeon-hole the outstanding gifts of a mind like Ms Le Guin's as "fantasy" or "science fiction" writing is almost as absurd as saying Shakespeare was a 16th-century poet -- not that my own tribute is a pure exercise in hero-worship intended to put the poor woman on a pedestal with that wordsmith.
Her sciences are never forced or foreground matter, but a backdrop to her far more immediate preoccupation with what some Newsweek critic nicely described as "such mundane concerns as life, death, love and sex." Particularly love, I would say, and other occasionally unfashionable or merely lip-serviced notions like freedom, forgiveness, redemption and spirituality shorn of dogma. As for the fantasy, Le Guin, even at her most fanciful, has never been anything other than a down-to-earth pragmatist. Again, I've seen her described as a Utopian visionary, which is just another tiresome way of blithely ignoring other aspects of her work.

Given Ursula's advancing age -- she was born in 1929 -- there's a chance she might be gone before I make an occasion to give her that kiss from a close if sometimes argumentative friend, but I'm content to see that now she straddles a couple of centuries like some latter-day shaman in whom western wisdoms sit easily and comfortably alongside ancient oriental thought.
Better still, there remain one or two mainly recent books by Le Guin I have yet to read. And when the dread day comes that my own imagination has been nourished by all of them ... oh well, I can always start over. Once again.

Dec 11, 2003

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