From: danny@cs.su.oz.au (Danny Yee) Date: Sat, 26 Aug 1995 16:34:34 +1000 Subject: Book Review - Always Coming Home title: Always Coming Home by: Ursula K. Le Guin publisher: Bantam Books 1987 subjects: anthropology, short fiction, poetry other: 562 pages _Always Coming Home_ is the only work I've ever felt could really be compared with Tolkien, in this case with the _Silmarillion_ rather than with _The Lord of the Rings_, since it is a fictional ethnography rather than a novel. Where Tolkien drew on history (along with linguistics and mythology) to create his imaginative world, Le Guin draws on anthropology (along with linguistics and mythology) to create hers. This difference is very clear cut: Tolkien's world has almost no ethnographic detail, while Le Guin's has no history. The subject of Le Guin's work is the Kesh -- a people who inhabit a valley in a far-future California and who are clearly based on native American models. Mostly she lets them speak for themselves, allowing the reader to learn about them through a montage of their short stories, poems, and myths. These are built around a central novella, which tells the story of a woman called Stonetelling who leaves the valley to live with her father's people, the Condor. The "back of the book" contains additional information about the Kesh in more traditional ethnographic form. While there are several passages of reflexive commentary in _Always Coming Home_ (where Pandora the archaeologist addresses the reader directly) and some of these make direct comments on contemporary issues, it is not clear exactly what Le Guin's "message" is. A more explicit account of her ideas about utopia can be found in the essay "A Non-Euclidean View of California as a Very Cold Place to Be" (reprinted in _Dancing at the Edge of the World_). As a work of fictional anthropology _Always Coming Home_ is a brilliant success. As a utopia, however, it has some major flaws. One is the "machina ex machina" of the City of Mind, a benevolent collection of machine intelligences which provides the Kesh and other peoples with all the positive benefits of science and technology (weather forecasts, global communication, etc.), while sparing them the need to devote resources to those ends. Another is the straw-man patriarchal and authoritarian society of the Dayao/Condor. This is too extreme to be an interesting contrast to the Kesh (except polemically), and its implausibility means that the "failure" of the Condor to dominate the societies around them (in effect to reenact the historical incorporation of traditional societies by empires and centralised states) actually *detracts* from the credibility of Le Guin's vision. (I can't help thinking that things would be a little different if the Kesh were to face Julius Caesar and a single Roman legion, even with their technological inferiority.) In an attempt to avoid this criticism Le Guin falls back on possible genetic changes in "human nature", a move which undercuts her work's engagement with reality and which I found as distressing as the terrible ending to _Tehanu_. Le Guin seems to have lost the strength of mind and the intellectual courage which were so apparent in _The Dispossessed_, where she went out of her way to face the likely problems in her anarchist utopia. Despite its flaws, _Always Coming Home_ is a work of extraordinary creativity. Though many who loved Le Guin's novels will find it unapproachable, many who would never think of touching a science fiction novel would enjoy it. -- %T Always Coming Home %A Ursula K. Le Guin %I Bantam Books %C New York %D 1987 %O paperback %G ISBN 0-553-26280-7 %P 562pp %K anthropology, short fiction, poetry Danny Yee (danny@cs.su.oz.au) 26 August 1995 ------------------------------------------------------------- Copyright (c) 1995 Danny Yee. Comments and criticism welcome ------------------------------------------------------------- URL http://www.anatomy.su.oz.au/danny/book-reviews/index.html -------------------------------------------------------------