Shirley Jackson's We Have Always Lived in the Castle

*As always, spoiler’s haunt this post, and I write with the assumption that you have read the novel.*

I was impressed by how much Shirley Jackson had grown as a writer in my review of The Haunting of Hill House.  But a mere 3 years later, when she wrote We Have Always Lived in the Castle, Shirley Jackson is at the top of her game. Every part of this novel made me catch my breath again and again.  Is our main character really an 18-year-old woman who wishes for the violent and graphic deaths of everyone in this town?  Are we really behind the eyes of a non-neurotypical woman who casually breaks household items to express and temper her displeasure and who has planted her baby teeth all over the estate?

I could not love this book more.

I love a well-done first-person narrative and the challenge such a perspective presents to both the writer and the reader.  I guess challenge is the wrong word, especially in the case of Mary Katherine Blackwood.  The usual trick of a first-person narrator is their unreliability, the uncertainty about what really happened versus what they present and how they present it.  But for Mary Katherine, there is nothing unreliable about her; there is no deception or dissembling; there is only her matter-of-fact statements about her feeling and actions. We see the world exactly as she does, and Jackson is insightful and thorough in employing that perspective, that it was to me a perpetual surprise and delight.

In discussing the book with Ann, I kept using the phrases “mentally ill” and “broken” to describe Mary Katherine and Constance, but I wasn’t comfortable with them.  I’m in favor now of non-neurotypical because I think it better captures the level of understanding and Jackson’s non-judgmental presentation of the information.  Throughout her works, Jackson has shown an interest in the way women’s lives and their mental health collide with an uncaring and sometimes openly hostile world.  That concern is at the heart of The Haunting of Hill House, and it is the central subject of We Have Always Lived in the Castle.

Jackson is masterful in her revelations, unpacking her subject one step at a time & changing the readers’ understanding bit by bit. Beginning with Mary Katherine shopping in town shows us her hostility toward the villagers and the equal hostility they feel toward her.  We don’t question the state of her mental health or neurochemistry.  When she pretends to be on the moon in this first chapter, it seems to be merely a protective flight of fancy that any of us might partake in.  Her violent desires are striking, but not distressing.  Then as she approaches home and is concerned about Constance’s wandering out of the house, we think of her as protective of her sister, as the caregiver.  As we move into the kitchen and discover Mary Katherine’s obsession with protective magical words and charms, we understand that she is not “normal.”  After Uncle Julian’s tale and the revelation of the poisoning, we as readers are on uncertain ground, though I personally suspected Mary Katherine was the poisoner and Constance was protecting her.  With Constance’s never-ending patience, we are in awe of her care for her “sick” sister and failing uncle.  Every step, we reevaluate relationships and positions. It’s not until the fire that we understand the depth of Constance’s own mental situation.  Her obsession with not being seen surprised me, and as Mary Katherine once again became the protector, we realize that the two sisters are in this together, each doing what they can to get the two of them through a world that doesn’t want them as they are.

It’s in this context that we need to understand Charles Blackwood’s role in the book, I think.  At first he seems like a common golddigger, interested only in the girls’ money.  But he never gets the safe combination from them, and he never breaks into the house to take the money, which he certainly knows he could if that was his ultimate goal.  No, Charles is the force of patriarchy and normalcy from the outside world seeking to make the Blackwood home how the world says it should be.  Money needs to be respected, not buried carelessly in the yard.  Old folks suffering from dementia should be shipped off to a care facility.  Mary Katherine should be committed to an institution, and Constance should be married and keep a proper home.  Charles is a mean-spirited bastard, to use Uncle Julian’s word, but his violence is more ideological than physical.  In the context of the Blackwood household, Charles’s view of “normal” is off-putting and offensive.  His view of the world is no more valid than Mary Katherine’s, and a lot more disturbing by the time it is introduced in the novel. And when we see the villagers let loose after the fire is put out, we know that they are no more healthy in their attitudes than Mary Katherine and Constance.  Likewise, it’s hard not to be critical of Helen Clarke’s desire to take them away to take care of the girls.  We want to protect the Blackwood sisters from the world after the fire, and we understand their fear.

Of course, nothing is simple.  Mary Katherine did indeed kill three people in a moment (or sustained state) of anger when she was 12, and she has no remorse six years later. The Blackwood sisters are not angels or simple victims, so there are no simple emotional responses to the events of the novel, which is one of the things that makes the novel amazing.

After the fire, the novel takes two interesting turns that I loved.  In chapter 9, the 1^st chapter after the fire, the girls are in something of their own postapocalyptic setting. How are they going to survive?  They can’t go safely into the village.  They can’t protect themselves with mere cardboard over the windows.  They have two rooms and a limited ability to provide for themselves.  But then they rise from the ashes, literally, and carve out a space to live.  The next turn of course is as the sister’s isolation becomes the stuff of urban legends, so that by the novel’s end we seem to be in an origin story about that dilapidated house on the hill everyone avoids and tells stories about.  Our protagonists are seen as children-eating witches who are to be feared and appeased as they huddle in the dark with only each other, peering out at the outside world and laughing.  It is simultaneously creepy and sweet, and I personally felt and uncomplicated pleasure in their safety and seclusion.

The story I kept thinking about as I read the book is Lizzy Borden, and I wonder to what extent that story served as inspiration for the novel.  Sadly, Jackson did not write or talk a lot about her works, so we don’t know.

There’s actually another turn that I love, which is when Charles Blackwood enters the story.  In those chapters, especially following upon Helen Clarke’s visit for tea, this contemporary novel feels more like a period piece, something from Austen or one of the Brontë’s, as the story becomes one of extended families and questions of inheritance.  The novel feels like it moves through genres like Mary Katherine moves through her moods.

There is a long essay to be written comparing The Haunting of Hill House and We Have Always Lived in the Castle.  Women, isolation, “madness,” understanding, belonging—all are central themes and concerns in both novels.  The Crain sisters and the Blackwood sisters are similar in their isolation and oddness.  The patriarchal morality of Hugh Crain and Dr. Montague (as suggested in his reading of Pamela) are contrasted with Charles Blackwood’s demand for modern normality.  I’m not the one to write that essay, but I’d be among the first in line to read it.

This is one of those books whose story sets up residence in a corner of my brain.  I’m rolling if over in my brain like a multifaceted jewel, watching it catch and scatter the light. I’ve only been reading good literature these days, and this is one of the best.

Shirley Jackson's The Haunting of Hill House

*I’m probably going to spoil the shit out of the book, so don’t read this unless you have already read the book yourself or don’t give a damn about spoilers.*

I swear to you that I read Shirley Jackson’s The Haunting of Hill House somewhere around 2002 or 2003.  I can picture the cover still, and even the odd creases on the cover from where it was bent when placed down carelessly once.  My wife and I had been huge fans of the Robert Wise 1963 film adaptation for a long time, so we decided to read the source material.  But here’s the thing, as of two months ago, I would have told you the book was pretty damn close to the movie.

What the hell was I doing in 2003?!  The book is radically different from the movie, in spite of there being many scenes and dialogue (or voice-overs) pulled right from Jackson’s book.  Nelson Gidding, the writer of The Haunting’s screenplay was right to pull from Jackson’s novel, because Jackson’s writing is all kinds of delicious.  We have the Library of America edition, which comes with the collection of short stories published as The Lottery; or, The Adventures of James Harris, published originally in 1949, ten years before The Haunting of Hill House.  The stories in it are excellent (you can see my thoughts on them in the previous blog post or under that book on GoodReads), but in the ten years between publications, Jackson has grown significantly as an artist.  Her writing here is sharp and moving.  She is in top form throughout the novel.

As for what Jackson is doing with the book, I have been struggling with that for weeks now, and all I have to show for it are a bunch of scattered and not-necessarily-connected thoughts.  Rather than waiting for them all to gel together (which I’m not sure they’ll ever do), I’m going to just throw them out here.

There’s something going on about family.  Eleanor, Theo, Luke, and Montague are something like a family in the decidedly domestic space of Hill House.  Dr. Montague is a fatherly figure and the other three are like children, playing hide and seek and planning picnics and being lighthearted and playful with each other generally.  Theo notes that the statue of Hugh Crain depicts a family and points out who is who in the picture.  That Theo has no patronymic is an interesting choice and I think related to this idea.

There’s something going on about morality and the female body.  While Theo is a modern woman, and Eleanor is doing her best to play the part, there are trappings surrounding them of an archaic and oppressive (and unfortunately still too-modern) moral sensibility regarding women’s morality and their sexuality.  Hill House was built in the Victorian period, and Hugh Crain’s book for his daughters is all about the dangers of their own sexuality.  And for as modern as Dr. Montague seems, his novel of choice is Pamela, an 18^th century novel about the perils of a young woman’s virtues.  This combines with the sexual tension between Eleanor and Theo in the book.  While Luke is a possible romantic interest for both Theo and Nell, Jackson herself seems much more interested in the chemistry between the two women, both platonic and romantic.  Wise’s movie plays up Theo’s homosexuality, but there is very little evidence of that in Jackson’s novel; Jackson puts much more attention on what Nell wants from Theo.

I love the nature of the haunting itself as depicted in the novel.  Mrs. Montague thinks she has it all figured out.  Ghosts are unhappy and unfortunate souls who simply need compassion and understanding to be freed from their burdens and sent on their way to the heavenly light.  While Mrs. Montague is a riotously funny and engaging character, it is made clear that she has no real understanding of what is happening.  There do not appear to be ghosts in Hill House.  Instead, Hill House is itself sentient, calling to and compelling Eleanor.

The house controls the senses to some degree.  You hear the knocking and pounding, but only if it wants you to, for Mrs. Montague and Arthur hear nothing.  You smell the decay of death in the library, but only if it wants you to, for the others do not smell what Eleanor smells.  They all agree that food tastes better at Hill House, beyond the mere cooking skills of Mrs. Dudley.  Hill House can make a roomful of blood appear and then just as easily make it disappear upon Mrs. Montague’s investigation.

There’s something about repetition in the way Hill House works.  Mrs. Montague observes that trapped spirits often just repeat themselves, sometimes filling up whole pages with repeated words or phrases.  Well guess who else repeats her thoughts and sayings?  Journey’s end in lovers meeting.  Nell has certain choral phrases she returns to throughout the novel, like one of the spirits Mrs. Montague is certain inhabits the home.  And don’t forget Mrs. Dudley, who’s ritual sayings become the butt of many jokes.  The house is calling to Eleanor, but it already has Mrs. Dudley, who cares for the home immensely.  Things must be in their proper place.  She gets annoyed with Hill House is spoken ill of.  She follows the others and put things back where they belong.  And though she leaves every night, she returns every day.

Or is Mrs. Dudley really like that?  Near the end of the novel, Eleanor is flitting about like an unseen spirit, listening to the conversations of the others, certain that they are all talking about her.  But Luke and Theo never mention her any more than Dr. Montague and Arthur.  In Mrs. Montague’s and Mrs. Dudley’s conversation, we hear a Mrs. Dudley completely unfamiliar to us.  She is conversing naturally and without ritual phrases, seemingly casual and an easy conversationalist.  It is, for me, a sort of wow moment that made me wonder what was really going on with our impression of her to begin with.

The book strikes that beautiful balance between Nell’s madness and the supernatural so that it is impossible to separate the two.  Nell is lost, displaced without anywhere to belong.  The dominating force in her life, her mother, is gone, and she is adrift, having never had a moment to find herself.  As she drives to Hill House in the first chapter, she is imagining all the possible futures for herself, all the places she might live.  But all those visions are a life of being alone, just herself and her stone lions.  At Hill House, she is presented the possibility of human company, and the other characters are presented as possible lovers and friends, each with something else to offer.  But when she chooses Theo and says that she will follow her and be with her, Theo roundly rejects her.  Hill House will of course have her.

So what does that all add up to?  Wonderment, as far as I’m concerned.  From the short stories of hers that I’ve read, it is clear that Jackson is not a fan of morals and tidy endings.  She likes the messy and the possible, the suggestion and the ghostly whispers of our human impulses.  There are no clean metaphors or declarations about life and humanity.  She is a smart, observant, witty, loving, and critical writer of the human condition and she’s more interested in turning over stones than putting a bow on anything.  Which is one of the reasons, I think, that I keep returning to The Haunting of Hill House.

How the Universe Got Its Spots

I first picked up Janna Levin’s How the Universe Got Its Spots in 2003 at the NASA museum in Florida, coming home from taking our three-year-old son to see family and visiting Disney.  It was an impulsive purchase.  While I loved watching Carl Sagan’s Nova as a kid and enjoyed my physics classes in high school, I did not have any thoughts about astrophysics, cosmology, black holes, or space in general.  In 2003, I was a literature and film geek, a budding videographer, and a stay-at-home dad.

Levin’s book scratched an itch I didn’t even know I had, stretched a muscle I didn’t know had cramped up, and opened a door in my mind that had been entirely forgotten behind the clutter that had accumulated over the years.

In the 15 years between 2003 and 2018, I had thought of this book often, the science, the story of Levin’s life in 1999 and 2000, and her beautiful prose.  I had recommended it to many others, leant it to friends, and eventually loaned it to someone who never returned it.  But still it lingered for me.  I finally ordered another copy for myself for Christmas this last year and reread it in its entirety.

The book is every bit as amazing as I remember it being.

It’s structured as a series of letters-slash-diary-entries that Levin addresses to her mother.  In them, she fills her mother in on the movement of her life as a young theoretical astrophysicist in academia and gives her a basic overview of the science and work that she is focused on.  Her current work (in the book) seeks to determine the shape of our universe or discover the ways that its shape can be discerned.  To get there, she walks through the work of the giants on whose shoulders she stands.  In the end, the reader gets a quick but substantial summary of the foundational elements and theories of astrophysics.  Levin does all of this concisely, clearly, and entertainingly.

According to the blurbs on the book’s cover, Levin is a talented scientist.  I have to take their word on that.  What I can witness for myself is that she is a talented writer.  How the Universe Got Its Spots is beautifully written.  Whether she’s talking about her personal life or scientific theories, she is warm and insightful, elegant and evocative.  There is wonder and excitement in her tone, and a genuine love for her subject, even against the backdrop of the sorrows and strains of her personal life.  There were many passages I lingered over and reread for the sheer pleasure of her language and cleverness.

The book covers concepts of infinity, theories of gravity, special relativity, general relativity, quantum theory, the big bang, black holes, dimensional theories, topology, and even touches upon string and chaos theories.  As an introduction to these topics, this book could not be more ideal, and I would (and have) recommend it to everyone with even a passing interest or idle curiosity.

One of the things that makes physics so fascinating is that nearly all their theories feel like metaphors for life, things like every action has an opposite and equal reaction.  Levin takes full advantage of this feature by mixing biography and science, moving back and forth between her lived life and the subject of the moment.  The two naturally fit together so that the story of these two years in her life coexist comfortably with the 400-year history of modern physics.

One of my favorite aspects of the book, as a literary geek, is the way the truth and fiction hold hands like good friends and sometime lovers.  Levin makes it clear at several points in the book that the diary entries and letters are being written in hindsight, even though they are written in the present tense.  For example, at one point, she is at a conference in Moscow, which she placed in February of 2000.  She includes a footnote observing that the conference was actually in October of 1999.  She says in that footnote, “Honestly, I’ve gotten the date wrong.”  Honestly, I’m lying.  But of course it’s the truth too, which is how art works, right?  Sometimes you have to tell a fiction to better capture the truth of the experience.  This is of course at odds with the demands of science to be rigorously factual and honest.  So Levin gets her lies and her honesty, her fiction and her truth to all elevate each other so that science and art become one.  And she makes it look effortless the whole while.

The Lottery, or, the Adventures of James Harris

The Lottery, or, The Adventures of James Harris is a unique collection of short stories by Shirley Jackson.  Published in 1949, this collection is the only collection of her short stories that were published in her lifetime.  I do not know to what extent she had a hand in determining which stories to include and in what order, but I like to think this was entirely by her design.

The 25 short stories are divided into four groups, and each group is preceded with an excerpt from Joseph Glanvil’s Sadducismus Triumphatus.  That’s not a made up name or title, but a real book published posthumously in 1681 about witchcraft.  In the quote preceding the first group of stories, the author describes the witches partying down with the Devil in one of their rituals.  This focus on witches and Devils runs throughout the collection, especially given the alternate title of “The Adventures of James Harris.”  Jims and Mr. Harris’s appear throughout the various stories collected here.  He first appears as a named figure in the second story, “The Daemon Lover,” which follows a young woman who is stood up by her fiancé, the man who proposed to her yesterday.  She searches the area for him and believes that she has tracked him down to an apartment where he appears to be shacked up with another woman.  Only no one answers the door when she knocks, and she returns regularly to try to find him but never does.  Does Jim Harris exist?  Is he fucking with the young woman, or is she delusional in some way?  It’s a fantastic story, but Shirley Jackson doesn’t care to answer that question.  So Jim is a kind of phantom, and you could describe him as devilish. 

The epilogue for the collection of short stories is an excerpt from a translation of Child Ballad No. 243, the ballad titled “James Harris, The Daemon Lover.”  In the ballad, James Harris is a man who lures a married woman and mother away from her family with the promise of riches, but once he has her, he reveals that he is the devil and that he is taking her to hell with him.  So the theme of devilry and witches runs throughout the stories, even though there is nothing resembling a witch in any of the tales.

Jackson’s stories are almost all about modern young women and their own spaces, living their lives.  It is of course not the women accused of witchcraft who called themselves witches in the 17^th century, but the men like Joseph Glanvil.  These are women being women in women’s spaces, the kind of thing that makes some men uncomfortable and accusatory.  What exactly is Shirley Jackson saying, I don’t know, but I would love to read the analysis that connects all the threads that are dangling loose in my head right now.  Unfortunately there appears to have been little scholarly work done with regards to this text.

Prior to reading this collection, I had not read any of Shirley Jackson’s short stories except for “The Lottery,” and I read that so long ago that my only memory was that the winner of the lottery got stoned (spoilers!).  I was expecting, then, dystopic tales and possibly even science fiction, but this collection could not be farther from that description.  I was surprised upon rereading “The Lottery” to find that there was nothing science fiction-y about it.  It only seemed that way to my young mind because “village” sounded so quaint and otherworldly, I suppose.

No, these stories are all about New England in the 1940s, and they feel like it.  They are tales that present situations fraught with danger, but the worst things you imagine are not where the story goes.  Jackson is concerned with the mundane rather than the magnificent.  For example, “The Tooth,” one of the final stories in the collection begins with a woman boarding an overnight bus from New Hampshire to New York, where she expects to have her tooth pulled in the morning.  Suffering from a terrible toothache, she boards the bus after popping codeine and drinking plenty of whisky.  Oh, and sleeping pills.  Good night!  How many things can go wrong there?!  And, while they do not go well for our protagonist, she does not end up raped, killed, or abandoned on the side of the road. The threat is certainly present, but Jackson is interested in things other than the sensational.

She spends much of her stories recounting character’s actions in pretty minute detail.  Her writing is clear and strong, and stays away from poetic phrases or extended similes and metaphors.  She keeps you grounded in the moment to moment actions of her subject and does not meditate on things beyond that.  The meaning to be pulled from the stories is in the action of the drama itself, not in its presentation.  There were several stories that were utterly captivating, and there were a handful that simply left me scratching my head.  Every time I felt like I figured her and her writing out, along would come a story that would dumbfound me.  “The Dummy,” for example.  What the hell was that story saying?  Or “Come Dance with me in Ireland.”  Or “A Fine Old Firm.”  But even the headscratchers ere beautifully brought to life.  

It was tempting at times while reading one story or another to think that Jackson just didn’t know how to build to a climax or seize upon a moment of tension in the narrative.  But it is clear that Jackson can do exactly those things when she wants to, which means that these stories that don’t do those things do exactly what she wants them to.  Often her protagonists are stuck in socially awkward situations and we read on to see how, if at all, they extricate themselves.  Will there be a moment of confrontation?  More often than not there isn’t. The protagonist often yields to the opposing force in a moment of quiet defeat or setback. These quiet moments seem to be the things that most captivate Jackson’s imagination, and I must say, I very much enjoyed her approach.

This is not a collection to be rushed through. Each story wants to be lingered over and compared to the others in its group.  What are they saying?  How are they reflecting one another?  What, if anything, do they add up to?  I don’t have solid answers, but I have feelings tingling around in my guts, and I like the echoes of my unanswered questions.

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!