May 2020 Books

I’m finding it hard this month to sort my books into highs and lows. Almost everything I read was valuable and enjoyable, though I didn’t absolutely love anything. For that reason this month we’ve got the good and the bad instead. Indeed, after what I wrote in this blog post, I’ve finally decided to stop giving ratings to books on Goodreads (more chat about that in my June books post), so from now on I’m just going to let the books decide how to group themselves instead of having any rigid formulation.

The Good

Rocannon’s World / Planet of Exile / City of Illusions by Ursula K. Le Guin

I’m being a little lazy in grouping these three together because they are all separate standalone novels (though I did read them in one single volume), but I think it’s productive to think about them together and what Le Guin is doing in these books. These are the first three novels in what has been called her Hainish Cycle (though I know Le Guin herself has repudiated the categorisation of these books as anything resembling a ‘cycle’). You will likely know that I read the first four of Le Guin’s Earthsea novels last year (which are fantasy rather than science fiction) and absolutely loved them. With Rocannon’s World as her debut, all three novels predate the first Earthsea novel and you can see that Le Guin is finding her literary feet in these books and beginning to explore some of the themes that she explores so brilliantly in some of her later work. That’s not to say that these aren’t worthy of your time in their own right, but I think they were more valuable to me as part of Le Guin’s larger body of work as she is fast becoming one of my all-time favourite authors. Her writing is thoughtful and uniquely captivating; she manages to create worlds that seem completely real with comparably few words; as David Mitchell says in the introduction to The Left Hand of Darkness (and I believe I made this same point at least to myself when I read her Earthsea books), they seem to “follow their histories even when no reader is watching”. Her prose is quiet and understated but beautifully rendered, making complex ideas digestible whilst still being thought-provoking. And there is something so warm and hopeful about her work even in its darker moments; her themes of the power of language and the importance of balance offer ways of being and reconciling with a difficult world (or world[s]). There’s a sort of expansive open mindedness and acceptance of different modes of life, a constant probing and a questioning eye that asks what it means to be, and how we might be better.

In the Hainish Cycle, there are hundreds of worlds in the nearby universe which are occupied by human beings, and in these first novels there is a ‘League of All Worlds’, which is trying to establish diplomatic relations between them. These human beings all originate from a civilisation called ‘Hain’ - including ‘Terrans’, which means us here on Earth - and over time they have all developed differently in ways physiological, biological and socio-cultural (partly because the Hainish experimented with genetic engineering). This allows Le Guin to compare these worlds across the novels, and make interesting anthropological and sociological points. Her father was a cultural anthropologist, so we can see where the inspiration for some of that comes from.

These novels are all relatively short, and are written almost like fables, which is especially interesting considering that they are science fiction novels, and ones set in space at that. They are old fashioned in some ways (published as they were in the late 1960s) and completely unique in others, and so for contemporary science fiction readers I don’t think they’ll necessarily provide the same kind of worldbuilding and plotline that you might be accustomed to, but as I said above they show the beginnings of all the wonderful Le Guin elements. I always particularly appreciate her focus on love and friendship as powerful forces, and that can definitely be seen in these novels.

I do think that maybe for me (and it may just be for me!) Le Guin’s writing works better in the fantasy setting just because I feel it’s a little more timeless by nature and works with her themes more seamlessly. I think when I read science fiction - especially with a space setting - I’m looking for something more science-based and up to the minute, like Cixin Liu’s Three-Body Problem. That’s something I also learnt from reading Dune, but Le Guin’s work is a million times more enjoyable for me than Herbert’s, that’s for sure! It’s interesting how you continue to learn about your preferences and yourself from reading, I’m sure it’ll be a lifelong thing. Nonetheless, I will be reading everything of Le Guin’s I can get my hands on, so expect to see her in more of these round-ups in the future.

The Left Hand of Darkness by Ursula K. Le Guin

I wanted to talk about this novel separately because it is so famous and was one of the novels that propelled Le Guin into literary stardom and commercial success, along with A Wizard of Earthsea. She won the Hugo and Nebula awards for this novel, and it has become one of those canonical works of science fiction that it seems everyone has read, even people who don’t typically read a lot of speculative fiction. It’s also part of the Hainish Cycle, and is set some time after the first three novels. Best to reiterate that each of these novels (even the ones above) can be read on their own. I wanted to read them in order just to give myself the maximum context but it certainly isn’t a requirement.

In this one, a Terran (i.e. Earth-dweller) named Genly is sent by the Ekumen - a loose alliance of worlds that performs much the same function as the ‘League of All Worlds’ - to the planet Gethen to get them to join said alliance. On this planet the inhabitants don’t have a fixed gender; most of the time they do not have sexual organs until they come into ‘kemmer’, in which two partners will take on the sex of male or female in order to mate productively. An individual can have male sexual organs during one instance of kemmer, and female the next - that part depends on the particular instance and partner as they enter kemmer.

Now obviously Le Guin is trying to think through gender in this novel, and her original idea was ‘what would happen if you took away gender’; of course, the whole novel actually becomes about gender and what it means to be male or female or nonbinary and the differences between sex and gender. Ultimately, by contemporary standards it sort of doesn’t work. And Le Guin recognised this in the years after publication. There are some questionable moments of latent misogyny and homophobia and she also uses male pronouns to describe all the inhabitants which seems to defeat some of the purpose and its blatantly feminist and queer potential. She acknowledged that she should have been braver and that there were things she would have changed in retrospect, and that is something I find eminently respectable in an author. Like when she wrote further Earthsea novels that rectified the lack of female representation in her earlier ones. I think that for 1969 this was probably a highly unusual book to write, and that her exploration of a sort of ‘androgynous’ society - though by no means perfect - would have provided some important representation in what became quite a mainstream novel, at least that is what I’ve garnered from reading a little bit about the history of this book.

In terms of the story I did find this book slow to start, but particularly loved the latter half where two of the main characters - who have such a hard time understanding each other at the beginning - undertake an epic journey across a vast swathe of ice and come to appreciate one another for who they are. And indeed as Genly states toward the end of the novel, “it was from the differences between us, not from the affinities and likenesses, but from the difference, that that love came: and it was itself the bridge, the only bridge, across what divided us”. It is about friendship and loyalty and finding understanding even when it seems impossible. And you all know that I love a vast landscape for a setting. So there is lots to love in this book, though it is very different to what I expected and I think will surprise a lot of readers going in thinking of it as a canonical science fiction text. It also felt markedly different from the first three Hainish novels because it is mostly told in first-person, which gave it a more immediate feel but also it felt like Le Guin had more confidence in her writing here, too. I’ve got The Dispossessed - which is the next Hainish novel and which also received a lot of critical acclaim - on my shelf so I’m intrigued to see where it goes next.

The Memory Police by Yoko Ogawa

I think sometimes publishers and reviewers do a disservice to books by smacking the word dystopia on all their promotional material (though I know why they do it!) because people have a very particular idea about what that should mean, especially in the wake of the whole swathe of action-packed young adult dystopias that has marked contemporary fiction. This is a dystopia, but it is also a quiet fable of a novel that explores loss and memory in an unassuming and deeply affecting way.

Originally published in 1994 but only recently translated into English, this book is about an isolated island where things and concepts keep disappearing overnight. For most people this is unsettling but somewhat routine, but there are some who can still remember, and who find their world shrinking in the face of these mysterious and unstoppable disappearances. Our narrator isn’t one of them, but she does attempt to create a pocket of hope in the form of her editor (she’s a novelist, of course), who she hides in a secret room in her house, trying desperately to keep him safe from the Memory Police. I suppose it’s about what totalitarian surveillance states do when they take over the ways you think and what you remember, and how deeply it affects your sense of self and your relationships with others. Despite the book’s age, this seems very timely considering all the discussion at the moment about ‘erasing’ history by tearing down statues of slave owners which seems a rather large distraction from the actual erasure of large swathes of unsavoury colonial history. But that is a discussion for another time. It’s also about memory, loss and grief more specifically (or perhaps more widely), and how we relate to the concepts and objects that surround us. And what resistance we might be performing in the act of remembering.

The book moves slowly but as it moves inexorably from loss to loss, you can’t help but feel the slowness might also be a method to make you, the reader, also forget the psychological violence at work, leading you blindly towards its existential conclusion. Ogawa’s prose is restrained, carefully laying out the actions of its protagonist, but there is a certain hypnotic, haunting and dreamy element to it, too. I found it to be a memorable (!) and important read.

The Ballad of the Sad Café and Other Stories by Carson McCullers

McCullers’ work is also haunting, though in quite a different way. This volume comprises her famous novella alongside a number of other stories which all have her signature style. ‘The Ballad of the Sad Cafe’ is about Miss Amelia, a Southern woman who becomes infatuated with a ‘hunchback’ (not a term I would use today) who turns up on her doorstep somewhat out of the blue, and this love of hers inspires her to become more generous and more involved in her rundown community, open up a cafe and find a sort of happiness. Unfortunately, the return of her resentful and criminal ex-husband means that this happiness is ultimately short lived. McCullers’ work is often placed in the ‘southern gothic’ category and has an element of the grotesque to it, which often allows her to explore androgyny, queerness and gender (which were important to her personally as well) as well as issues of class. I don’t believe this novel would stand up very well by contemporary standards on disability, so that is something to be aware of when you read her work, like much writing contemporary to her time.

There is lots to love about her work; she creates atmosphere like no other, and her writing so beautifully captures a sense of loneliness and alienation. Her pacing is perfect, and her prose is poetic and deeply layered. Like with many of my favourite authors, you will not get the full story with McCullers; she wants you to read between the lines and to read carefully. She will almost definitely make you reflect on what it means to be human and how it feels when you don’t feel that you fit into society’s neat categories, and also what it means to love. I will continue to return to her work.

The Bad

The Gallows Pole by Benjamin Myers

I wanted to love this novel so much because I’ve been enjoying historical fiction lately, but sadly it was a bit of a disappointment. I sort of dragged myself to the end hoping it’d get better but it just… didn’t.

It’s about real historical man David Hartley, who was the leader of a gang called the ‘Cragg Vale Coiners’ who were forging illegal coins in Yorkshire in the late eighteenth century. Hartley called himself a ‘King’ (which probably didn’t help his case) and it’s hardly a spoiler to say that he eventually ended up being hanged. Sounds interesting, right!? Especially for me because I’m quite familiar with the area Hartley was working in so it was pleasing to see familiar names pop up.

Sadly not. The writing was promising - deeply rooted in the landscape and quite poetic at times. But Myers hammered home that Hartley was part of the landscape and the landscape part of him just a little too much, and it became a repetitive theme at the expense of other interesting ideas he might have explored, or maybe just the plot. The storyline dragged and dragged, and it needed more to it beyond ‘man makes coins, other man wants to catch him, man gets caught’. And the characters were all abhorrent; I’m all for a nuanced view of things, but I think it confused some of the points Myers was trying to make. Also, Hartley’s wife is introduced right at the very beginning (essentially getting violated), and I was thinking right, she’ll be a main character here, or at least a catalyst to the action. But this was not the case. Instead she seemed to serve the purpose of being desirable and the perfect wife. And - spoiler here - I wanted her to come out on top at the end but that sense of victory is instead given over to Hartley’s son.

There is also this secondary narrative written in first-person by Hartley himself in phonetically spelled English and I had no idea what the point of this was or what the relationship was between this and the main narrative. It seemed a method by which Myers could show how ‘literary’ he is without actually adding in anything of value to the plot. So yes, it was an all-style-no-substance read for me, and I am off in search of more good historical fiction.

So that’s it! I will see you guys next month for more.