Ursula K Le Guin splits her focus very well: in this second-published novel, on a different world than the earlier Rocannon’s World, she continues the technique of telling a story focused on the planet and characters. But not totally focused. In Rocannon, we see the noblewoman retrieving her necklace from a museum lightyears away, which takes only a couple of pages, and the rest of the story takes place on-scene, boots on the ground, in situ. And Le Guin ensures that even when the outside context intrudes again, at the end, Rocannon’s destroying the rebels’ interstellar base happens on the world that would come to take his name. This focusing of the story allows so much.
—First, don’t show the monster—the one writing “rule” I have ever been accused of advocating for. In other words, allow space for the reader’s imagination to fill in, but give enough hints that you can guide their imagination towards horrifying or beautiful or whatever you want them to think of. Le Guin does this with her wider Hainish Universe. She drops hints and statements about the wider universe, and lets the reader wonder. I appreciate not being spoonfed.
—Yet it ultimately allows her to focus on the story she is interested in writing, the one here discussing preparations for hibernation over a fifteen year long winter. In other words, instead of building characters, the world, and the wider universe, she focuses her writing on building the first two, and barely mentions the third in order to keep the story moving and allow depth of exploration. This focus clearly keeps me engaged in her story.
—Though she does “split her focus”, the slight split merely allows wonder and depth, while helping the reader focus on what’s important to the story at hand. She doesn’t bite off more than her talent or story can chew, but she also doesn't ignore the wider context.
What is hard is to keep alive on a world you don't belong to.
Again, like the earlier book, Le Guin shows and doesn’t tell. She didn’t tell me that Rocannon is compassionate, and here she doesn’t tell me that Umaksuman is a pragmatist. But I see it over and over again through Umaksuman’s actions. And because he never acts to contradict that aspect of his personality, it is clear to the reader. The one time he seems to contradict this, it is later explained as a misunderstanding on the part of a character in great pain who couldn’t quite tell what was going on.
Wold felt sorry for him, as he often did for young men, who have not seen how passion and plan over and over are wasted, how their lives and acts are wasted between desire and fear.
The themes here focus on the ubi sunt motif of English literature. The colony of “farborn”, or people from another planet, remember little of life before the six hundred earth-years they have been on-planet. The begin to doubt even their own records. Their abandonment has left them essentially native, but differences in genetic code mean that they are unable to breed and integrate with the main populace of the planet, though politics, myth, and custom also interfere. Set against the invasion of migrating northern tribes, the Gaal, this ubi sunt motif doesn’t drive the story so much as the characters themselves.
—But this book also starts to show Le Guin’s tendency to allow multiple themes comfortable room in her book. Racial issues, custom, politics, love, death, Wold as Hrothgar, an aged king in a warrior culture who hasn’t been usurped yet.
She the stranger, the foreigner, of alien blood and mind, did not share his power or his conscience or his knowledge or his exile. She shared nothing at all with him, but had met him and joined with him wholly and immediately across the gulf of their great difference: as if it were that difference, the alienness between them, that let them meet, and that in joining them together, freed them.
The writing here improves over her earlier novel, simply by being more readable. There are less awkward phrases to pause over, as Le Guin starts to find her voice. But the book is largely another pulp fiction adventure tale about a besieged city populated by two slightly antagonistic tribes, filled with relics of the past, and being attacked by both winter and the united Gaal tribes.
Neither grief nor pride had so much truth in them as did joy, the joy that trembled in the cold wind between sky and sea, bright and brief as fire.
One other strength here is Le Guin’s consistent worldbuilding. This world has an orbit of 60 earth years, meaning that each season is 15 years long. Le Guin allows this to influence the story and characters in believable, consistent ways. Instead of translating everything to earth years, she points out the difference a couple of times, then stops, letting the reader fill in the translation or get drawn into the world built by starting to think like these people. Yet it’s not an unfamiliar thinking—these are nomadic farmers preparing for winter, just a 15 year winter. It’s known to us, how to prepare for winter when your resource gathering area is as far as you can walk, but it’s multiplied by the length of the winter. So, instead of taking something from far out of human conception and forcing it down her reader’s throat, she merely multiplies a known historical process, and this lends the whole legibility.
In the big, crowded, noisy room where golden suns swam on the walls and the years and Years were told on golden dials, he searched for the alien, the stranger, his wife.
It’s a good book. I really enjoyed reading it. But, again, it’s not as strong as Le Guin’s later mastery. It shows her steadily improving, especially in storytelling as this isn’t a split narrative but one whole narrative from start to finish. This book even begins to show her later strengths as a writer more than her first novel did. I’m impressed, even if it still isn’t deep enough for me in the themes it discusses, or broad enough in the viewpoints on those themes.
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