The Eye of the Heron by Ursula K. Le Guin

*Spoilers ahead*

The Eye of the Heron is another fantastic novel by Ursula K. Le Guin.  Because of its brevity and directness, it feels at times like a YA novel, but its depth and complexity says that it’s intended for mature readers.  It occupies this between ground comfortably and elegantly, and impressively.

Reading the story in early 2019 was surprisingly hard, emotionally-speaking.  As with all of the other Le Guin novels we’ve read, I read Eye of the Heron aloud to Ann each night, so the progress was slow-ish and the challenges facing the people of Shantih had time to resonate in our heads at the end of each chapter for a day or two before we can pick the book up again.  For those of you who read the novel a while back and need a quick refresher, the book is about two societies on the planet of Victoria.  Victoria was originally a prison planet for prisoners from Brazil.  Those people founded the City of Victoria and have a classic capitalist power structure with the aristocratic bosses and peasants.  Their culture is also divided along what we consider traditional gender roles, with men as dominant and privileged and women as property and fragile vessels of morality.  Fifty or so years after the first settlers were sent, a third ship arrived, this time with 2,000 members of a communist labor group.  They founded the town of Shantih, where they work farmland for communal benefit. The two civilizations have a relationship, each providing things that the other needs.  At the beginning of the book, set 70 years or so beyond the arrival of the last ship, the people of Shantih have found a place in the wilderness to establish a second settlement, and they plan to send half the population northward. The bosses of Victoria City are afraid of losing their labor force and plan to put pressure on the people of Shantih so that they lash out, giving the military force of the bosses and reason to quell the “rebellion” and turn the peaceful and leaderless communists into slave labor.

So the non-violent people want to extricate themselves without violating their code of non-violence while the all-too-familiar power structure of Victoria city is looking for any excuse to subdue and conquer them.  Even though I knew that Le Guin is an optimist, or if not an optimist, someone who believes in providing models of hope, I didn’t see any way for the people of Shantih to escape their horrible situation.  Or I should say, I didn’t see any way for them to do so without the author pulling some punches or creating cheap escapes.  So I read with dread of either watching the one group subdue and yoke the other.  Since we are living in a time in America that a third to half of the political forces in America are willing to embrace authoritarianism and vilification of the weakest amongst us in the name of stability and privileged comfort, the dilemma of the book hit me very viscerally, way more than it would have done if I had read the book four years ago.

The resolution was of course thoroughly satisfying.  Le Guin is not only a gifted writer but a perceptive student of humanity.  The thing that makes her novels so thrilling and interesting is that she can turn her mind into a laboratory of human conditions.  She creates a test lab of limited variables, puts people into her constructed situation, details those people with specificity and uniqueness, and then records what she sees in her minds eye.  In the case of Eye of the Heron, she reduces the world to two cultures in a world with no outside influences but their traditions and memories. Then she gives each side simple desires that are opposed to each other, and a set of techniques and beliefs that govern the way they act on those desires.  But her magic ingredient is that she clothes these generic positions in specificity, grounding them in real characters with relationships and individual desires and personal commitments.  She’s concerned about things at a high level, but her stories take place in the weeds and mud of real people.  Large ideas might be forceful and driving, but they are always channeled through people.  Falco is no nameless capitalist, but a man with a specific position, a specific relationship with his daughter, and relationships with the other capitalists both established and upcoming.  Lev and Vera and Luz and Andre and Southwind and Macmilan are each anchored by their own relationships and views of the world that exist simultaneously within and separate from the larger movement of which they are a part.  The best social science fiction writers do this, and Le Guin is among the best of the best.  The laboratory of the mind can and should never be a fully sterilized place.  There are variables that must be removed for her experiment to take place, but as soon as the characters of the experiment are complicated and breathing people, a million tiny forces of reality are at play, and the talented author sees them and acknowledges them and grants them space to affect the story unfolding.

As usual, my intended introductory remarks have grown into their own little analysis, leaving me little room to comment on the things that I filled my paper with while brainstorming about the book after finishing it.  I’ll just throw out some of the ideas now and you can do with them what you will.  Ignore them, foster them into full ideas, use them as leaping off points for your own thoughts—whatever you do is cool by me.

The book begins and ends with wotsits, the most alien of creatures on Victoria.  All the other animals are based on the initial inhabitants’ memories of earth: herons, coneys, pouchbats.  The wotsit, as the name suggests, is completely strange.  It’s something like a three-eyed, feather-winged, shadow-colored toad.  Where it goes, it goes of its own will.  It cannot be coerced and it cannot be caged, because all caged wotsits die.  Knowing this, no one tries to cage them.  The wotsits appear to be an obvious analogy for the human spirit, and the people of Shantih in particular, who are making their break from the bosses of Victoria city.

The ringtree is a gorgeous creation and another beautiful image.  The tree grows solitary and at some surprise moment, explodes its one seed pod that then plants seeds in a neat circle around it, where in time, 40-60 trees take root and create a ring of trees around a center in which nothing but shrubgrasses grow and often a pond forms where the original tree was rooted once it has died.  Ringtree becomes tree ring and then the cycle starts all over again.  The relationship between the individual and the society seems an obvious read as the individual leader is only leader for a moment before the strength is given over to the masses to hold the line together until such a time as another leader is needed.  Perhaps it’s also related to the people of Shantih’s Long March, where an idea is the seed for a gathering of like minded people who can carry the idea to its end, until another idea from the crowd bursts forth to have its influence, with Luz being the next ringtree to explode, instigating the final expansion into the wilderness, taking Lev’s and Vera’s place.

I love the first section of Chapter 10, the section that immediately follows Lev’s death.  Luz, Vera, Southwind, and Elia are wrestling with what happened on the hill and what it means for the community.  Nothing is easy and nothing is clear, and even though they survived as an independent people, no one is comfortable with how things shook out or where things should go from here.  Not only is Lev dead, but the army was turned back because the people of Shantih responded by rushing the army, an act of violence.  Moreover, Falco’s shooting of Macmilan and other soldiers was also a significant reason for their victory, and his motivation was not one of peace or an interest in protecting the people of Shantih.  So the philosophy that is at the foundation of their movement is shaken and challenged and they are all struggling with how to proceed.  It is painfully human and complicated, and all it does is raise questions and not answers.  It is a beautiful section because it recognizes what has happened and doesn’t attempt to line up lessons or morals.  We are still believers in non-violence, but we must acknowledge that we don’t know its limits or how it exists entirely separately from violence, to which is always exists in relation.

I also loved chapter 6, the one in which the hundred or so people of Shantih are being forced to labor in the new fields at gunpoint.  This chapter is stunning in its depiction of power and consent.  Even though the soldiers have rifles, the laborers are there only because they have consented to be there.  As such, it would be more productive to lay down the rifles and share in the labors.  More would get done and community could thrive, but the city soldiers believe there is a hierarchy as long as they have the guns.  We know that belief is an illusion.  We often think of this dilemma as Angel did when he thinks the laborers are stupid because they outnumber the guards but do nothing to challenge them and are sheepish instead.  Lev makes it clear that it is not sheepishness that makes them organize as they do.  We are all connected and interdependent, and the more we acknowledge that unity rather than try to force a difference the better work we can do.  Le Guin is careful I think to not criticize those who have yielded to the oppressive power of guns—hell, it’s the thing that caused me so much anxiety while reading the book.  But power is always a relationship of consent, and when that consent ends, so does the power.  The people of Shantih are educated enough to know this; the people of Victoria City are not.

The novel is interested in the difficult relationship that we have with traditions and our past.  The understanding of “this is who we are” comes from our past.  The storyteller in chapter 10 tells of the Long March, and every child knows the stories.  This is who we are and how we handle adversity.  They are a comfort to us and a guide, but they can equally become a prison.  The traditions of Victoria City are what led Vera to staying in Casa Falco, which is what influenced Luz to side with the people of Shantih, which determined the course of the story.  There is tradition and there is growth and adaptation.  Luz is the one who rejects tradition, and as such she becomes a leader and a force for change.  She first rejects her own culture and then challenges her new people to push on beyond their boundaries.  Which I guess brings us back to the wotsit.  All the other creatures are traditional to us, things that remind us of home, but the wotsit is unique and fully adapted to the planet Victoria.  They are everywhere and free and totally alien.  And they are a sign of hope and the people who Luz has joined will become something as unique and perfectly suited to the life they are creating.