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May. 14th, 2014 12:44 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
skygiantsI have an unexpected day off work today, and I have SO MUCH stuff I could and should be doing with it, but instead I spent all morning finishing up Ursula K. LeGuin's Annals of the Western Shore trilogy.
The trilogy consists of three loosely-linked books, which take place across an array of neighboring cultures; the protagonists of the first book are supporting characters in the second, and just a reference in an internal text for most of the third.
Gifts, the first book, is the quietest and most claustrophobic and, for me, the least compelling. It takes place in a hardscrabble mountain culture, governed by ruling families who have some kind of hereditary gift, often violent -- the gift to twist things, the gift to cut with a knife from a distance, the gift to make things ill. The protagonist's best friend has the ability to call and understand animals; his father has the hereditary power of unmaking things by looking at them, and his mother is a foreigner who loves books and stories and only half-believes in gifts at all. When the protagonist does come into his gift, it seems to be wild and uncontrollable, and so, for the sake of the people around him, he and his father agree to seal away his eyes, which is extra difficult for him because it also seals him away from books and from his mother's culture that she's been trying to share with him. So the book is about how he deals with this. I loved his mother, I loved her story as a foreigner living in this very difficult world by choice and trying to understand it; as for the main story, I think I understand what LeGuin was trying to do. But all the time that Orrec spent thinking bitterly how unfair it was that he had to choose to seal his eyes, I wish she had even just once had Orrec have a conversation with someone who was born blind.
Voices is a much more active book -- it's about a once-learned merchant city that has been living under an invading force for the past seventeen years, until a great poet comes to the city and sets off a chain of events that leads to revolt. The protagonist is a mixed-race girl, a "siege brat" from that initial conquest, who hates the invaders passionately and lives in a once-ruling house where secret learning is still kept. At first I rolled my eyes a little at how very, very awful the invading culture is, in contrast to the peaceable city inhabitants -- they're religious fanatics! they believe books are demonic and came specifically to BURN them! AND ALSO they're sexist and keep their women locked away, and and and -- but LeGuin is better than that, so even though the culture of the invaders is pretty much deliberately designed to horrify the readers as much as it horrifies the city inhabitants, the invaders are very much shown as people, too, and their culture as complicated and not monolithic. And the story is also about what happens after a tinderbox revolt, and politics and negotiations and compromise, and rebuilding afterwards. It's sort of an ideal scenario of how a revolution might go, but being ideal doesn't make it over-simplified or less complicated.
Powers, the third book, is actually the one I found most compelling, which I didn't expect. It's slower and more wandering than the others -- the protagonist of this one grows up as a house slave in the City-States, a military society which is very economically grounded in slave-ownership. He also sometimes has the power to see the future, not very clearly; this is almost incidental for a large part of the story. Anyway, he is actually fairly happy and unquestioning of his status in life until something awful happens that completely emotionally shatters him and also breaks his trust in the foundation of the system. After that he sort of bumbles in and out of various societies and situations, sort of grappling with the different systems of ownership and government and power that he encounters, and attempting to form real connections that can replace what he's lost. The book is also the most overtly feminist, and the discussion of slavery has a strong sub-theme of the ways that women are easily commodified, and even 'free' societies often and easily leave women out of that freedom. All this sounds pretty depressing and not all compelling, probably, but this morning I couldn't put it down. (And the ending is not depressing! In fact the happy ending comes almost too easily, after all the complicated, thoughtful depictions of everything else that happens.)
I really liked the series as a whole, and I think it benefits reading as a whole. Each book sort of indirectly complements and complicates the others, and the poem "Liberty" that links all of them means something different to each protagonist. And they all share a very strong interest in words and reading and stories and the power of narrative, and how that operates in different contexts. The one thing that links all the protagonists is their passion for stories and words.
The one thing I do want to say though is that there is are weirdly troubling depictions of disability, or at least they troubled me -- in the first book the 'gifts' are often used to disable people, but the victims of those 'gifts' appear as hearsay or unpleasant scenery, they're not really present and they don't have a voice. So then, as I mentioned above, the protagonist's blindness-by-choice is presented as a.) a terrible and difficult thing for him but b.) also weirdly and completely outside the context of blindness not-by-choice. That bothered me. Then in the third book, there's a character who as a child is described as walking a little strangely, his face a little askew, having fits of anger that he can't control -- and this character grows up to become horrible, violent, murderous, one of the symbols of the injustice of masters having unchecked power over slaves. So ... that's not good. And it made me less comfortable with the blindness narrative in the first book, because I can't trust that LeGuin was thinking very hard about disability in this narrative, although she was clearly thinking long and well about lots of other things.
Anyway this post is already very long so I'm going to stop it here, though there is loads more to discuss. I liked the books a lot! Project LeGuin continues to be a good project!
The trilogy consists of three loosely-linked books, which take place across an array of neighboring cultures; the protagonists of the first book are supporting characters in the second, and just a reference in an internal text for most of the third.
Gifts, the first book, is the quietest and most claustrophobic and, for me, the least compelling. It takes place in a hardscrabble mountain culture, governed by ruling families who have some kind of hereditary gift, often violent -- the gift to twist things, the gift to cut with a knife from a distance, the gift to make things ill. The protagonist's best friend has the ability to call and understand animals; his father has the hereditary power of unmaking things by looking at them, and his mother is a foreigner who loves books and stories and only half-believes in gifts at all. When the protagonist does come into his gift, it seems to be wild and uncontrollable, and so, for the sake of the people around him, he and his father agree to seal away his eyes, which is extra difficult for him because it also seals him away from books and from his mother's culture that she's been trying to share with him. So the book is about how he deals with this. I loved his mother, I loved her story as a foreigner living in this very difficult world by choice and trying to understand it; as for the main story, I think I understand what LeGuin was trying to do. But all the time that Orrec spent thinking bitterly how unfair it was that he had to choose to seal his eyes, I wish she had even just once had Orrec have a conversation with someone who was born blind.
Voices is a much more active book -- it's about a once-learned merchant city that has been living under an invading force for the past seventeen years, until a great poet comes to the city and sets off a chain of events that leads to revolt. The protagonist is a mixed-race girl, a "siege brat" from that initial conquest, who hates the invaders passionately and lives in a once-ruling house where secret learning is still kept. At first I rolled my eyes a little at how very, very awful the invading culture is, in contrast to the peaceable city inhabitants -- they're religious fanatics! they believe books are demonic and came specifically to BURN them! AND ALSO they're sexist and keep their women locked away, and and and -- but LeGuin is better than that, so even though the culture of the invaders is pretty much deliberately designed to horrify the readers as much as it horrifies the city inhabitants, the invaders are very much shown as people, too, and their culture as complicated and not monolithic. And the story is also about what happens after a tinderbox revolt, and politics and negotiations and compromise, and rebuilding afterwards. It's sort of an ideal scenario of how a revolution might go, but being ideal doesn't make it over-simplified or less complicated.
Powers, the third book, is actually the one I found most compelling, which I didn't expect. It's slower and more wandering than the others -- the protagonist of this one grows up as a house slave in the City-States, a military society which is very economically grounded in slave-ownership. He also sometimes has the power to see the future, not very clearly; this is almost incidental for a large part of the story. Anyway, he is actually fairly happy and unquestioning of his status in life until something awful happens that completely emotionally shatters him and also breaks his trust in the foundation of the system. After that he sort of bumbles in and out of various societies and situations, sort of grappling with the different systems of ownership and government and power that he encounters, and attempting to form real connections that can replace what he's lost. The book is also the most overtly feminist, and the discussion of slavery has a strong sub-theme of the ways that women are easily commodified, and even 'free' societies often and easily leave women out of that freedom. All this sounds pretty depressing and not all compelling, probably, but this morning I couldn't put it down. (And the ending is not depressing! In fact the happy ending comes almost too easily, after all the complicated, thoughtful depictions of everything else that happens.)
I really liked the series as a whole, and I think it benefits reading as a whole. Each book sort of indirectly complements and complicates the others, and the poem "Liberty" that links all of them means something different to each protagonist. And they all share a very strong interest in words and reading and stories and the power of narrative, and how that operates in different contexts. The one thing that links all the protagonists is their passion for stories and words.
The one thing I do want to say though is that there is are weirdly troubling depictions of disability, or at least they troubled me -- in the first book the 'gifts' are often used to disable people, but the victims of those 'gifts' appear as hearsay or unpleasant scenery, they're not really present and they don't have a voice. So then, as I mentioned above, the protagonist's blindness-by-choice is presented as a.) a terrible and difficult thing for him but b.) also weirdly and completely outside the context of blindness not-by-choice. That bothered me. Then in the third book, there's a character who as a child is described as walking a little strangely, his face a little askew, having fits of anger that he can't control -- and this character grows up to become horrible, violent, murderous, one of the symbols of the injustice of masters having unchecked power over slaves. So ... that's not good. And it made me less comfortable with the blindness narrative in the first book, because I can't trust that LeGuin was thinking very hard about disability in this narrative, although she was clearly thinking long and well about lots of other things.
Anyway this post is already very long so I'm going to stop it here, though there is loads more to discuss. I liked the books a lot! Project LeGuin continues to be a good project!
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Date: 2014-05-14 06:08 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2014-05-14 06:22 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2014-05-14 09:40 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2014-05-16 12:05 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2014-05-16 05:06 pm (UTC)I did not think about the blindness thing, so thanks for noting that. My issue with Gifts was that it uses a trope that never works for me: that of two children growing up like siblings and then going on to have a sexual/romantic relationship. It always pings my incest squick.
Project LeGuin continues to be a good project!
Yay! I strongly encourage this project. \o/
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Date: 2014-05-17 02:27 am (UTC)Yeah, I was side-eyeing that one a bit too, although then they worked so well together in Voices that I became retroactively okay with it. And, I mean, I guess in Gifts-land there aren't really a lot of viable and attractive romantic options ....