Eden

The other promised catch-up post.

The Years of Rice and Salt (Kim Stanley Robinson)

Rather than a novel, this is more like a series of short stories/novellas. It follows the same characters through various incarnations. In some of them the connections are easy to make, in others it's not so easy. The alternate history aspect is interesting, and couldn't have been fully explored without this device, I suppose, but I found it jarring to be jerked from time period to time period, culture to culture, and I never really fell in love with the characters as continuations of the previous characters. There were characters I found interesting in each separate story, but I didn't necessarily like them in their other incarnations, I mean. If I had, maybe I'd have cared more.

As it is, I ended up abandoning this book for a while, and almost skimming to finish it. I really liked "The Alchemist", and kind of wanted more of it than that -- that and the first story especially stick in my head.

An interesting idea, but the execution didn't work for me. I might reread it someday.

Always Coming Home (Ursula Le Guin)

I expected to take a long time over Always Coming Home. In a way, I wish I had: there's a lot in it, and a lot to reward a slower, careful reading -- this time I went plunging through it for the narrative, such as it was, enjoying the layers of understanding that came to me, imagining and figuring out what I didn't know. I didn't read the "Back of the Book" section, this time: another time, I think I will. I just wanted to fly through it, this time, total immersion in a culture that does not exist.

Always Coming Home is a collection of stories, of fake-histories, of poems and plays and things that do not neatly fit into our genres, belonging to a culture that does not exist. The first note says it best, "The people in this book might be going to have lived a long, long time from now in Northern Carolina." It seems to be the story almost of the Native peoples, and then it begins to mention computers and other technologies of our day... The way the world came to be this way isn't really seen clearly, only seen in its effects on the people. It's very interesting to read this way: interesting, and frustrating, because like real history, it doesn't always show you the bits you most want to see.

Ursula Le Guin's writing is beautiful, as always, and easy to read and understand despite the invented words and concepts. I sort of imagine this as the way she might build up any culture, in any book, through the scraps of their literature and histories that come to her... It's quite a nice thought, actually.

I didn't read the "Back of the Book" section, preferring to keep things vaguer, not spelled out. I will probably read it one day, but not now.

Though I greatly enjoyed this, I don't know if I'd dare recommend it to anyone. For me it required some patience with the original idea, which turned into delight as Ursula Le Guin once more captured my heart. For others, who didn't find Earthsea compelling, it'd be dry as dust, I think. And as with many books, but particularly with those that are a bit different, someone might find they love it, when they have never loved Le Guin's work before -- or that they hate it, when they've always loved her work.

Gwenhwyfar: The White Spirit (Mercedes Lackey)

Mercedes Lackey's version of Guinevere's story is mostly distinctive in her choice of sources: she has taken elements mainly from the Welsh tradition, and tried to weave a coherent story out of them. The three Gwenhwyfars named in the Triads, the abductions by both Melwas and Medraut, Gwenhwyfach... It's very interesting that she chose to use the Welsh tales.

The subtleties of the relationship between the Christians and the pagans in this story were also an interesting decision. Normally people draw them as diametrically opposed: this co-existence and slow merge is an interesting way to look on it.

However, her characters and plotting are not particularly distinctive. The first three quarters of the book is rather slow, and she doesn't even meet Arthur in that time. Her time with Arthur is largely glossed over, too. She's a Celtic warrior-woman, and a scout, but ultimately that doesn't seem that important... the most important thing in it is her moment of sacrifice, sacrificing that to her duty when she goes to marry Arthur. And even then, I don't think that moment has the power it could.

The relationship with Lancelin is profoundly unsatisfactory, and seems almost a by-the-by to add a touch of romance. If something more was done with them at the end, maybe...

This is a fun enough read, and based on some interesting ideas. But it's a bit slow at times, and it's not exactly a deep and involved retelling

Day of the Triffids (John Wyndham)

The Day of the Triffids is a book I've meant to read for a long time. Sometime way back when, I forget quite why, Dad told me the basic story -- not with characters, just the basic ideas -- and as an impressionable little daddy's girl of probably about eight years old, it stuck in my mind.

I actually expected something a bit more trashy than this, after some reviews and comments I read. It's certainly got the seeds (heh) for a lot of horror writing -- Stephen King's work is quite similar in some ways, in The Stand and Cell. It's got some ideas that're creepy as all get out: the lurking triffids, genetic experiments, satellites full of plagues and nukes and god knows what, the return of feudalism...

In a way, I've read this book before -- nothing that happened really surprised me, because I've read enough post-apocalyptic fiction to have thought about how things would work out if [xyz] happened. It's a reasonably realistic guess at how things would've turned out if this was all the case, I think.

It's a reasonably compelling read, too. There's a chapter full of back story, which drags a bit, but for the most part it goes along at a pretty good pace, and there's genuine anxiety about whether Bill and Josella will find each other again and so on.

The Word for World is Forest (Ursula Le Guin)

This is a story with a familiar theme. I see a lot of people comparing this to Avatar, looking at the reviews. This is Ursula Le Guin, so it's better than Avatar, though not as flashy. The writing is not Le Guin's best, in my opinion, but it's still clear and expressive, and lyrical. The story is not new, and I get the impression from the reviews that it was very political and topical at the time it was written -- not a context I share in, so I can't comment on that. Le Guin isn't so shallow a writer that her politics become utterly irrelevant in so short a space of time, though, and the book still has thoughts to offer.

The thing that struck me most, reading it, was how quickly she sketches out the world. This is basically only a novella, so it's not as painstakingly drawn a world as, say, Earthsea, but there's still detail there, even just in the way that Davidson refers to people. Not necessarily overt detail, but implied. I love it.

Not my favourite of Le Guin's work, but interesting and worth a read if you're a fan.

Searoad is lovely. Quiet, reflective, a little melancholic. Perhaps not the best thing to choose to read on Christmas Day/Boxing Day, but at the same time, I'm glad I read it. Ursula Le Guin always writes beautifully, always makes me feel, always makes me want to write. I'm full of shapeless, formless ideas right now, of thoughts. There were parts of Searoad that I didn't connect with very well, or that I found confusing, but it paid off to keep reading, to pay attention to it. I especially liked the story "Quoits", with the two women, the one who died and the one who survived her, and the way it said that they wouldn't use the wrong words just because there were no right ones. It's not so much the case now -- I don't feel like "marriage" is the wrong word to use of two women's relationship -- but at the same time I can understand it, how the words are or were wrong. I love that this story is just in there with everything else, a normal part of life, so that I don't even want to shelve this book as LGBT, on goodreads, because that isn't really the point, as I see it. I will anyway, because maybe someone else will see that shelf and read this review and read "Quoits" and feel... understood.

This collection is basically just about a town called Klatsand, near a shore. There are connections deep in all the stories, between characters and themes, though it's easy to miss and you find them joining up in ways you didn't expect. It's not a strong, vivid stand-out work, I think, and only "Quoits" really struck me hard -- it's more gentle, wistful, reflective. Not depressing to read, I don't think, but not the kind of thing that grips you tight and won't let go. Don't expect high drama in it, or you'll be heartily disappointed. Don't expect Ursula Le Guin's fantasy or sci-fi here, because there isn't that, either. Just "ordinary" men and women.

Hmm. The three books of this trilogy aren't that directly related -- I think they can be read alone. I think Voices is probably the best, in that it has a plot as well as the other things that make Le Guin's writing so lovely. I might like this better on a reread, as I did with Gifts, but I think perhaps I found this the weakest -- and I'm not sure why I think so, really. It seems quite slow, and ponderous, and there doesn't seem to be much of a conclusion or climax. The themes of stories and learning from the other books continue, and the theme of liberty, and Gry and Orrec show up again...

There's a lot of world-building -- some beautiful, beautiful stuff. But it all seems a little meaningless. Hoby ties the beginning and the end together, but weakly: we see hardly anything of him, in reality. Characters like Yaven and Astano, who I wanted to see more of, ultimately meant nothing. Chamry, who I liked a lot, doesn't show up again. Diero ultimately has little part to play. Maybe there was something I missed in the reasons why he never sees these people again, but it felt like more could have been done.

Not my favourite, but it's Le Guin, so it's not bad, either.

A lot more seems to happen in Voices than in the first book of the trilogy, Gifts. It has more tension, more drive, and it feels more full. Ursula Le Guin has a habit of writing very beautiful books that aren't very immediate or exciting because they have very little by way of plot. I still like them, but plenty of people won't stop to read them. Voices isn't like that -- there's a plot, as well as compelling characters, beautiful writing and careful worldbuilding. Nothing slips, here.

Gry and Orrec, from the first book, are important in this book, too. Orrec, particularly, in terms of the plot, but in terms of the emotional part of the book, Gry is very important to the narrator, Memer. It's good to see these characters, good to see how they've grown. But then again, if you haven't read Gifts, it's actually okay, I think, just to read Voices. You're missing out, I think, but you could read Voices on its own.

Le Guin's "agenda" is more obvious in this book. Parts of it -- the idea of the people of Ansul being peaceful people, and "set free to be free" -- remind me of The Eye of The Heron. For most of the book, there's a powerful, oppressive, occupying force, which has to be overturned. I really like that the people of Ansul remain relatively peaceful -- not unnaturally so, stretching belief only a little, but still, peaceful. There's food for thought about the nature of liberty, religious/cultural conflict, politics...

Funny that I have rather less to say about this book, in which rather more happens than in Gifts. Perhaps that's because it's easier to let it speak for itself.

The Other Wind is a beautiful book. I don't think I liked it all that much the first time I read it, but now I see exactly how it fits. It's less incongruous than Tehanu, for me, but follows on neatly enough -- and it does use all the ideas and feelings that are brought up in Tehanu. Set a long time after it, it makes most sense if you've read Dragonfly, from Tales from Earthsea, before you read it. The first time I tried to read it, I don't think I had, and I had no idea who Orm Irian was or why she was significant.

One thing that I disliked in The Farthest Shore was the picture painted of death. It was difficult to think of it as such a crime to come back from there, when it was so miserable, where lovers could pass each other in the street and not care. The Other Wind sets this right. It's interesting to me that, at the end of The Farthest Shore she thought the series had ended, and presumably also at the end of Tehanu, but this book fits so cleanly, so clearly, as if it was intended all along.

The writing is once again beautiful, in places. I found it rather commonplace in Tehanu, matching the subject matter, but there are some really gorgeous quotes in this book. This one is perhaps my favourite:

"I think," Tehanu said in her soft, strange voice, "that when I die, I can breathe back the breath that made me live. I can give back to the world all that I didn't do. All that I might have been and couldn't be. All the choices I didn't make. All the things I lost and spent and wasted. I can give them back to the world. To the lives that haven't been lived yet. That will be my gift back to the world that gave me the life I did live, the love I loved, the breath I breathed."

Along with the recurring theme of life and death, and the one giving value to the other, we also have more criticism of the male-dominated system, and of the male way of thinking in Earthsea. How much of this is meant to be political commentary, and how much of this is Ursula Le Guin exploring her own world, I doubt we need to know. It's interesting that she introduced what is basically a burqa, without any particular comment on whether it is anti-feminist or not. Sesarakh comes out from behind her veil, of course, but I didn't feel like Le Guin was saying omg burqas r evol!

Character-wise, we have a lot of characters from other books, but there are some new ones as well. Chief among these is Alder, and Sesarakh. I don't think it's really explained quite thoroughly enough why Alder is the centre of all this -- it doesn't really make sense, when he's just a town sorcerer -- but it does break the pattern of Roke-wizards being all-important, as does the inclusion of Seppal, and it is something that would happen... an 'ordinary' person getting swept up in great events. Also, isn't Ged ordinary, at the beginning? So maybe it needs no better explanation. Anyway, I didn't get as attached to him as to Ged or Lebannen, but he did make me smile sometimes, reading about him. And I was sad, at the end.

Sesarakh is an interesting character, another vector for the discussion of the female in Earthsea. I didn't get to love her as a character, or really feel the romance between her and Lebannen, but that wasn't really the point. I did want to kick Lebannen rather, for the way he treats her and thinks about her. But Tenar had him well in hand, really.

I was going to say that The Other Wind isn't my favourite book of the series, but really I don't see why it shouldn't be. It has a complexity that A Wizard of Earthsea doesn't, it carries on the work that, in retrospect, all the other books began. It offers some bright, beautiful images and some hope for what happens after death, and I don't see why it can't be an education and a comfort to us, too. "Only in dying, life," is a truth for us, too.

This book is probably my least favourite of the series. It's so much less about adventure and so much more about domesticity, which is strange coming from Tenar and Ged. Such ordinary thoughts and fears, after all the high and mighty adventure! Even the confrontation at the end of the book feels like a placeholder, more because those things will not leave Ged alone than because it's actually still a part of his life.

There are parts of this book I like a lot. Ged and Tenar's love scenes are worth reading, because they do fit together and I did have to wonder whether no wizards ever had sex and how there could be mages born without wizards having kids. The little glimpse of Arren was nice, and the discussion of the role of women in this world was interesting. Women had so little place in the first book, and not much in the third...

Perhaps that is something I like this book less for, though. From high adventure to keeping house, yes, but also from a philosophical but still mostly adventurous story to one about the role of women. It's an interesting topic, and almost necessary after what little part the women have in other books, but this doesn't exactly fit into what I originally expected from the world. Unexpectedness isn't a bad thing, of course.

The other thing is that this book just doesn't taste as nice. There aren't so many beautiful images. With the everyday lives come everyday images.

Much as I love A Wizard of Earthsea, there isn't much feminine about it. It's a male society, it seems in that book, shaped by men and only inhabited by women. I don't know how much thought Le Guin put into that, originally, but the women in the story don't really have much of a place. There's the witch and Serret and the Kargish woman and Yarrow... but they don't have great parts in Ged's life. He's taken away from the tutelage of the witch because only a man can teach him wizardry, and there's the sayings, "Weak as women's magic" and "Wicked as women's magic". Le Guin addresses those issues later, in Tehanu, but women aren't really present in the first book.

So it's just nice to have a book framed by women: Tenar and Thar and Kossil and Penthe, the priestesses and novices of the Tombs. Women are the only ones allowed to serve the gods, or at least the Nameless Ones -- well, women and eunuchs. The fact that Arha/Tenar is the main character, and not Ged, gives it a whole different slant. She has a different kind of life, so her story is rather different. Her story is less of an epic quest than Ged's -- there's tension, and danger, but they're not going to something, they're escaping something. She has to grow as a person in a different way. The quest is Ged's, as before, but we see him coming in from outside this time. It's interesting.

The language and descriptions and images are all as beautiful as the first book. There's something very compelling about the Tombs, the dark rituals. You can feel the cold, the routine hardness -- you feel stuck in the rut that Arha has been stuck in throughout her many lives. You can feel the slow unchangingness of the place. And you feel the joy and weight of the escape, too. I like the rhythms and tastes of this book the best in the whole series, I think. Some of the descriptions have just stuck in my head -- the drum struck at a slow heart-pace, the little thistle growing beside Ged's hand. And some of the things Ged says, his descriptions of Havnor and his speech that is essentially about "nature red in tooth and claw".

This is really the only book that steps out of Ged's own culture. The others are mostly rooted in the Archipelagan traditions, which is interesting enough, but this provides a bit more worldbuilding. Which is awesome.

Ursula Le Guin's The Eye of the Heron looks like an easy, short book. My copy is quite slim, the writing is a reasonable size, and the prose is as polished as hers always is, and it's easy to read. There are some absolutely amazing quotes, that I loved to read just for the perspective she always brings to the discussion. These are the ones that struck me the most (in parts of them, description has been taken out to make them more universal).

a. "You know, if we sit in the back room, with babies or without babies, and leave all the rest of the world to the men, then of course the men will do everything and be everything. Why should they? They're only half the human race. It's not fair to leave them all the work to do. Not fair to them or us. Besides," and she smiled more broadly, "I like men very much, but sometimes... they're so stupid, so stuffed with theories... They go in straight lines only, and won't stop. It's dangerous to do that. It's dangerous to leave everything up to the men, you know. [...] I get worried they'll go too fast and too straight and get us into a place we can't get out of, a trap. You see it seems to me that where men are weak and dangerous is in their vanity. A woman has a center, is a center. But a man isn't, he's a reaching out. So he reaches out and grabs things and piles them up around him and says, I'm this, I'm that, this is me, that's me, I'll prove that I'm me! And he can wreck a lot of things, trying to prove it."

b. "If you marry a man like that and live his life, then I agree. You may not really want to hurt people, but you will."
"That is hateful. Hateful! To say it that way. That I haven't any choice, that I have to hurt people, that it doesn't even matter what I want."
"Of course it matters, what you want."
"It doesn't. That's the whole point."
"It does. And that's the whole point. You choose. You choose whether or not to make choices."

c. "If I don't speak truth I can't seek truth."

d. "It takes courage to really be a woman, just as much as to be a man. It takes courage to really be married, and to bear children, and to bring them up."

What I also find interesting is Ursula Le Guin's sympathy and understanding of all her characters. It would be easy to dismiss "Boss Falco", not intentionally being unsympathetic to that side of the divide, but not feeling that he has anything valid to say and so just letting him be a cypher. He isn't, there are some bits of his characterisation which break my heart a little.

It's interesting that I found what would happen quite hard to predict. Not that it didn't make sense, but that one has certain expectations from a book like this: that the People of Peace will simply prevail right away, like because their way is right it is the only possibly outcome; that Lev and Luz will prevail and get together; that Boss Falco will be irredeemable... And it doesn't always happen the way you expect.

The worldbuilding in itself is lovely. I liked the "wotsits", and the ringtrees. It is also easy to just make other worlds other earths, and this doesn't happen in The Eye of the Heron.

This in no way covers all my feelings about this book. I think Ursula Le Guin has said some lovely things in it, and I may have to reread it. It isn't as easy as it would seem, either. Sometimes I had to put it down to think through what a certain part is trying to say. It's a good thing.

A warning, though, that this is not so much a novel in which things happen, as a novel in which things are thought. There are actions and consequences and all of that, but I don't think that is the most important thing.

I've been in Wales sans internet for a weekish, so here are all the reviews of things I read in the meantime. I've been busy!

( King Rat )

( The Overcoat and the Nose )

( The Picture of Dorian Gray )

( Beowulf (Seamus Heaney's translation) )

( Three Bags Full )

( An Abundance of Katherines )

( Wuthering Heights )

( Lavinia )

( To The Lighthouse )

( A Passage to India )