The Telling by Ursula K. Le Guin
Cover Design by Vaughn Andrews<
Published by Harcourt Brace
Reviewed by Leigh Kimmel
This novel is the last novel-length story of the Hainish Ekumen that Ursula K. Le Guin wrote, and in some ways it is one of her weaker ones. I was fascinated by her science fiction 'verse from the moment I discovered a copy of The Left Hand of Darkness on the shelves of our local public library. I was a teen at the time and science fiction was hard to come by in the small town environment in which I grew up. Over the years I've read a number of the others, and have been fascinated by the hints of a far larger continuity behind them.
Unfortunately, continuity is one of the biggest problems with this novel. Most obviously, there is the lack of consistency in the world building, particularly as related to the operation of the ansible, the FTL communication system which has been part of her 'verse from the beginning, but which was invented by Shevek of Anarres in The Dispossesed. In all the previous volumes of the Hainish Ekumen 'verse, the ansible operates rather like a telegraph, being very low-bandwidth and capable of transmitting only brief text messages, not lengthy discourses or image data. However, in this novel, we have descriptions of whole books being transmitted by ansible, albeit largely lost at the receiving end due to acts of terrorism.
Furthermore, it's simply impossible to reconcile it with any sort of chronology established by the previous books. In the very first chapter we see the destruction of the Library of Washington by religious fanatics of the Unist movement. The context makes it pretty clear that it's what we currently call the Library of Congress, and that it's still considered a great repository of knowledge and wisdom -- that its destruction is on the level of the sacking of the Library of Alexandria in the ancient world in terms of an assault on humanity's collective memory. Furthermore, there are clear references to the Ekumen, and to humanity's being in the process of recovering from the disaster that the Terran envoy in The Dispossessed refers to in her talk about how Earth and the Hainish made First Contact. This pretty well demolishes the theory that the League of All Worlds preceded the Ekumen in internal chronology, since this is clearly not the future of the Earth we saw in City of Illusion, conquered and devastated by the Shing to the point even the names of whole regions had been worn down to near-unrecognizability.
There are also issues with the world building. For instance, the world of Aka is described as having a single megacontinent on the lines of the continent of Pangea on prehistoric Earth, but there is no real consideration of how having a single vast continent and a single vast ocean would affect the climate and weather patterns (most likely to far greater extremes than what we see on Earth). Furthermore, Akan society is supposed to have been one in which there was no real sense of the outsider, the Other -- yet it is also described as having multiple languages, which would suggest division. When people cannot talk with one another, they are pretty much guaranteed to view one another as strangers.
Yet with all its flaws this novel is still a fascinating book in its own right. It is the story of a journey of discovery, of the beauty of an ancient culture which still survives in spite of the government's efforts to eradicate it. In it you can see the author's love of the traditions of Taoism, which we saw as early as City of Illusion, in which the Tao Te Ching was called the Old Canon of Man and played a major role in the protagonist's journey of self-discovery. As a result, it's easy to see the novel as a condemnation of China's Cultural Revolution, and particularly the campaign against the Four Olds which sought to erase traditional ways of thought as obstructing China's progress toward industrialization and ultimately full Communism. And certainly there is plenty to condemn there, for the Cultural Revolution (and the Great Leap Forward which preceded it) was one of the greatest bloodbaths of a century soaked in blood shed for the sake of utopian notions of society. However, Aka's Corporation State can also stand as a criticism of the sort of consumerism that reduces its members to social atoms relating to one another solely as producers or consumers of goods, rather than in human ways as friends, family, conjugal lovers, etc.
It is the story of Sutty, a young woman of Indian origin, living in western Canada as the religious extremists known as Unists seek to impose religious conformity, attacking and destroying areas of refuge for dissenters and places in which knowledge is preserved. The dramatic destruction of the Library of Washington is the catalytic event that leads her to the decision to go to the Hainish Envoy and enter training to become one of their agents.
The next scene jumps forward to her arrival on Aka. The Hainish Ekumen is a world with FTL communications, but no FTL travel. As a result, the journey that seems so brief for her has been many decades for the outside universe. She had been looking forward to an encounter with the traditional society that she'd been able to glimpse through what fragments of information were not destroyed by Unist saboteurs, but instead discovers a forced-draft industrialist culture, full of brassy music and loud slogans about the March to the Stars.
Much like China or the old USSR, the government of Aka, the Corporation, does its best to keep the offworlders cloistered away from the ordinary people, given carefully stage-managed opportunities to meet selected individuals who will present just the right appearance. The further this goes, the more frustrated Sutty becomes. She'd worked so hard to learn everything about an Aka that for all appearances no longer exists, destroyed as something that holds back progress. But every time she tries to go out on her own to encounter the real Aka, she is watched by a stern Monitor, a Corporation official clearly sent to spy on her.
And then she is handed an opportunity so great she'd hardly dreamed it possible. She has been invited to visit the city of Okzat-Okzat, up in the mountains. She will not be flown there, but rather will go overland and then by riverboat, a mode of transportation more suited to soaking in tall the nuances and vagaries of a culture.
Okzat-Okzat is a city where the old ways still live, if broken, stunted, and forever under threat. Her first order of business is to find lodgings, but there are no hotels, no apartment blocks. Instead she stays with a widowed, disabled woman and her son, who rent out rooms in their home for some extra money. Instead of the Corporation's packaged nutrient-balanced foods, they feed her the traditional cuisine of old Aka, each ingredient and each course chosen to balance the various energies and humors recognized in the traditional system of medicine. That leads her to an elderly apothecary, whose shop is decorated with texts in the forbidden ideographic writing, texts Sutty can almost follow, almost understand.
From there she is introduced to an exercise group -- except it's not the vigorous aerobic exercises approved by the Corporation for preparing people for the March to the Stars. Instead it's a slower, more meditative set of stretches and postures reminiscent of yoga, which may just make the impossible possible, although Sutty's never sure whether one most peculiar incident really happened or if it was an illusion of an altered state of mind.
However, it's also an art and discipline in constant peril. At every session someone has to be tasked with watching for any signs that government agents are coming. When that happens, everyone quickly jumps up and sets to doing the sort of exercises that are approved.
As if to underline just how precarious this sanctuary of the old ways is, one day Sutty goes back to the apothecary's shop and finds it empty, vandalized, all the murals full of ideographic sayings and poems whitewashed over so only fragments now peek through. Horrified, Sutty wonders what has happened to this gentle elderly man, whether her own interest in his knowledge has ended up betraying him to the Corporation's agents.
And then she is given the highest accolade of all -- an invitation to join a pilgrimage to the Lap of Silong, the Mountain that is so frequently alluded to in the poetry and tales of the system of folk belief she has taken to calling the Telling. It is by necessity a journey by foot, along trails that often seem to be more suitable for mountain goats than human beings. Along the way they visit mountain villages where the reach of the Corporation State is slender at most, where the old ways can be kept freely without need to hide.
There's something about the journey, and especially the arrival in this holy place, this treasure house of wisdom, that brings to mind stories of Shangri-la or Shambala, the semi-legendary secret Buddhist monastery high in the Himalayas where all is peaceful, where ancient wisdom is preserved. As it turns out, the Lap of Silong is first and foremost a library, a repository of texts that have been rescued from destruction and preserved out of the Corporation State's reach. Some of these texts are things that Sutty has seen, at least in part, or has heard retold, but some are things that she had no idea of. And all of it, gathered in a single place, suddenly becomes extraordinarily vulnerable when her old nemesis the Monitor reappears, pursuing her in a helicopter.
Except it crashes, leaving him badly wounded, dependent upon the people of the Lap of Silong to be nursed back to health. And as he recovers, he and Sutty talk. It's a fascinating interaction, almost like a sparring match with words and sentences used as weapons, argument and counterargument. But then he begins to remember a childhood that he had long suppressed as having no place in the modern Aka of the Corporation State. Memories of being raised by maz, those who tell the old stories, who lead and teach.
The ending is bittersweet, with hard choices for both Sutty and the Monitor who reclaims the childhood name he'd rejected. But there is also hope that the Ekumen may be able to copy and catalog all that vast wealth of knowledge in the Lap of Silong, to preserve it for all the scattered worlds of the Ekumen. And we realize that the protagonist's name is more typically romanized as Sati.
For all its flaws, The Telling is Ursula K. Le Guin's swan song, her final vision of the Hainish Ekumen, her final gift to us her readers. And I think that its vision of stories being told and heard is what she would most like us to remember about her and her worlds.
Buy The Telling from Amazon.com
Review posted April 12, 2012.
