Four Ways to Forgiveness

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Summary: A fresh study of subjugation and freedom.. beautiful.
Review: A marvellous book, the four stories of Yeowe & Werel intertwined subtly and beautifully.

The issues of slavery and female subjugation, so central to any moral history of real humankind on real planet earth, are treated with Ursula's characteristic compassion and humanity, in the context of an imaginary planet and its colony-satellite.

The characters of these stories, their acts of bravery cowardice revolt submission, are so familiar from earth's own history of colonizations and exploitations! As always I marvel at how LeGuin, White American and presumably priviledged, knows so well the hearts of the enslaved and the colonized.

How familiar to see the lives of slaves who go on century after century without thinking to revolt!

How familiar to see the slave who, at the moment of choice, remains on the side of the master and sticks to the familiar, instead of striding into the unknown world of freedom!

And how familiar to see oppression and war and famine continuing, in different form, after freedom from the external oppressors.

(Former colonies of the European oppressors will remember sorely how brown/black bosses promptly took over the former_roles of the white masters after liberation.)

And how familiar to see, the lonely and driven activist, the former slave who wants all enslavements to end, the few moral beings in an often immoral world.

The cry of slave peoples on Werel -- "Oh, Oh, Ye-o-we" -- so mournful, so similar to the bittersad poetry of colonized peoples everywhere.

Actually, the four ways have now become five ways, as LeGuin has written one more story set in Werel, in the collection "The Birthday of the World".

Rating:
Summary: I had forgotten just how good she is.
Review: Few writers, of any genre, can do as much within the bounds of the novella form as LeGuin does here.

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Summary: Science Fiction literature
Review: Fine SF explores the nature of the human condition under special circumstances--with observations of lasting import. LeGuin does that in her works. While this one, a collection of 4 interrelated novellas, is not her best work (see The Left Hand of Darkness or The Dispossessed), it is very fine work nonetheless. I like it much better than her short story collections (e.g. Orsinian Tales). This book is about the relationships between politics and people. It also speaks of the differences and similarities between the internal and the external such that changing external circumstances may not have much lasting effect if the internal circumstances (within the people) don't change. There is an interrelationship here too. There are several pithy quotes for my collection in it as well:

Love of God and country is like fire, a wonderful friend, a terrible enemy; only children play with fire. p.57

To live simply is most complicated. p. 90

The right use of knowledge is fulfillment. p.117

Loquacity is half of diplomacy ... The other half is silence. p.127

Ignorance defends itself savagely. p.197

Rating:
Summary: A Grand Mistress at her peak.
Review: Le Guin was probably one of the most powerful voices in science fiction of the sixties and seventies. "The Left Hand of Darkness" and the "Dispossessed" remain two of the most powerful science fiction novels of their time, and still stand out as literary classics transcending the limitations of the genre. However, since that time, her output has been minimal. She has been quiet for too long, so when this collection of novellas came out, I was over the moon. I wasn't at all disappointed. Each story, weaving characters and events from the others, paints a picture of two worlds, their cultures and above all the people who inhabit them in a way few other writers can. Her prose is simple, lacking the excessive use of adjectives and flowery ornamentation that characterise the writing of many a lesser author, painting a vivid landscape and fully fleshed characters. Moving love stories, powerful descriptions of the clash of cultures and the search for individual dignity and meaning are at the heart of all four stories. Painted against the common backdrop of the struggles for freedom of the slaves of Yeowe against the slave masters of Werrel, the personal stories of the characters are never lost against this broader backcloth. Le Guin has always focused on character and plot, set against a detailed background, rather than on scientific extrapolation and high adventure. It's not juvenile writing (unlike most science fiction), but adult literature for those who like to be challenged by what the read, rather than looking to be passively. There are few writers who take the real political, cultural and social issues of our day and explore them so thoroughly in science fiction la setting. Paul Park and Iain M. Banks may be two modern exceptions, but Le Guin remains the master (or mistress!) of the genre. I can only hope that this isn't the last we hear of her for a long time, and heralds the renaissance of her writing career.

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Summary: hope and redemption
Review: Le Guin, with her masterful use of seemingly simple and fluent prose, tells us the stories of how four very different people find hope after terrible ordeals. The background to the stories --and also the main source of hope-- is the need to fight: against slavery, against enormous social inequalities and brutal sexual segregation... in short, against most of the worst injustices that we can find in our world, but that Le Guin transports to the imaginary planets of Yeowe and Werel. We see in these two planets, thanks to the author's mastery, an example of nightmarish distopias whose consequences are analysed in the four main characters. However, Le Guin is always more convincing when describing a society with defects (any kind of defect), and the reactions these defects provoke in the individual, than when describing highly evolved, almost perfect societies. These latter may be better to live in, but they sure are more boring to read about, since the author has to keep within the limits of the politically corect, and that shows.

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Summary: Just Okay
Review: The nations of the xenophobic, imperialistic Werel did not at once permit the Ekumenical Mobiles to document and enlighten their people. Nooo, they spend three and a half centuries militarizing, industrializing, preparing to deflect the imagined alien threat. The invasion never came, and Werel instead colonized its neighbor planet - Yeowe. Exporting male slaves - "assets" - and working them to death in the mines or in the fields, the Four Corporations started a predatory program of exploitation and destruction of the environment. Soon, however, the shipping costs rose, and it became more profitable to ship women as well as men. Hoping to establish a self-replenishing slave workpool, Bosses on Werel underestimated the tenacity of female assets, with catastrophic results. First at Nadari, and then all over the place, slave rebellions flared up, soon combining into a costly thirty-year war. Waging war across the vast gulf of space is difficult business, and eventually Werel's stranglehold on Yeowe freedmen was broken. However, no war can be won, no matter what the cost: Werelian social order is crumbling under the weight of me-too young revolutionaries; and Yeowe has regressed into a mishmash of gang warfare and cruel mysoginistic practices. This is where agents of the Ekumen come into the picture...

Deftly amalgamating United States history and her Hainish universe, Ursula LeGuin has produced yet another masterful work dealing with personal freedoms and one's social obligations, adopting a format she has made familiar in such other works as her "Fisherman of the Inland Sea" and "Tales from Earthsea": a series of novellas connected by setting and characters.

- closely mirroring LeGuin's own "Tehanu", "Betrayals" speaks of an aging woman's willingness to see past a disgraced revolutionary's sins and love him for his humanity;

- in "Forgiveness Day", she brings together two opposites who can't see each other as anything but ignorami - Solly, the Ekumen's Envoy to Werel, who can't see past its people's stuffy ritualism, and Teyeo, a Werelian soldier assigned as Solly's guard, who finds Solly garish and dimwitted - and makes them fall in love;

- her "Man of the People" documents the personal quest of a Hainish villager, who, unable to adapt neither to his village's ritualistic beliefs, nor to the university's vast intellectual breadth, finally finds peace of heart as a social reformer on tumultuous Yeowe;

- lastly, "A Woman's Liberation" tells of a woman's struggle for personal freedom that she can find neither in slavery, nor in revolutionary movements, only in learning. Those who read any of Frederick Douglass' autobiographies may find this somewhat familiar.

My only personal qualm is that LeGuin - however measurely and masterfully - depicts literally everything and anything as a profound formative experience, neither right nor wrong, but just sort of there. None of her characters seems to feel passionate, explosive emotions. They are all placid, timid lumps of clay. Furthermore, almost every novella prominently features at least one sex scene (which apparrently takes a center place in LeGuin's idology). The occasional profanity feels artificial and sophomoric.

Each and every time I open a LeGuin book I know that some aspect of my life is about to be depicted as "human" and "necessary" and packaged in a tiny parcel and then spoon-fed to me in a most unobtrusive, all-pervasive manner possible. I can only take so much of "All knowledge is local" before I explode. I can hear that "everything is right in its own way" only so many times before I stop reading.

Rating:
Summary: Some of the most humane sci-fi ever written.
Review: Ursula LeGuin has always been one of my favorite writers, and I particularly enjoy the many books and short stories of hers that take place amongst the worlds of the Ekumen. Of course, a book with a title like "Four Ways to Forgiveness" might be somewhat off-putting to lovers of hard science fiction, but this book is a must-have for fans of Ms. LeGuin. When we read of worlds that are gradually being welcomed into the Ekumen, we read of cultures and traditions in much the same way as we might read of foreign nations in "National Geographic." LeGuin writes humane, anthropological science fiction, and this book is an excellent example. When I came to the last page and read the last few words, I breathed a deep sigh of warmth and satisfaction. Ursula LeGuine writes that beautifully. The real tragedy is that this book is out of print and almost impossible to find. Get this book back in print!