This novella shows the end of an Earth colony on a planet called Forest, hence the title. Terrans call this planet New Tahiti, and the natives consist of furred, little, green humans. Because Earth lacks trees for lumber, the Terrans cut trees down on this oceanic planet, where every island grows shore-to-shore trees, and ship them back to Earth, lightyears distant. This is not my favorite Le Guin story, though it also contains traits that I appreciate.
I don’t know. Do men kill men, except in madness? Does any beast kill its own kind? Only the insects. These yumens kill us as lightly as we kill snakes. The one who taught me said that they kill one another, in quarrels, and also in groups, like ants fighting. I haven’t seen that. But I know they don’t spare one who asks life. They will strike a bowed neck, I have seen it! There is a wish to kill in them, and therefore I saw fit to put them to death.
Le Guin generally excels at character building, but not here. Of the three main characters, one native and two Terrans, two seem caricatures, and though the third has more depth, he is shallowly three-dimensional.
—Le Guin introduces the Terran Davidson first, and that initial chapter plays out from his point of view—as do two later chapters out of the eight total. This is the only time he is shown as anything other than brutish, though his actions quickly gain that pallor through the readers’ growing understanding. So, after bait-and-switching the reader from thinking he is the hero to realizing he is the villain, Le Guin then dissolves him into a caricature of an unrepentant, racist, violent, mass-murderer. At the end, he feels two-dimensional: loyal to the army structure, yet serving another purpose in his life.
—The Terran Lyubov narrates two chapters as an anthropological member of the colonizing force from Earth. He is sympathetic to the plight of the natives, but caught up in the system he is a part of, powerless. This is another two-dimensional character: he loves the culture of the natives, but cannot convince other Terrans to.
—Selver, the native who narrates the other three chapters, has more going on than either Terran. His culture doesn’t know violence—adults replace the childish feats of wrestling and strength with skill at singing. So his eventual embrace of violence makes him the avatar of a god in their culture. Yet, his reasons for embracing violence are sympathetic: systemic racism, violent oppression, the consistent murder and rape of his people and his wife. Yet he struggles with his decision to adopt violence, and has a hard time using it. He becomes a shell, a symbol for his culture, the resistance leader whose effectiveness comes at great psychological cost and alienation, though this isn't adequately explored. So, though Selver has more than two dimensions, even he feels shallow.
—Le Guin allows each character space on the pages, interior monologue, actions, and plenty of dialogue—even with each other. But they all still seem fairly shallow. I think this shallowness comes from Le Guin’s interest in showing how mass violence is distasteful. The characters all serve this one theme. Davidson loves mass violence, serves it, but is insane. Lyubov resists it from the start and ends up dead by accident. Selver uses it as an answer to the violence of the Terrans, but ends up torn. The characters are not given enough of their own stories outside of this question of violence to really shine, to gain depth and interest outside of the central theme. So, instead of writing characters, Le Guin here uses characters as avatars viewing the theme from different perspectives, to help build the world and conclusions, forgetting the characters in the midst of her theme. Though she starts out wanting to explore the villain and treat all three sides of the argument around violence, she quickly loses interest and each character ends up being a shell, existing solely to make an argument. Yet that initial impulse seems strong. And I read hoping for reconciliation within Selver, for Davidson to see the error of his ways, for Lyubov’s work to gain traction—which did happen after his death—yet Le Guin wanted simply to take aim at war and tear it down, so she forgot to finish writing her characters. It comes off more polemical than interesting, and it is a weak book. Maybe this would have been better suited as a short story than a novella.
For if it's all the rest of us who are killed by the suicide, it's himself whom the murderer kills; only he has to do is over, and over, and over.
But that world she wastes her characters to build is built well. The locals’ alternative living situations use local materials, while working around and within the present landscape instead of scooping it out to a design. Their partially submerged, forest houses are hidden from Terran eyes in the endless jungle. The human camp is a backwater of slow communication, misunderstanding, and too few people doing too many jobs. Le Guin does a great job of giving me a few specific descriptors, and a couple of general descriptors, and then letting my own mind run with it. For instance, on the night of the main uprising, she shows a woman’s throat getting slit open in detail, but uses the horror of that to let the generalities of her descriptions of the rest of the violence be driven home by the reader—a later victim being “pulled down” seems much more serious than just being pulled off their feet because of this earlier violent example.
"Sometimes a god comes," Selver said. "He brings a new way to do a thing, or a new thing to be done. A new kind of singing, or a new kind of death. He brings this across the bridge between the dream-time and the world-time. When he has done this, it is done. You cannot take things that exist in the world and try to drive them back into the dream, to hold them inside the dream with walls and pretenses. That is insanity. What is, is. There is no use pretending, now, that we do not know how to kill one another."
So, while I like the impulse to make the villain a well-rounded character with his own narrative, she gives it up and he becomes a punching bag caricature, and insane. While I feel like Selver shows some real promise as a character—using violence to fight violence but being torn apart because of it—not enough context is given for the other natives to fully flush out Selver. While the world is built well, it comes at the expense of the characters in a way that makes the book feel more polemical against, and allegorical of, the Vietnam War—jungle, napalm, short humans of a different color—than interested in exploring the theme of mass violence. In terms of Vietnam War science fiction tales, I have now read three, and I like both Starship Troopers and The Forever War better. This one is too direct, too based on what Le Guin is against, not abstracted enough to allow the science fictional retelling to have power outside of the known context of the war itself.
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