The Telling

Rating:
Summary: I regret to inform...
Review: Being a die-hard Le Guin fan, with almost the entirety of her in-print canon lurking somewhere on my bookshelves, I picked up The Telling as a matter of course. Imagine my disappoinment when, instead of the lithe, intricately worded, quietly stunning novel I was expecting, I discovered I had in my hands a thinly disguised socio-political propaganda tract! Don't get me wrong: there are moments of beauty in The Telling fierce as any in LeGuin's stronger Hainish novels, and LeGuin's familiar leitmotifs of mountain, wind, light, dark, and "gulfs of air" are well deployed. Indeed, for about the first fourth of the novel, when the complexities of Akan society were being explicated, I was as deeply involved as I have ever been in a Le Guin novel.

The problem is that, while Le Guin sets up a delicious anthropolgocial mystery in the book's early pages (why the dichotomy between past and present Aka? What is the link between the neo-Taoist Telling and the neo-Maoist Corporation-State?), she fails to follow through. About a third of the way through the book, she abandons the process of discovery in favor of the process of systemic explication. Instead of puzzling out the intricacies of Akan society, we are left to absorb them wholesale, in anthropological report format. Even character development takes a backseat to this reportage. Le Guin's best novels feature characters whose actions and motivations are in dialogue with ideologies; in The Telling, the ideology sat fat and contented in the middle of the book like some kind of tyrant, pressing the poor, one-dimensional characters into a thankless servitude.

If you want ideology, read Le Guin's translations of Lao Tzu. If you want character and story, read her other novels.

Rating:
Summary: Effect on an Observer
Review: Le Guin delves once more into her continuing theme(s) that she has dealt with so effectively in The Dispossessed and The Left Hand of Darkness, of the forces and desires that strain between anarchistic communism which requires great effort on the part of each individual and rigid stratified societies that remove the need for personal decisions. This one is told from the viewpoint of a Terran observer on a newly opened for contact Hainish world, and much of the novel is strictly her observations and thoughts on these matters, with little action and a lot of philosophy. She draws clear parallels to the Chinese cultural revolution and to the forceful subjugation of Tibet, while taking some digs at the sometimes mindless material obsessions of capitalistic societies. Being told in first person, there is little apparent development of other characters besides the protagonist, and the dry, almost academic tone and spare language of the first three-quarters of the book can make for difficult going. Somehow, though, by the end of the book, I found myself totally engaged with her protagonist, with a clear picture of not only the society but also her secondary characters. The resolution requiring action on the part of her observer seemed very appropriate, the observer affecting the observed and vice versa, becoming caught in a web of personal responsibility until she can no longer be a just an observer. In some ways this one reminded me of Pangborn's Mirror for Observers.
This is not quite at the level of The Dispossessed, and it probably should have had a greater length to allow for better character development, but still a very good exposition, with more depth than one would expect in such a short work.

Rating:
Summary: Dreary and Boring
Review: Reading back-to-back with The Left Hand of Darkness, it would appear that in the last thirty-odd years Ms. Le Guin has moved backwards in style and presentation even with similar settings: long arduous treks through rugged wildernesses, sociocultural conflicts, sexual politics, bla bla.

But the worst failing of this work is that it fails to entertain. The author is so caught up with grinding the axe of how awful religious tyranny is, how communist-fascist states destroy real culture, and how wonderful homosexual unions are, that she fails to tell a decent story or even adhere to classic dramatic forms that are classic for good reason.

Bo-ring! There is nothing fun about this travelogue through pseudo-Tibetan or -Nepalese culture, about being dragged through miserable upbringings and traumatic upheavals, or having to learn yet another stupid set of pseudo-linguistic honorifics and sound-concepts. I finished this story feeling let down, anti-entertained, and irritated at the waste of time spent waiting for it to get good.

The Right Wing would accuse Ms. Le Guin of lesbo-feminist leanings, which would be unfair except for the evidence of the story itself: an idyllic persecuted pastoral-peasant utopian culture wherein a significant portion of the population are gay or lesbian. Gimme a break! There has never been any evidence that such a Terran-human cultural has ever existed for thousands of years, so it's not as if she is writing from example.

Give this one a pass. If you like Le Guin (which I do less so since reading this story), stick with her earlier works.

Rating:
Summary: A Good Book
Review: Le Guin is a major American writer. Two of her novels, The Dispossessed and The Left Hand of Darkness, are among the best novels written in this country in past half century. She has written also some very good novels, like The Word for World is Forest and The Lathe of Heaven, as well several fine short stories and some outstanding children's books. The Telling is not her best work. It returns to the Hainish universe, a future history is which our part of the galaxy was settled millenia ago by colonists from the planet Hain. Following an interstellar catastrophe, Hain is gradually recovering contact with the human settled worlds and incorporating them into a benign information sharing order, The Ekumen. The Telling takes place on a recently rediscovered world, Aka. It uses familiar themes and devices. There is the Terran envoy discovering the complexities of a foreign world, as in the Left Hand of Darkness. There is the catastrophic impact of aggressive Terran culture on a native society, as in The Word for World is Forest. One of the characters was essentially abandoned as a child by his mother, similar to the hero of The Dispossessed. For readers familar with Le Guin, this book lacks the originality of her previous works. It lacks also the powerful writing that characterizes Le Guin's best work. There is little in The Telling that can match the best scenes of The Dispossessed, The Left Hand of Darkness, the Earthsea books, or her best short stories. It is not that this book lacks artistry. For example, the heroine of this tale is a woman of Hindu descent named Sutty. This is likely a reference to the Hindu practice of immolating widows after their husband's deaths; suttee. Sutty has essentially been widowed by a catatrophe on Earth and then leaves everything behind her by the long relativistically sundering journey to Aka. A metaphorical reincarnation, also a reference to Hinduism. Despite these touches, The Telling is not Le Guin's second tier works, let alone major works such as The Dispossessed.

Rating:
Summary: Pay attention, and the book reads well
Review: I came to review this, even though I got my copy before the book's original publication, because I've been teaching *A Fisherman of the Inland Sea* this morning and watched it fall flat. Since it's one of my favorite stories in the world, that stung; and it made me remember how the reviews here stung, a year or so back, and want to defend Le Guin, if not to my students (being defensive is the kiss of death to teaching) then to someone.

So: *The Telling*. Some of the critiques here are fair; there is, perhaps appropriately, more telling than showing, and the "spare" language characteristic of Le Guin is sparer than ever. That the moral, or anyway one of the morals, that trashing Tao in favor of Mao wasn't too smart, is very clear is also true. I'm not sure why or whether that's an inherently bad thing; but there are less evident "morals" too. That the "evil" new culture isn't actually evil is one of them; the problem was that no one knew what that culture expected of the Ekumen. The motif of "footsteps on the air", the mourning for the value we all throw away, is a major issue, more major even than the capital-M moral that Tao is Good. Or how about the idea that knowledge and stories have inherent value, and that it's not degrading to bargain for them and pay for them? If we took that "moral" to heart from *The Telling*, maybe our teachers and nannies and daycare providers--yes, and writers--would be paid as much as the people who build strip malls and destroy the world.

But (here's the defense) I certainly can't agree that we know nothing about the characters; on the contrary, we learn a great deal about the central character, Sutty, from deft handling of remarkably succinct evidence. How, someone asks, does Sutty feel about sex? About Pao? But these feelings are presented with great lucidity and in the deadpan voice of someone who knows how great and lasting grief can be. Sutty, of course, loves Pao, whom she has lost, without any real cessation either of mourning or of love; and so great is the love that the mourning is moved to the background, because Pao is so large a part of Sutty. But Sutty is so used to this, and takes it so calmly, that it's easy to miss. We are told that though her throat aches in telling of the death of Pao--her own telling, and a turning point in the book--that that didn't matter; it always would ache. She can have casual sex, and both enjoy it and feel essentially nothing from it, because sex that's not with Pao can ONLY be casual. It means nothing, it neither degrades Pao's memory nor sharpens it. Perhaps this is truer than most of us want to admit for most sex: the only significance it has is the significance we give it. If our country, with its odd combination of teenaged salaciousness and puritanical hypocrisy, took THIS moral to heart, maybe we'd spend less time talking about our leaders' sexual peccadilloes and more about what value they're really offering.

In short, I like this book. It's dead on about mourning, love, the value of stories, the perils of absolutism, the need for more mindful cooking practices, and lots of other things. While there are some valid reasons not to like this book, I think a reasonable number of them, though not all, boil down to lack of attention. And one can't really blame Le Guin for that.

Rating:
Summary: The only dud from an excellent author
Review: Tedious, predictable, cliche-driven plot, one-dimensional characters - other reviewers have already said the same, so I'll just add a few more personal reactions.

The only character who seemed real in this book was the protaganist, Sutty, and I really wish she could have faded into the background with the rest. Unfortunately, she leapt out from the pages as the most irritating, nosy, self-righteous moron I have encountered in any book by any author. Again unfortunately, I have actually met a lot of real people who resemble her, so she was certainly convincing. I don't have a problem with main characters who are intentionally despicable (e.g. Captain Davidson in "The Word for World..."), but here it seemed that we were expected to like and sympathise with Sutty - this was impossible for me.

One thing that I have enjoyed with many of Le Guin's other works is the ambiguity with which they present the various cultures across the Hainish universe. This is particularly true in "The Left Hand of Darkness". The general culture of the Gethenians never (for me) corresponded too clearly to any Terran ethnic culture, and I liked the fact that the author didn't present definitive judgement on it, or even on the contrasts between the Karhiders and Orgota - realistically, each are shown to have their good, and bad, points and people. The less balanced the presentation of the world, its culture and issues, the less I tend to enjoy the books (e.g. "Four Ways to Forgiveness" came on a bit strong, as did "The Word for World is Forest"). I don't read sci-fi to have an ideology, any ideology, rammed down my throat!

The world on which this book focuses, Aka, too clearly represents mainland China, with the oppressed rural areas a fairly weak, one-sided characterisation of Tibet. From the first few lines, we are force-fed a single perspective of the current cultural state of this planet/country and the style of regime which rules them both. This may suit readers incapable of independent thought (and also unable to comprehend that there are two sides to every story), but it really doesn't appeal to me.

My advice: for some excellent sci-fi with a strong human touch, read "The Left Hand of Darkness", "The Dispossessed" or "The Birthday of the World". For a much better understanding of the issues with which this book fails to deal satisfactorily, just visit the PRC!

Rating:
Summary: A disappointment
Review: I've been a huge fan of Ursula Le Guin's for a long time; The Dispossessed is still one of my all-time favorite novels. Over the past few years she has been writing many excellent short stories set in her Ekumenical universe (the four collected in Four Ways to Forgiveness, "Solitude" in Nebula Awards 31, "Coming of Age in Karhide" in Year's Best SF by Hartwell, etc). I'm sorry to say The Telling falls far short of this standard. A central element is the huge literature of an oppressed culture, but Le Guin gives us mere (and unconvincing) snippets of it while spending page after page insisting that it is all really extremely wonderful. Nothing much happens, the main characters are sketchy at best, and her trademark social anthropology is heavy-handed. I just can't believe Ursula Le Guin wrote this! And before you pay your money, note that the pages have wide margins with big doublespaced type. This book is a short story (actually more like the outline of a short story) stretched to novel length. What went wrong? I can only hope she returns to form next time around.

Rating:
Summary: Welcome return to Ekumen in novel form
Review: "The Telling," like Le Guin's 1972 novella "The World for Word is Forest," is much more about our own world than the world it explores.

Here, a lesbian woman of East Indian descent, Sutty, signs on to be an ambassador for the Hainish Ekumen (the Hainish originally seeded human life on all the member planets) when her lover is killed by fundamentalist terrorists on earth.

But in transit, relativity plays a cruel trick on her: In the 60 years she's been traveling in a Nearly-As-Fast-As-Light starship, the planet Aka has adopted a severe, technophilic society not unlike that of Maoist China. Indeed, the Corporation State has done its best to eradicate its previous culture, a Tao-like, creedless system of wisdom known as "The Telling."

Sutty eventually travels to a distant, mountainous place where people secretly maintain their old system, and there she discovers how her own planet Terra may have catalyzed the culture-destroying changes.

As in Le Guin's 1969 classic, "The Left Hand of Darkness," the protagonist enters the society hoping to learn, and eventually undertakes a journey, this time deep into the heart of the high mountains. Here, the village of Ozkat-Ozkat is sharply reminiscent of Chinese-occupied Tibet.

Le Guin is brilliant at this sort of thing, and while the story is quite simple and takes a while to catch fire, the denouement is moving, engaging and illuminating. I still think she has a penchant for somewhat cold and distant, even a bit sterile, characters, but that detracts only a bit from this tale.

It's not as adventurous as "Left Hand," not as detailed in its world-building as "The Dispossessed," and lacking the action of "...World is Forest," but it's still a thoughtful, entertaining read.

"The Telling" is a meditation on cultural decimation, fundamentalism, colonialism and even gay rights, Earthly issues, that just happens to be played out on a distant world.

Rating:
Summary: Fine Addition to Ongoing Hainish Cycle of Novels
Review: I concur that "The Telling" isn't Le Guin's best work of fiction, but it is nonetheless a fine addition to her "Hainish" cycle of novels. Certainly it is a long overdue addition. All of Le Guin's gifts as a splendid prose stylist and an expert at anthropological science fiction are well represented here in "The Telling", which could be seen as a fictional commentary on the rise of Communism in Russia and China. Indeed, much of her description of "The Corporation", the government of the planet Aka, draws instant comparisons to Maoist China. She provides a fascinating protagonist in Sutty, a native of India. I don't think I have read work by another American author which has so convincingly portrayed Indian culture; here Le Guin clearly scores a home run. Admirers of Ms. Le Guin's fiction will not be disappointed with "The Telling".

Rating:
Summary: Substandard
Review: Okay, first off, I did not dislike this book. It's hard to find quality sci-fi, and while this book doesn't achieve le guin's usual standards of writing, I enjoyed it. However, The Telling is very introspective and philisophocal, and also very straightforwardly so. It contains none of the grandly complex metaphors that characterize the high end of the genre but rather resorts to internal and explanatory monolougues. There is little to no character devlopment outside of the first person pov of the protagonist, in fact the entire thing is pretty darn short.

All I ask is please, please don't judge le guin by this novel. I can forgive her it and many more (though I hope I won't have to) just by rereading The Left Hand of Darkness or her Earthsea novels.