Very Far Away from Anywhere Else

*Spoilers ahead.  Read at your own Risk.*

This novella is the first non-science-fiction/non-fantasy work of Le Guin’s that we have read. It is, however, pure Le Guin, as it deals with one of her central themes: how two people connect across the gulf of our own minds and experiences.

When we began it, neither Ann nor I was particularly excited, since it felt so very much like a young adult novel, with a wise-cracking teen narrator who is both smart and lonely, feeling like a freak among his “normal” peers.  It’s not really until Natalie enters the picture that the novel takes off.  Once our two protagonists met on the bus, we knew we were going to be okay because Le Guin was going to do one of the things that she does best.

The length and limits of the novella speak of Le Guin’s focus and her ability to get right to the heart of the matter.  We are used to Le Guin’s stories taking their time, unfolding gradually and organically.  There is no such wandering in Very Far Away from Anywhere Else.  It’s not that there’s rushing or shut-off avenues; it’s just that this is a story about the complicated nature of love between a young man and a young woman.  The novella could easily have been expanded by exploring other facets of young adulthood as so many young adult novels have done, looking at all the tough parts of growing up.  I appreciate Le Guin’s unswerving attention to Owen and Natalie’s relationship.

I also appreciate that this is not a story about how Natalie saved or ruined Owen’s life.  Natalie does save Owen’s life in her own way, but her purpose in the story is not just to save Owen.  Natalie is a woman of focus and ambition who does not want anything to distract from those dreams.  Owen’s story is of how he learned he was not alone in the world and that he should not sell out his own dreams to live the life his parents (and by extension, society) wants him to live.  Natalie doesn’t just listen to and advise Owen; she is a living example of what Owen needs to see.  Natalie is a friend and an inspiration.

The crisis of the story is when the phantom of romantic love begins to haunt Owen’s mind.  As Owen says, he convinces himself that his fondness for Natalie is capital-L Love, and he begins to play the part of the lover, if only in his own mind.  This pressure echoes the other pressures in Owen’s life, the pressure to live by a script written by someone else.  The things he does as a lover—mooning over her looks, writing poetry, quietly aching in his heart—are all things that American pop culture defines as the behavior of love.

What I love is that in their healing discussion, Natalie confesses that she made mistakes too, that Owen is not the only one who reacted poorly to the love growing between them.  She says, 

The way I figured, I didn’t want to get really involved with anybody.  Falling in love or love affairs or marrying or anything like that.  I’m pretty young, and there’s all these things I have to do. That sounds stupid, but it’s the truth. If I could take sex lightly the way a lot of people do, that would be fine, but I don’t think I can.  I can’t take anything lightly.  Well, see, what was so beautiful was that we got to be friends. . . . I thought we’d really made it, and everybody’s wrong when they say men and women can’t be friends.

Owen apologizes for “pushing the sex stuff in where it didn’t belong,” but Natalie counters, ”Yeah, but it did belong. . . . You can’t just tell sex to go away and come back in two years because I’m busy just now.”  She felt the sexual tension and desire too, and her error was to ignore it because it was inconvenient.  But this realization is not followed by a declaration of love and restructuring of plans.  Natalie’s solution appears to be to move forward as before but with the full awareness of what they both feel.  That’s amazing, and beautiful, and everything I expect from Le Guin. 

So many writers skip past the difficult conversations needed to foster true connection between people, using the pressures of love to elide the hard work of communication.  The joy of this novel is that that conversation is made the climactic moment of the story.  As a writer you can’t do that unless you know exactly what you believe about human relationships and love itself.  Le Guin knows, and I can listen to her talk about it all day.

Destruction and Survival on the Lathe of Heaven

There are tons of spoilers ahead, so tread knowingly.

The Lathe of Heaven is one of Le Guin’s shorter novels, but it packs a big punch.  It’s a dystopic novel in which the dystopia is always changing because living in this Utopia is a man whose dreams change the very fabric of reality.  It’s is trippy and heavy, funny and irreverent, sad and thought-provoking.

As in the best of her novels, in The Lathe of Heaven Le Guin uses her unique world to tell the story of very human characters.  There are three main characters in this story.  George Orr, in his late 20s or early 30s is the man whose dreams are at the center of the novel.  He has been having his “effective” dreams since he was 15 or 16, but they didn’t cause him much worry until four years before the start of the novel.  We learn that something happened that April—we never know what, only that it was an action that Orr worries was unjustified—that made Orr fear the power of his dreams to change reality.  At that point he started to take drugs to keep himself from dreaming.  As the novel begins, George is delusional from having taken a dangerous combination of drugs and is ordered by the state to go to Voluntary Therapy to avoid a sentence.

Dr. Haber is the therapist George is assigned to.  Haber is an oneirologist, a scientist of sleep and dreams.  He is a man of quick judgments and conviction.  After the first session with George, Haber learns that the young man’s dreams can indeed change the world.  Haber wants to learn how George does it and wants to use the power of those dreams to make the world a better place.  As the novel starts, the earth’s population is stretched to its limit while climate change was ruined food production so there is very little for very many people.  But George’s dream-power is like the cursed monkey paw, and every changes Haber brings about is accompanied by an unintended shift.  For example, Haber instructs George to dream that there is plenty of elbow room for all, and the past is rewritten so that there was a major population crash, wiping out 6 million people.  Haber instructs George to dream of peace, and history is rewritten so that all the countries of Earth are united . . . against an alien species that has occupied our moon for years.

Heather Lelache is an attorney in Portland, Oregon (where the novel is set), a hard-nosed attorney who takes civil rights cases.  George comes to her when he suspects that Haber is using George’s dream-power against George’s will.  While our first impression of her is that she is as strong-willed as Dr. Haber, her dismissal of George upon first meeting of him gives way to gentler feelings and a drive to understand.  She observes one of George’s sessions with Dr. Haber in the name of the ACLU, making sure that the new technology Haber is devising to work with George’s dreams is safe and legal.  When George dreams, only he remembers the past truths as well as the present truths, unless someone is with him when he dreams, in which case that person two holds memory of the old and new world.  By witnessing the session, Lelache learns the truth about what is happening.

These three characters and their relationships make up all the energy and drama of the story, all with the backdrop of a rotating horror of global strife and tragedy.  No matter what George dreams, the climate has been thoroughly ruined by corporate greed and human apathy.  Man, I would love to see a quality mini-series made of this book—it is perfect for what television can do today.

For all that, what is the book about? 

Each chapter begins with a literary quote, most of which come from Zhuangzi, both the author and the book.  I was unfamiliar with Zhuangzi or his writing, so I did a little research.  Zhuangzi is a philosopher, and his tales are about the mystery of the nature of reality and how to live in an uncertain world.  The title of the book, The Lathe of Heaven, comes from chapter 23 of Zhuangzi, and is included as the quote at the head of chapter 3 of the book: 

Those whom heaven helps we call the sons of heaven.  They do not learn this by learning.  They do not work it by working.  They do not reason it by using reason.  To let understanding stop at what cannot be understood is a high attainment.  Those who cannot do it will be destroyed on the lathe of heaven (26).

The Lathe of Heaven, taken as a whole, is a kind of parable that could appear in Zhuangzi, if Zhuangzi was a modern work of science fiction.  The philosophy at its core is one of balance and acceptance, of being a part of the world even as you see yourself as apart from it.  That quote above is about accepting and being a part of the world not through human action, but by being.  To not be, to push for your own ends will lead to destruction upon the lathe of heaven.  Be shaped by the will of heaven.  To fight it and try to be the lathe yourself will only end in horrors.  Which is, of course, precisely what happens to Dr. Haber.  He wishes to push his own will on the heavens and pays the ultimate price for it, and makes a huge chunk of the world pay that price as well.

Orr, on the other hand, is a son of heaven, in the sense of the quote above.  George is the living embodiment of balance, as we learn in chapter nine, when Haber tells him about the results of his personality tests, calling him “the man in the middle of the graph.”  For Haber, to be so centered is to be “self-cancel[ing]”: “You cancel out so thoroughly that, in a sense, nothing is left.”  A colleague of Haber’s proposes a different reading: “he says your lack of social achievement is a result of your holistic adjustment,” a notion Haber finds laughable, but that we can see the wisdom of. We are told early on that 

Orr was not a fast reasoner.  In fact, he was not a reasoner.  He arrived at ideas the slow way, never skating over the clear, hard ice of logic, nor soaring on the slipstreams of imagination, but slogging, plodding along on the heave ground of existence. He did not see connections, which is said to be the hallmark of intellect. He felt connections, like a plumber (39).

See how that connects to the sons of heaven?  He does not reason it by using reason.  He does not work it by working.  And he is only too happy to let understanding stop at what cannot be understood.  After the aliens come to Earth, George learns from them and rediscover this inner peace by asking for their help.  George snaps back to a feeling of balance that abandoned him four years ago when he began trying to control his dreaming.  For nearly 10 years before that, he dreamed easily and the world didn’t suffer.  (I admit that is an uncertain statement to some degree, insofar as the world kinda sucked, and we have no idea how George affected reality before the start of the novel.  But whatever his dreams did or didn’t do, we know that the lathe of heaven is turning and shaping him, using him to shape the world, in the philosophy of the text.)

I’ve got much more buzzing around in my head than I have time to write right now.  I suspect that George Orr’s name is a nod to George Orwell and simultaneously important because “or” is the balancing point of alternatives. George can let both parts of the or exist without tension or exclusion.  There is no “either” to George’s “or.”  That would be a fun path to pursue.

I would like to read a whole essay about Lelache, who is, I think, a crux in the novel.  She is introduced in opposition to George just as Dr. Haber is, but she is no Haber.  Her mixed racial background makes her almost a living example of opposites meeting, so much so that her blackness is so crucial to who she is that she cannot exist in the gray-skinned world Haber creates through George’s dreams.  I would love to see an analysis of how Lelache matters to the themes of the novel.  Because I think it’s a critical role she plays.

I want to talk about the opening chapter and how George is like the jellyfish in the ocean.  I want to talk about the Aldebararians and why they look like sea turtles, how they are the eastern mystics, and why they talk out of their left elbow.  I want to make connections between their broken speech and George’s broken speech in the first chapter, in which we get insight into the back story of his broken sentences while the listening characters are clueless.  I want to talk about the snake poison analogy and its implications.  I want to talk about the alien quoting Macbeth and George responding with Hamlet.

There’s so much to think and talk about in this short novel because it is insanely rich and beautifully crafted.  Here, Le Guin is at the top of her game.  Read it and write about all the things I couldn’t, please.

The Farthest Shore

*As always there are spoilers ahead, so read on at your own risk.*

The Farthest Shore is Le Guin’s third book in the Earthsea cycle, and another excellent novel.  At root, it is the story of Arren as he journeys from being the boy prince of Enlad to the man and future King of All the Isles.  Arren travels with Ged across the Western isles and into the realm of the dragons in search of who is responsible for what appears to be the death of magic in Earthsea. 

The list of Le Guin’s talents and gifts as a writer is long, but one of my favorite is her refusal to tell any story but the one that is right to her, no matter what genre and tradition might say.  We have seen the story of the boy who became king many times.  If he’s a prince, as Arren is, then he’s usually arrogant and used to wielding power, and he must learn humility and responsibility.  Or he is feckless and must learn the gravity of what it means to rule.  In other stories, he proves himself in battle or saves the realm with feats of heroism.

Arren has none of these traits.  He falls in love with Ged upon meeting him and wishes only to serve him.  He may not be humble, but nor is he arrogant.  He puts others above himself for most of the story.  When he is on the rafts of the Children of the Sea, the ruler acknowledges Arren as a prince, but doesn’t know whether to address him as an equal or a child.  The narrator tells us at that time that Arren prefers to be thought of as a child.  Arren’s sword remains in Lookfar throughout the novel, coming out only as Ged and Arren land at Selidor.  He swings the sword once, but it does nothing against Cob because “there is no good in killing a dead man.”

The battle with Cob seems to be what the narrative is bending towards from early on in the novel, once Ged and Arren determine that one wizard is likely responsible for the state sweeping over the world.  But there is never a battle at all.  When living Cob faces Ged, Orm Embar the dragon crushes Cob before the battle begins.  In the realm of the dead, when Ged and Arren again face Cob, Ged makes it clear that Cob has no actual power; he can’t even remember his own name, let only exert any magic.  Arren swings his sword, but it does nothing, and Ged, well, Ged doesn’t even bother with Cob.  The climax isn’t about Cob at all, but about the healing of the rift that has been torn between life and death.  Ged spends all his magic not defeating Cob but restoring balance to Earthsea by closing the rift.  And Arren grows to manhood, not by partaking in that act, but by bearing witness to it and carrying Ged up the mountain to reenter the world of the living.  We know that he has grown because when he meets Kalessin the dragon, he meets him as an equal, one ruler to another.  Now, Arren doesn’t prefer to be treated like a child.  Instead he says to Kalessin, “Let my lord be.  He has saved us all, and doing so has spent his strength and maybe his life with it.  Let him be!”  Arren spoke “fiercely and with command. He had been overawed and frightened too much, he had been filled up with fear, and had got sick of it and would not have it anymore. He was angry with the dragon for its brute strength and size, it’s unjust advantage.  He had seen death, he had tasted death, and no threat had power over him.”  Yelling at the oldest dragon on the planet is pretty badass, and a sure sign of Arren’s growth. 

The Farthest Shore is about a world being torn apart by self-interest and greed, the willingness to ruin the world if only it means I can live forever.  But Cob and his greed is only a symptom of the larger problem.  The ring of Erreth-Akbe have been returned and peace should rule the land, but it doesn’t.  There is an absence of war, but that is a poor substitute for true peace.  True peace in this tale comes by the uniting of all the islands under one ruler.  I think this is not about the importance of a ruler, but about the coming together as a joint entity, not as a nation, but as a people.

The whole series is about split things coming together.  In the first novel, Ged is split with himself and must rejoin the two.  In the second novel, East and West come together to deliver the ring of Erreth-Akbe to Havnor.  In the third novel, all of Earthsea is rejoined by the separating of life and death.

There’s a reading to be made about the importance of dragons in this novel, how they are linked to human beings, so that the rift between life and death affects them both equally.  They move from legend and distant threat to partners with Ged in this book.  I was particularly struck by Arren’s observation when Orm Embar curls up beside Ged as he slept after arriving at Selidor: “Arren was aware of his yellow eye, not ten feet away, and of the faint reek of burning that hung about him.  This was no carrion stink; dry and metallic, it accorded with the faint odors of the sea and the salt sand, a clean, wild smell.”  Dragon are not supernatural, but a part of nature. This reading of the dragons, I’ll leave to others, but I will say that Le Guin was clever in her use of them to escalate the stakes of the conflict.  Seeing the dragons cannibalize each other and go mad made clear that all of Earthsea is endangered by Cob’s actions, not just the fate of the people of Earthsea.

I really enjoyed the novel, though The Tombs of Atuan is still my favorite of the Earthsea novels so far.  I am excited to get back to Tenar in the next half of the series!

The Tombs of Atuan

*As always, this review is intended for others who have already read the novel, so there are plenty of spoilers ahead.*

This is my first time reading through the Earthsea cycle, and I’m ordering the books as I go, one at a time.  When I got halfway through The Tombs of Atuan, I went to Amazon to order the next book, The Farthest Shore (because, sadly, our library doesn’t carry it).  I’ve seen excited posts in the last week or two about the new illustrated collected volume of the Earthsea books, a thousand-page, hardbound edition full of quality illustrations.  So I considered getting that instead of buying the 2012 rereleases that I have been getting.  But I didn’t, in part because I didn’t want an artist’s interpretation of the texts coming between me and what I was reading for the first time.  The illustrations are really fantastic, and on second readings, I would love to see them to see how they align with my own mental pictures.  But the real reason I’m sticking with the editions I’m reading is that they include an afterword written by Le Guin herself in 2012.  As I said in my review of A Wizard of Earthsea, no other artist can evaluate her own work like Le Guin, and these afterwards, though only 8 pages or so, are full of insight and humor and top-notch analysis of both the intellectual and artistic variety.  Ann and I had dinner a few nights ago before finishing The Tombs of Atuan, and a lot of the observations we brought up in our conversation about the book over that meal Le Guin includes in her afterword, only more sharply observed and more eloquently phrased.

I will add a few observations of my own, but let me included for you some of what she says here.

[W]hen I started The Tombs of Atuan, I saw it, as well as I can recall, simply as a sequel.
 And a change of gender.  Ged would play a part in it, but the person whose story it was would be a girl.  A girl who lived far from the cities of the Archipelago, in a remote desert land.  A girl who could not seek power, as young Ged could, or find training in the use of it as he did, but who had power forced upon her.  A girl whose name was not given to her by a kind teacher, but taken from her by a masked executioner.

The boy Ged, offered wisdom, refused it through his own pride and willfulness; the girl Tenar, given the arbitrary power of a goddess, was taught nothing about living her life as a human being.

When I was writing the story in 1969, I knew of no women heroes of heroic fantasy since those in the works of Ariosto and Tasso in the Renaissance.  These days there are plenty, though I wonder about some of them.  The women warriors of current fantasy epics – ruthless swordswomen with no domestic or sexual responsibility who gallop about slaughtering baddies – to me they look less like women than like boys in women’s bodies in men’s armor.

Be that as it may, when I wrote the book, it took more imagination than I had to create a girl character who, offered great power, could accept it as her right and due.  Such a situation didn’t then seem plausible to me.  But since I was writing about the people who in most societies have not been given much power – women – it seemed perfectly plausible to place my heroine in a situation that led her to question the nature and value of power itself.

The word power has two different meanings.  There is power to: strength, gift, skill, art, the mastery of a craft, the authority of knowledge.  And there is power over: rule, dominion, supremacy, might, mastery of slaves, authority over others.

Ged was offered both kinds of power.  Tenar was offered one.

Heroic fantasy descends to us from an archaic world.  I hadn’t yet thought much about that archaism.  My story took place in the old hierarchy of society, the pyramidal power structure, probably military in origin, in which orders are given from above, with a single figure at the top.  This is the world of power over, in which women have always been ranked low.

In such a world, I could put a girl at the heart of my story, but I couldn’t giver her a man’s freedom, or chances equal to a man’s chances.  She couldn’t be a hero in the hero-tale sense.  Not even in a fantasy?  No.  Because to me, fantasy isn’t wishful thinking, but a way of reflecting, and reflecting on reality.  After all, even in a democracy, in the second decade of the twenty-first century, after forty years of feminist striving, the reality is that we live in a top-down power structure that was shaped by, and is still dominated by, men.  Back in 1969, that reality seemed almost unshakeable.

So I gave Tenar power over – dominion, even godhead – but it was a gift of which little good could come.  The dark side of the world was what she had to learn, as Ged had to learn the darkness in his own heart. (215-218)

And this:

In The Tombs of Atuan, the Old Powers, the Nameless Ones, appear as mysterious, ominous, and yet inactive.  Arha/Tenar is their priestess, the greatest of all priestesses, whom the Godking himself is supposed to obey.  But what is her realm?  A prison in the desert.  Women guarded by eunuchs.  Ancient tombstones, a half-ruined temple, an empty throne.  A fearful underground labyrinth where prisoners are left to die of starvation and thirst, where only she can walk the maze, where light must never come.  She rules a dark, empty, useless realm.  Her power imprisons her. (218-219)

And this:

She is only able to escape when Ged becomes her prisoner.  She, for the first time, exerts her power to – her freedom of choice.  She chooses to let him live.  So she gives herself the chance to see that, if she can free him, she can free herself.

Some people have read the story as supporting the idea that a woman needs a man in order to do anything at all (some nodded approvingly, others growled and hissed).  Certainly Arha/Tenar would better satisfy feminist idealists if she did everything all by herself.  But the truth as I saw it, and as I established it in the novel, was that she couldn’t.  My imagination wouldn’t provide a scenario where she could, because my heart told me incontrovertibly that neither gender could go far without the other.  So, in my story, neither the woman nor the man can get free without the other.  Not in that trap.  Each has to ask for the other’s help and learn to trust and depend on the other.  A large lesson, a new knowledge for both these strong, willful, lonely souls.

Reading the book, more than forty years after I wrote it, I wonder about many of its elements.  It was the first book I wrote with a woman as the true central character.  Tenar’s character and the events of the story came from deep within me, so deep that the subterranean and labyrinthine imagery, and a certain volcanic quality, are hardly to be wondered at.  But the darkness, the cruelty, the vengefulness . . . After all, I could have just let them go free – why did I destroy the whole Place of the Tombs with an earthquake?  It’s a kind of huge suicide, the Nameless Ones annihilating their temple in a vast spasm of rage.  Maybe it was the whole primitive, hateful idea of the feminine as dark, blind, weak, and evil that I saw shaking itself to pieces, imploding, crumbling into wreckage on the desert ground.  And I rejoiced to see it fall.  I still do. (219-220)

Yeah, that’s better than I could have said.

So over that dinner the other night, Ann and I agreed that something about writing a young adult novel did cool things for Le Guin’s style.  The need to be straightforward with a clearly directed plot makes for sharper storylines than her earlier work.  (Note: I love the way Le Guin lets her plots unfold and meander, so I’m not knocking that at all.)  At the same time, she doesn’t let that need for direct storylines affect her ability to tell the kinds of leisurely plots that she is inclined to write.  We see this is in A Wizard of Earthsea once Ged is in pursuit of the shadow.  As I said in my review of that book, the pursuit of the shadow is when the book really starts to feel like a Le Guin novel.  That feeling is amplified and extended, to my mind, in The Tombs of Atuan.  Though it’s a much shorter novel, it reads more slowly and moves more quietly than A Wizard.  Plenty happens on the island of Atuan, but it’s a novel that is concerned with the interior life of Arha/Tenar.

We see all the classic Le Guin themes at play in this novel: the coming together of opposed cultures; the negotiating and “marriage” of them as some synthesis occurs, creating something entirely new; the meaningful bonds formed between two thoughtful and opinionated minds.  If I were to make a study of the book, I would love to go through the novel again and see how Le Guin weaves together plot and personal reflection.  The novel never drags and never wanders off into onanistic philosophizing, and I’d love to see how she strikes this wonderful balance.

Another amazing talent Le Guin possesses is the ability to stay focused on a main character.  There are so side plots or diversions away from Arha’s journey.  Another author could easily have made a side story about of Arha’s relationship with Penthe or Manan.  Another author could easily have made a cartoon villain out of Kossil as well.  There are a thousand ways to have messed with this story in I think detrimental ways, and Le Guin steers through all the dangers true, like Ged with his mage wind. 

As much as I like A Wizard of Earthsea, The Tombs of Atuan is the book I think I’m most likely to reread and revisit going forward.

A Wizard of Earthsea

Le Guin is a rare breed, an author who is not only willing to reflect on what she has written but is skilled at breaking down what her novel has accomplished, where it shines, and where she feels it falls short.  My copy of Earthsea comes with an afterward that Le Guin wrote in 2012, some 44 years after the novel was first published.  Reading it, she said everything I was thinking about the nature of her hero and his quest as it relates to other fantasy quests.  Here’s what she says:

Hero tales and adventure fantasies traditionally put the righteous hero in a war against unrighteous enemies, which he (usually) wins.  This convention was and still is so dominant that it’s taken for granted – ‘of course’ a heroic fantasy is good guys fighting bad guys, the War of Good Against Evil.

But there are no wars in Earthsea. No soldiers, no armies, no battles.  None of the militarism that came from the Arthurian saga and other sources and that by now, under influence of fantasy war games, has become obligatory.

I didn’t and don’t think this way; my mind doesn’t work in terms of war. My imagination refuses to limit all the elements that make an adventure story and make it exciting – danger, risk, challenge, courage – to battlefields.  A hero whose heroism consists of killing people is uninteresting to me, and I detest the hormonal war orgies of our visual media, the mechanical slaughter of endless battalions of black-clad, yellow-toothed, red-eyed demons.

War as moral metaphor is limited, limiting, and dangerous.  By reducing the choices of action to ‘a war against’ whatever-it-is, you divide the world in Me or Us (good) and Them or It (bad) and reduce the ethical complexity and moral richness of our life to Yes/No, On/Off.  This is puerile, misleading, and degrading.  In stories, it evades any solution but violence and offers the reader mere infantile reassurance. All too often the heroes of such fantasies behave exactly as the villains do, acting with mindless violence, but the hero is on the ‘right’ side and therefore will win.  Right makes might.

Or does might make right?

If war is the only game, yes. Might makes right.  Which is why I don’t play war games.

To be the man he can be, Ged has to find out who and what his real enemy is. He has to find out what it means to be himself.  That requires not a war but a search and a discovery.  The search takes him through mortal danger, loss, and suffering. The discovery brings him victory, the kind of victory that isn’t the end of a battle but the beginning of a life.

Like all her novels, A Wizard of Earthsea is beautifully written and narratively compelling.  Unlike her other novels published before it, A Wizard of Earthsea is focused, moving with a purpose from chapter to chapter.  It’s not rushed; it unfolds leisurely as is her want, but each chapter moves us measurably along a course that is discernible to the reader.  At some point in every novel before this one (and at many points in most of them) I have wondered where the story was going, what it was building to, what it was about.  A Wizard of Earthsea sets up Ged’s contest with the shadow early on and doesn’t veer.

It was a quite refreshing tactic, and I was thrilled to see that she could accomplish the feat without sacrificing any of the style that makes her writing so rewarding. The most that’s-so-Le-Guin part of the story was, to me, Ged’s and Vetch’s sailing beyond Lastland through the open waters, and getting to it was like rejoining a friend after a long parting. 

The world of Earthsea, the system of archipelagos as the only known lands, is a rich idea for a fantasy world, and Le Guin uses her art to bring the system of islands to life, giving each region and cluster its own flavor and history.  I can see already why the book was turned into a series, not something Le Guin had originally planned to do.

We are going to be starting on The Tombs of Atuan even tonight.

The Handmaid's Tale

There are plenty of spoilers ahead, so read on at your own risk.

I can’t find it now, but I remember reading a passage in which Orwell talks about his political fiction and how it was important to him that his novels be art first and political second.  Political fiction that is mere didacticism will not have an impact because it will never be read or tolerated.

Atwood was clearly inspired by Orwell’s 1984, and she also appears to have shared his position concerning political fiction.  The Handmaid’s Tale flies far above political handwringing to create a compelling and disturbing narrative.  Atwood can successfully critique the direction she saw America heading in the mid 80s because she wrote a story about a character with real blood in her veins and placed her in a world made of flesh and bone, bricks and concrete.  The arts of language and narrative come first in her telling of Offred in Gilead, and Atwood is a master of those arts.

Part of what makes the novel powerful—the part that I was struck by—is how imperfect a hero Offred is.  She didn’t see the warning signs about where the world was heading when she was younger, and when she finally did, she didn’t think much further than herself and possibly her daughter.  As readers, we rally behind her insight and her ability to analyze the horrors that she endures, but once she kicks off her affair with Nick, she loses interest in the larger movement that Ofglen and others are fighting for.  Offred is not here to start a revolution; she just wants her own freedoms back.  To the reader she is simultaneously understandable and frustrating.  Presenting her protagonist in this way allows Atwood to position her readers both behind Offred’s eyes and above her, so that we can feel for her without being trapped in her perspective, always forcing a little distance between us.  Most readers are savvy enough to know that you can’t fully trust a first-person narrative, but that doesn’t mean it’s always easy to be critical of what we’re told.  Offred’s shortcomings help us do just that.

But what I really want to talk about are the endings.  I use the plural because there is the ending to Offred’s account and also the ending of Atwood’s novel, the “Historical Notes on the Handmaid’s Tale.”  Talk about a roller coaster ride!  First, trained by 1984 and similar dystopias, I was expecting some real dark shit to go down at the end of Offred’s account.  That it ended with her being escorted out to the Mayday folks was surprisingly uplifting.  Yes, technically it’s a Lady-or-the-Tiger ending, but since we know she is writing the narrative we have just read, it is unlikely that she was taken away and killed by the Gilead government (although as I write that, I am certain some enterprising scholar out there has written a solid essay about why we should believe that very thing).  So boom, surprise happy ending!  But wait!  Enter James Darcy Piexoto and the Twelfth Symposium on Gileadean Studies.

What a powerful and devious move by Atwood!  After taking us through a dark and emotional journey through the looking glass, she jerks us into the brightly lit halls of some convention center or hotel where smug pricks like Professor Piexoto is saying shit like this: 

If I may be permitted an editorial aside, allow me to say that in my opinion we must be cautious about passing moral judgment upon the Gileadeans.  Surely we have learned by now that such judgments are of necessity culture-specific.  Also, Gileadean society was under a good deal of pressure, demographic and otherwise, and was subject to factors from which we ourselves are more happily free.  Our job is not to censure but to understand. (Applause.)

Fuck you and your detachment from which you can look at the subjugation of half the populace and be simply fascinated.  Instead of Gilead becoming this historical moment that is learned from, it has become a subject for scholars to analyze and chuckle politely over.  There is a Gileadean Society?  This is their twelfth symposium?  Good God.  It reminds me of Don Delillo’s White Noise and Jack Gladney’s position as head of Hitler studies.  Instead of Offred’s story having any power to change the world, we learn in this afterward that it has been absorbed by the world and turned into a curiosity.  This is a much darker ending than if Offred had been hung on the wall.  Even when Gilead falls, nothing will have changed except the names of places and people.

That final chapter is both horror and warning.  Heed this tale and the emotions it stirred, and threat them with reverence.  Don’t let the monstrosities of our past and present become intellectual playthings without meaning. 

The most disturbing thing about reading the novel in 2018 is how prescient it has proven to be.  Though written in the Reagan years as the religious right was first becoming a political force, it is only more apt today as the GOP in the Senate fights to confirm Brett Kavanaugh on the highest court in the country.  Moreover, Atwood identifies the growing environmental concerns and the rampant racism in America and a panic over the “browning” of America.  The Handmaid’s Tale is a wonderful and disturbing novel.

Obsessed with The Dispossessed

As always, there are spoilers ahead.

The Dispossessed was published in 1974, the fifth book published in Le Guin’s Hainish Cycle.  It is thematically tied to the other Hainish novels in that it deals with the soft collision of drastically different cultures as seen through the interactions of individuals from those cultures.  The Dispossessed differs from the previous novels insofar as neither of the two cultures are Terran or Hainish or alien at all.  The two cultures at issue are from twin planets that circle each other, each acting as the other’s moon.  Urras is the parent planet, where all the people originated.  170 years before our story begins, a group of anarchists fled Urras for the moon, Anarres, where they could establish their anarchical utopia.  For the past 7 generations, the two cultures have not mixed or interacted more than some radio communications.  The people on Anarres, the Odonians, have an entirely original language and have divorced themselves entirely from the Urras way of life.  In the opening chapter, one lone Anarresti boards a freighter rocket that irregularly transports goods between the planets to travel to Urras.

Shevek, our main character, is a temporal physicist who has worked out a unified theory of space and time, called simultaneity.  His work has gone as far as it can among the Anarresti, and he hopes to make progress among the minds and technology on Urras.  The Urrasti want him to complete his work so that they can build the ansible, which is only a theoretical concept on Urras.  We have encountered the ansible in all the other Hainish novels: it is the device that allows simultaneous communication across any distance of space.  With it, the Urras hope to have an edge on the interstellar communities—the Terrans and Hainish—who have been in recent contact with them. 

Thematically, the novel, like all Le Guin’s other works in the Hainish cycle, is about the space between the cultures that are mid-clash.  She calls that synthesis “marriage” in her introduction to Planet of Exiles, and I talk about it in my posts about that book as well as City of Illusions. The metaphor in The Dispossessed is the wall, the things we build in an effort to protect ourselves but that have the added effect of imprisoning ourselves.  There is but one wall on all of Anarres, because there is no property or boundaries in the anarchical society.  That wall is what the book opens on:

 There was a wall.  It did not look important.  It was built of uncut rocks roughly mortared. An adult could look right over it, and even a child could climb it.  Where it crossed the roadway, instead of having a gate it degenerated into mere geometry, a line, an idea of boundary.  But the idea was real.  It was important.  For seven generations there had been nothing in the world more important than that wall.
 Like all walls it was ambiguous, two-faced.  What was inside it and what was outside it depended upon which side of it you were on.
 Looked at from one side, the wall enclosed a barren sixty-acre field called the Port of Anarres. . . . The wall shut in not only the landing field but also the ships that came down out of space, and the men that came on the ships, and the worlds they came from, and the rest of the universe.  It enclosed the universe, leaving Anarres outside, free.
 Looked at from the other side, the wall enclosed Anarres: the whole planet was inside it, a great prison camp, cut off from other worlds and other men, in quarantine.

Near the end of the book, a dozen or so paragraphs from the end of chapter 10, Shevek (in a scene that takes place before the opening of the book) decides that he needs to start a printing syndicate to print all the things the other syndicates on Anarres refuse to print.  Among the things he will print is the play written by his childhood friend, Tirin, the performance of which resulted in Anarresti society shunning Tirin. “I owe him that,” Shevek says in explaining why he’ll print Tirin’s play. “He taught me what prisons are, and who builds them.  Those who build walls are their own prisoners.  I’m going to go fulfill my proper function in the social organism.  I’m going to go unbuild walls.”

Walls are boundaries, ways we imprison others, and ways we isolate ourselves in the name of protection.  Walls say “this is mine, not yours.”  Walls are rules without words, telling other where they can and cannot go and be.  The Anarresti have one wall, and one written law, and not coincidentally, they are the same thing: no one from Urras may come onto Anarresti soil. On Urras, Shevek doesn’t encounter literal walls, but they are everywhere around him.  They structure the way people talk to each other; they structure what he can see and what he cannot; they channel his movements and his experiences without his even knowing it.  Urras is a capitalist society with all the social ills that accompany it.  There are hierarchies at work in every interaction.  As an Anarresti in this strange land, Shevek has to find a way to square up these social inequities with the beauty of the world he’s shown. 

This is a great book, and it is a very Le Guin book.  Like all her Hainish novels, there is no immediate “plot” that gives the reader a sense of where the story is going.  We are meeting characters and watching their interactions, and through them we are discovering the world of the novel.  Tension within situations develop not through characters butting heads, but through the general clash of expectations and world views.  There are no villains and no heroes, and the journey is not one of personal development.  Shevek’s understanding of how the worlds and cultures are related goes through a major shift, but nothing about Shevek’s character changes.  I was talking with my wife the other day (with whom I am reading these novels) and we described “plot” in Le Guin’s book like hand-beating cream into whipped cream.  For a long time, things are spinning and spattering, and then, just when you think it will never become whipped cream, it transitions from a liquid to a solid seemingly all at once.  The Dispossessed is no different in this—it hums along as an interesting story, and then, wham, there is suddenly a plot and the story arrives it one big bang.  You can then look back and see all the strands and connections, but nothing seems forced or inevitable.  In so many ways her novels seem like anthropological studies, in which she creates situations, molds some representative characters, and then watches them bounce off one another.  It is only through the power of her art that those characters and the worlds they inhabit take on full independent life.  It’s amazing to behold.

One of Le Guin’s greatest gifts is communicating genuine tenderness, love, and affection between two characters.  In The Dispossessed, we see this most in Shevek and Takver’s relationship, and in each novel before it, there are equally moving relationships, the most affecting for me being Genly Ai and Estraven in The Left Hand of Darkness.  Normally for Le Guin, this kind of description and connection is its own reward, but in the case of The Dispossessed, I feel like Shevek and Takver’s relationship is given a foil in the relationship between Shevek and Vea, the Urrasti woman.  Vea is witty and urbane in an almost classic Hollywood sense.  She’s flirty with sharp retorts and interested in defending her decadent culture by revealing the repression and hidden decadence of Anarresti culture.  The back-and-forth between Shevek and Vea is the kind of interpersonal relationship that is common in a lot of novels, and its presence here draws attention to the fact that it is not anywhere else in the novel.  It is hollow and disturbing, and not a delight the way it is in classic films.  It’s one of the more troublesome chapters in the book since we see Shevek ready to practically rape Vea, Shevek who up to this point has been the voice of feminism in the novel.  There is much to be made of this chapter, and I look forward to reading the thoughts of a much smarter literary critic, but I’ll limit my observations to this one thing.  Shevek’s premature orgasm that puts his semen on Vea’s leg seems to me the crucial symbol of the scene.  When the sexes are not established as equals, and the only power granted women is sexual power, then the arena of conflict between a man and a woman will necessarily become sexual.  And the fruits of that encounter will be as wasteful and disturbing as Vea’s stained dress.  Shevek’s and Takver’s relationship is only possible between equals, and the sexism in the Urrasti system destroys that possibility, and it makes monsters out of men and women alike.

One of the greatest aspects of The Dispossessed is its ability to present an “ambiguous Utopia.”  In the end, Anarres is a true Utopia, a vision of what humankind could have, but it is not an unproblematic vision.  It is simultaneously admiring and critical of the civilization, knowing that any group will always fall short of their ideals.  Le Guin is unflinching in her vision and analysis.  As she says through Shevek when he thinks about the complicated reality of Urras: “The dignity and beauty of the room he and Efor were in was as real as the squalor to which Efor was native.  To him a thinking man’s job was not to deny one reality at the expense of the other, but to include and to connect.  It was not an easy job” (about a third of the way into chapter 9).  Include and connect.  That could be the motto of Le Guin’s writing.  She never denies one reality at the expense of the other, but holds them both up and draws lines to connect them.  It’s what those of us who love Le Guin’s works keep coming back for.

I have talked in other reviews (mostly in my look at City of Illusions) about the important of synthesis in the Hainish novels, of two different cultures coming together to make a third thing, unique and superior.  That idea is given a unique twist in The Dispossessed, in that synthesis is rejected.  The difference here is that Anarres and Urras are not two alien cultures, but a splintering of one culture.  To re-synthesize would be to recreate the imbalances and troubles that caused the separation in the first place.  No, Shevek rejects the synthesis in chapter 11 when he is talking to Keng, the Terran ambassador:

It was for that idea that I came here too.  For Anarres.  Since my people refuse to look outward, I thought I might make others look at us.  I thought it would be better not to hold apart behind a wall, but to be a society among the others, a world among the others, giving and taking.  But there I was wrong—I was absolutely wrong . . .
 'Because there is nothing, nothing on Urras that we Anarresti need!  We left with empty hands, a hundred and seventy years ago, and we were right.  We took nothing.  Because there is nothing here but States and their weapons, the rich and their lies, and the poor and their misery.  There is no way to act rightly, with a clear heart, on Urras.  There is nothing you can do that profit does not enter into, and fear of loss, and wish for power.  You cannot say good morning without knowing which of you is “superior” to the other, or trying to prove it. . . . I have been to Hell at last.

Keng offers a counterpoint, that Urras, in spite of its flaws is as close as she’s ever come to paradise.  He asks what she would think of Anarres, and Keng responds that the Terrans “forfeited our chance for Anarres centuries ago.”  Shevek responds:

You will not achieve or even understand Urras unless you accept the reality, the enduring reality, of Anarres.  You don’t believe in me, though I stand with you, in this room, in this moment. . . .  My people were right, and I was wrong, in this: We cannot come to you.  You will not let us.  You do not believe in change, in chance, in evolution.  You would destroy us rather than admit our reality, rather than admit that there is hope!  We cannot come to you.  We can only wait for you to come to us.

For all its faults, Anarres is a utopia, a dream of equality and communal support.  It is not a culture to be synthesized and absorbed; that would destroy it and not improve the other culture at all.  It is rather a kind of goal post, a place to push for.  And we see this at the end of the novel when the Hainish citizen requests to visit Anarres.  You have to come to Anarres; it cannot come to you, and it cannot meet you half way.  It is outside of the League of Worlds where synthesis between cultures takes place.

The Dispossessed didn’t knock my socks off when I read it.  None of Le Guin’s novels have done that.  They are wonderfully written, but they are not poetry in prose seldom breathtaking in their presentation.  But they have a power that grows as you read them, and that sits with you (or I should say me) once I’ve finished them.  They are intelligent, quiet, meaningful, heartfelt, and thoughtful.  They are like ancient structures built to last and be revisited, learned from, studied, explored, and admired.  And I love them for that.

City of Illusions

City of Illusions is the third book Ursula K. Le Guin wrote for her Hainish Cylce.

It’s been a lot of fun reading these books in order because you can see Le Guin’s style and skill evolving, with each book offering more impressive writing and thinking than the one before it.  It’s also neat to see how she places the books in the same universe with casual connections rather than strict chronology or any kind of cause and effect between books.  The main character in City of Illusions, Falk, is a descendant to the Jacob Agat in Planet of Exile, but it’s not an important fact, and nothing in the story hinges upon your understanding that connection.  The details are rewarding to a fan but not an impediment to a new reader.

Another fun element for us is that our edition of these collected works includes the introductory essays that Le Guin wrote in the 2010s.  Le Guin is a loving and astute reader of her old texts, able and willing to point out their weaknesses and their strengths, noting connections, and treating each one like an old lover for which she is grateful to have had in her past.  It was in her introduction to Planet of Exile that she noted a recurring theme in her novels is “marriage,” which I wrote about in my review of the book.  Foregoing any plot summary of City of Illusions, I want to jump right into my analysis because it picks up on this notion of marriage.

There are plenty of spoilers ahead, so if you haven’t read the book and don’t want to know what happens, stop reading here.  Know that it is an excellent read and that if you like her other books, you should read it.  Then come back and tell me what you think of my analysis.

My interpretation of Le Guin’s “marriage” theme is that she is interested in the coming together of two cultures or people to see how they synthesize to create something original.  Her most common approach in these Hainish novels has been the stranger in a strange land motif.  Here, Falk is an alien with no memories making a home on Terra.  Through his education in the first chapters of the novel, he comes to inhabit the culture of the forest dwellers and then sets off to Es Toch, the city under the control of the Shing.  On his way, he encounters different people who teach him a little more about the world.  Finally, in Es Toch, he is reunited, through the Shing’s technology, with his original identity, Ramarren.  Le Guin makes it clear that Falk and Ramarren are two separate individuals cohabitating in the body of one man.  We have a literal coming together of two cultures in the mind of Falk/Ramarren.  In her introduction, Le Guin says that that idea, two minds existing in one person, was the kernel of the novel she set out to write, which she intended to call The Two-Minded Man. In the climax of the novel, Falk and Ramarren come together in one identity:

He turned and stared foggily at Orry and Ken Kenyek.  What to do with them?  They had come along, evidently.  Erase the records on the computers, said a voice inside his mind, a familiar voice, his own—Falk’s.  Ramarren was dizzy with fatigue, but gradually he saw the point of this request, and obeyed.  Then he could not think what to do next.  And so, finally, for the first time, he gave up, made no effort to dominate, let himself fuse into . . . himself.

Fusion occurs because of an act of relenting, of ceding to a state of equality, of not dominating.  For two things to meet in the middle and have a genuine and productive union—marriage—there needs to be mutual respect, equality.

In contrast to this moment of fusion are the Shing, inhabiting Terra but totally separate from the native people.  The Shing control and dominate and keep themselves apart.  In that same climactic scene, before their union, Falk thinks about the Shing while considering the fate of Estrel:

Had they retrained her, razed her mind, killed her?  No, they did not kill.  They were afraid to kill and afraid to die, and call their fear Reverence for Live.  The Shing, the Enemy, the Liars. . . . Did they in truth lie?  Perhaps that was not quite the way of it; perhaps the essence of their lying was a profound irremediable lack of understanding.  They could not get into touch with men. They had used that and profited by it, making it into a great weapon, the mind-lie; but had it been worth their while after all?  Twelve centuries of lying, ever since they had first come here, exiles or pirates or empire-builders from some distant star, determined to rule over these races whose minds made no sense to them and whose flesh was forever sterile.  Alone, isolated, deaf-mutes ruling deaf-mutes in a world of delusions.  Oh desolation .  . .

The Shing’s relationship with earthlings, and specifically the sterility of their relationship, recalls the situation in the Planet of Exile.  In Planet of Exile, the two people are able to bridge the divide between them and become one people, but here, the Shing apparently have no interest in a marriage of equality, and so are doomed to a lonely existence.  The Shing refuse to fuse with the people of Terra, and unlike Falk and Ramarren, no third thing is created, and become, in Falk’s analysis, something to be pitied.  In Le Guin’s universes, there is always more power—and pleasure—in union.  Without that union, you have hierarchy, rulers and ruled, controllers and controlled.  With that union, you get equality and progress.

I think it is important that the novel culminates in a city, Es Toch.  Cities are meeting grounds for all kinds of cultures and ways; they are the embodiment of cultural synthesis.  Not surprisingly, the Shing have forbidden all cities but the one they control.  Presumably, this is to keep humans apart from each other, but in the terms of the novel, it is to keep thing homogenous and unmixed.  When Ramarren gets to tour Es Toch near the end of the novel: “That day they showed Ramarren all over Es Toch, which seemed to him who had lived among the old streets of Wegest and in the great Winterhouses of Kaspool, a sham city, vapid and artificial, impressive only by its fantastic natural setting.”  Instead of being a place of synthesis and life, Es Toch is a sham, vapid and artificial.  There’s no genuine mixing of ideas and culture, no chemical reaction between people that is life.

The Shing’s big claim of success is how peaceful Terra is under their rule.  Ramarren observes that under the Shing, humans have become “almost a race of children.”  The peace the Shing bring is an unproductive peace.  When people don’t interact or clash, there are no battles and no conflict, but there is also no synthesis, no growth.  What I find interesting is that the logical extension of this argument is that people must necessarily war to some extent or another in order to synthesize and change each other.  Given that, it seems perfectly natural that Le Guin moves on to Gethen in The Left Hand of Darkness for her next novel, asking herself what a world without war might look like and what sort of circumstances might create a world without war but still with cultures coming together.  In fact, not only does Gethen exist without war, but the League of Worlds is replaced by the Ekumen, the former being a league built around war and the latter built around the exchange of ideas between planets.

I found City of Illusions to be a rich novel that gave me a lot to think about, and in my understanding of Le Guin’s writings, it’s a kind of lynchpin of ideas as she pivots from one way of thinking to the next.

Planet of Exile: Crossing the Divides

Planet of Exile is Ursula K. Le Guin’s second novel in what became the Hainish Cycle.  It’s a relatively short novel, only spanning 100 pages in my edition.

The story takes place on a planet whose rotation around its sun is equivalent to 60 earth years, so seasons last about 15 years a piece.  It is the end of autumn, the beginning of winter, when the story begins, and the whole narrative covers about three (Earth?) weeks.  There are three groups of people at the heart of the story.  The Tevarans are a nomadic people, native to the planet, who exist in the technological equivalence of our Iron Age.  The Alterrans are a dark-skinned people who live in a city by the sea.  They are the descendants of a group from the League of All Worlds who came to the planet to enlist the inhabitants in the upcoming battle.  An unknown trouble struck, and their ship left them there.  That was 10 Years ago by this planet’s calendar, 600 years by our own.  The Alterrans have a code that prevents them from using technology beyond the capabilities of the planet’s natural-born people.  Finally, the Gaal are a group of Northerners who come south every winter.  This Year, they have amassed as one great people and are essentially building an empire as they head south.

The Alterrans and Tevarans have something of an uneasy alliance, which becomes more strained when the Rolery, daughter of the Tevarans’ leader, becomes the lover of Jakob Agat, the Alterrans’ leader.  The Tevarans and Alterrans have intermixed in the past, but something within them are incompatible, in the sense that no children can be born from the union.  Miscarriages or death of the mother are the most common result.  The lovers are discovered just after Tevarans have agreed to team up to fight against the Gaal, and the discovery dissolves the alliance leaving each people to fight for themselves.  The second half of the novel covers that invasion.

Okay, if you haven’t read the novel, you probably want to stop here, because I’m going to get all spoilery and analytical about what I think is happening in this novel.

So what’s with all the patriarchal bullshit in this story?  Wold’s people are all about the gender division, and even though Rolery notes that the women of Landin (the city of the Alterrans) have fewer restrictions on their behavior, it is clear that when the war comes, the women play just as much a secondary role as the Tevarans.  While there was a serious lack of female characters in Rocanon’s World, the division of gender roles and the diminished social status of women were not drums that were beaten in the novel, certainly not like in Planet of Exile.  So what’s the deal?  Was Le Guin just feeling especially patriarchal while writing the novel?

I don’t think so.  I think gender, and the division of the genders, is thematically on-point in the novel.

In many ways, the novel is all about divisions between people, both the social divisions and the physical barriers.  The Alterrans and Tevarans have not only different ways of life, but they are physically separated as well.  When Rolerly enters the city of Landin in the first chapter, she makes her way through the various barriers of the city—the outer wall, the inner square, the long causeway.  In fact, that last one is a barrier that is too much for her.  She goes around it onto the sands and out to the Stack, it’s own little fortress divided from Landin itself and the rest of the world by the unpredictable tides.  There rolery is called in from the sand by Jakob.  His mindspeech breaks the barriers of her own mind, and then she in turn breaks the barriers of the Stack.  And that’s the beginning of their love, though neither knows it. 

Le Guin summons up all kinds of images of division and focuses on the forceful breaking down of those divisions, such as the siege of the Winter City and of course the multi-chapter siege of Landin.  Similarly, she has clear opposites that have to be redefined in the face of new threats.  First the Alterrans and Tevarans are placed in opposition, then they are united against the invading Gaal.  The Gaal are successful because they overcame their own internal divisions so that separate tribes joined together to become one force.

Even the snowstorm is a dividing force, isolating groups and individuals from each other, a barrier put in place by nature itself.  Mindspeech too is about barriers and divisions.  Jakob tells Rolery that the skill of mindspeech is to keep the brains natural barriers from flying up at the first intrusion.  Mindspeech is about successfully opening yourself up to another human.  In this world Le Guin has created, no surprise that so few have mastered the art form; they are all so busy blocking themselves off with names and titles and scientific specifications.

In the end, the story itself is about the Alterrans finally becoming a part of the ecosystem, as opposed to self-enforced aliens in exile.  There is hope that they have adapted to the planet, which on the one hand lets them suffer infections (another broken barrier!), but on the other lets them potentially conceive children with the Tevarans.  Jakob’s big speech in the final chapter to the Tevarans in Landin is to say that the city is open to them, that they are free to leave and equally free to stay forevermore.  Those barriers and differences are dropped entirely.

It’s in this entire context that the gender division that seems so ridiculously stringent exists.  We may not see Rolery or Alla pick up arms and fight side by side with the men, but everything in the story tells us that difference is not only meaningless, but ultimately harmful.  Even though the novel changes perspectives from chapter to chapter, it is in Rolery’s chapters that we find horrible sentence like “but she was only a woman, and so she wept” (I can’t find the exact passage now, but it is within the final three chapters).  The final divide, gender, is the only divide that goes unexamined by these characters.  It’s possible that it is unexamined by Le Guin herself, but something compelled her to be especially explicit about that divide, something I haven’t yet seen in her other writings.  If she has any hangup about that bridging that divide, I think it is because she sees the divide as necessary and bridged in other ways, by which I mean that man and woman come together in the act of sex, and their union creates a child, that third thing that is separate from them, just as the Alterrans and Tevarans will come together to create an all-new people over time.