Customer Reviews

Always Coming Home

5 star:		(15)
4 star:		(3)
3 star:		(2)
2 star:		(2)
1 star:		(1)

 

 

This book is a marvelous collection of "an anthropology of the future." LeGuin excavates stories, songs, beliefs, myths, traditions, and more of the people who "will be might have been" someday living in what is now Northern California. At once Utopian and Dystopian, the culture that LeGuin shares with us is beautiful and complex.

I read this book when it was first published in paperback in the mid-80's. It planted and nurtured in me a seed of hope that humans are capable of someday living in community in different ways than we do now. It opened in my imagination doors that I had never before noticed. Here is an example of a new narrative structure, or anti-structure. Here, too, is an example of a new-old social structure, a post-modern tribalism that has returned to "traditional" values such as living in harmony with oneself and one's environment, and recognizing the strength and beauty in ritual and tradition.

Though others (including she) may disagree, I personally have always considered this work Mrs. LeGuin's crowning achievement. As Tolkien did in his Middle Earth stories, LeGuin in "Always Coming Home" creates a new-old world that is unfamiliar yet recognizable, someplace we want to go back to again and again. We are lucky indeed that this book is now back in print!

"Always Coming Home" is a unique book by a unique author. It is a slow, quiet, rich read. Those (including the author of the 'With Apologies to Ursula LeGuin' review) who read passively and, consequently, cannot hold onto a book that does not compel their attention will be disappointed. To them I would like to reveal the astonishing information that sometimes the best books require more than one attempt. I first essayed this highly-detailed and multi-faceted creation of a future culture embodying native American values in 1998. I found it both fascinating and slow-going, and the library copy was due before I'd covered half the text. Wishing to own the full edition (which comes with a supplementary audiocassette, "Poetry and Music of the Kesh"), I scouted around but, being ignorant of amazon.com at the time, could not find the full 'set' of book + cassette. Then for some reason it slipped my mind. I ran across a used copy the other Sunday in a magnificent bookstore in Stanton, California, and it was like catching sight of an old love again. Now I would like to sing her praises to you.

Very few books involve the reader as deeply in the sensibility of a different culture as this one. The descriptions of villages and nature are shot through with the symbolism of a deeply religious way of experiencing the world, a way which is at the same time simple and natural. The central symbol of the gyre or double spiral manifests in the town-planning, artifacts, dancing and education of the Kesh, as well as providing a template for understanding one's passage through life. The complex family and social organization is presented both in schematic form and in the narration of day-to-day customs and interactions. The reading of omens emerging at the heart of the plainest everyday events lends dramatic richness to the course of the narrative portions of the book.

However, this is no static account of an insulated society; the Kesh are still in history, and must contend with outside forces that threaten to undermine their peaceful existence, a contention manifested in the intimate relations between Willow, the main narrator's mother, and her husband from outside, the Condor captain of 300 warriors.

Nor is this future period presented in isolation from our own present. Here and there the reader is given tantalizing hints of the very different culture of the remote past that built the Straight Road, hints that accelerate and culminate in the haunting section "Of Time and the City," where the Kesh come into contact with the accursed descendants of our own more imbalanced civilization.

And here I will stop. The attempt to present a finished presentation of a multi-faceted work comprising narrative, poetry, music, language, and anthropological analysis within 1,000 words must founder. The wonder is that Ms. Le Guin was able to accomplish all of this in less than 600 pages. The only parallel achievement that comes to mind is JRR Tolkien's "Lord of the Rings," and while he achieved more scope in thrice the number of pages, in her invented culture of the Kesh she has achieved considerably more depth. The book entices the reader to immerse him or herself in its depth again and again, ever returning to the surface of this world with fresh vision.

Ursula Le Guin is my favorite living author, and this is my favorite of her novels. If you don't want a review that comes from that position, which has developed over thirty years and uncountable books and is not (quite) as facile as it sounds, stop now.

This book, though, received a lot of criticism, some of it, perhaps, just. It was criticized for appropriating Native American culture, and although Le Guin is explicit in denying that as her intent, it's an issue worth discussing. Because Le Guin is the daughter of anthropologists specializing in deep study of native cultures, it might be truer to say that those visions of the world have appropriated and influenced her. Nonetheless, this is something to discuss if you teach the book, or recommend it to a friend.

Le Guin's also been variously accused of predicting the future with that least forgivable sin, earnestness, and of creating a prescriptive utopia in which no reasonable reader can believe. These charges, though, I find less worthy of discussion. Those who say it's unbelievable cite

a) the Kesh's success in dealing with the military-industrial Condor through nonviolent resistance (nonviolent resistance actually work? Ridiculous! Oh, wait a minute...),
b) the improbability of the Condor getting so caught up in their exploding toys that they don't make good use of them (also ridiculous! no one would build more and more bombers while failing to provide body armor for their troops, and the Afghanis never drove out the techno-heavy USSR with flintlock rifles), and
c) the belief that the culture of the Kesh "really" wouldn't be anything like this.

If we're talking of earnestness and prescriptive prediction, though, I think such critics undermine their own position. It doesn't get much more earnest, or much more prescriptive, than saying that someone else's imaginary culture "would" "really" have done thus-and-such. One of Le Guin's points is that the world doesn't *have* to go the way that some military-industrial-consumer Americans are prone to believe it must; there are other choices, though perhaps only after some very regrettable ecological catastrophes. She's also mildly famous for pointing out that SF authors don't predict the future; they observe the present. By that standard, ACH doesn't say that people will live in Kesh-like valleys, or that they should live in Kesh-like valleys, but that some people, right now, do in some sort live this way. And that, in my experience, is the literal truth. Those people are silenced and ignored and sneered at and mocked, but they exist, and not just in straw-bale solar houses.

In terms of Utopia, Le Guin explicitly rejects it(in the passage "Pandora Converses with the Archivist.") Now maybe she needs more than a single rejection to prove that this doesn't function as an improbable utopia; but it doesn't hurt to actually read the thing before dismissing it, and see what she does say.

I tend to think that it avoids utopianism by what IS included: for instance, people in the Valley routinely and slowly die of mercury poisoning (or something very like it, "sevai".) Not so Utopian, really. Again, rather than having machines which make all manual labor obsolete, we see two women digging a garden in soil that's "like wet concrete when it's wet, and like dry concrete when it's dry." They do this by digging a shovelful and then handing it to the other woman to clean off the concrete-like mud while digging a second shovelful with a second spade, and so on. If that's your idea of utopia, I can only say it's not mine: people suffer, people die, people work, sometimes, very hard. The fact that they aren't doing it in Wal-Mart, or in a cubicle, doesn't mean that hard work isn't, well, hard work. Thirdly, living "in harmony" in this valley (or anywhere else) isn't just a matter of the warm fuzzies: it requires some knowledge of ecology, and some brutal adjustments to it. These people can have two children per person, no exceptions. If you marry someone who's got two, you won't have any children of your body. If you want six, you're out of luck, that's all, and it's not such an easy proposition. "Living in balance" is a term easy to scoff at; but balance, as those know who've tried it, requires work and thought, both routinely thought to be unnecessary in a well-maintained utopia. And, finally, this "utopia" spans one valley in one mountain range: the Kesh's "goodness" hasn't convinced the rest of the world to change its ways, not even the Pig People next door. If picturing a world in which one insular society is allowed to live sustainably and peacefully is Utopian, then, yes, it's Utopian; but viewing this as so improbable as to be not worth contemplating says more about the reader than about the author.

Still with me? needless to say, I recommend it very highly indeed. Maybe it's not fair in its use of indigenous elements; I don't feel qualified to say. Maybe it is a Utopia, if people can die and suffer and sweat and fart in Utopia. But whether or no, it's a beautiful and entertaining and thought-provoking book.

Always Coming Home, by Ursula LeGuin, is a striking and highly readable Utopian novel with feminist themes. LeGuin wrote this work in 1985, and became so wrapped up in the World she created that she published the book with tapes of songs and ceremonies from its supposed inhabitants. This did not help sales, and the book, although very well reviewed at the time and much beloved by its fans, is no longer in print. In the distant future California is inhabited by a people with a culture similar to American Indians, current U.S. culture having polluted itself to death and fallen into the sea just as everyone predicted. These Napa Valley people have profited from Silicon Valley and combine modern computer skills with a simplicity of life close to nature. There is, however, a troublesome, warmaking, male-dominated, city-building culture to the north where Oregon and Washington are now, and this is where the culture clashes come from that allow feminist issues to be developed. The gentle Californians have e-mail, and a group safely far away from the community that is suffering raids and town burnings from the Arab-like northern people keep writing our community that fighting back is wrong, and that they should sit down with these people and discuss things and settle it all by peaceful talking; in a memorable line, someone in the embattled community flames back, "You come here and do that!" Our protagonist, North Owl, is captured by the Arab-like culture as a teenage girl. When she finds her way back after much oppression and many adventures, she takes the second of three names women take to mark major life themes, Woman Coming Home.

The Oxford Times said of 'Always Coming Home' that "sometimes you open a book and find in a dozen pages the world inside more solid than the room where you sit". It is definitely such a book. From the obscurity of the future, Le Guin has drawn a people that are at the same time as wild as their surroundings and as civilised as we, as human beings, could ever hope to be. She says in her first note that the people who call themselves the Kesh might be going to have lived a long, long time from now in Northern California. The emphasis in this first note should be placed on the 'might', this is utterly and completely a work of speculative fiction. It is a marvelous thought-experiment that allows us to peek at the way the world might be, at one possible destination. But the world Le Guin has created is not a Utopia, although the idyllic, slow-paced nature of the Kesh is an attractive prospect. Nothing in Le Guin's work comes easily, she is not a woman that believes in easy answers. This is an admirable quality. If anything, I would say that the world the Kesh inhabit is a critical utopia, it is a hope for a better future, but one that is flawed, and this is the way Le Guin has intended it to be. It is what makes the work so believable and so heart-wrenchingly beautiful. The wilderness of the Kesh is neither better or worse than our own. It is simply different. hence its appeal.

I believe the seeds for this book were sown during the author's summer holidays to the Napa Valley as a child and teenager, where she roamed the hills and creekbeds and devoured books as only a young adult can. This is a work that has grown out of the geographical imagition of a child, and later, the earnest, hopeful, complex, strong-willed mind of an adult hoping for a better world, aware that it may not be possible. 'Always Coming Home' is imbued with the strongest and most deeply felt 'sense of place' I have ever encountered, her world is so deeply realised, so easy to step into. It is a masterpiece for so many reasons, a critical exploration of utopia, a work of ecocriticsm (the study of the way ecological principles, landscape studies and literature meet), as well as an experimental novel that lets informal and formal voices stand side by side, a work that lets the voices of the people of the Kesh speak for themselves, their poems, their personal and social histories, their rituals framing a more organised central narrative in which a young woman learns what it means to be an outsider, and what it means to know a place called home. It has been over 15 years since Always Coming Home was written, but I think that the potential for personal understanding and scholarship that it carries with it is still untapped. It's not a book for everyone, but those that it is for will love it dearly all their lives. I recommend trying to find the first edition by Grafton Books for its beautiful cover illustration by Mike Van Houten, it captures the balmy twilight of the valley perfectly, the way the 'roots of the valley are in wilderness, in dreaming, in dying, in eternity'. The true timelessness of a land and a people that haven't even existed yet.

I truly do not think that any one has ever created a better or more thoroughly thought out alternative future society. It is just so perfectly humane. This isn't a "primitive" society- it is just a society that fully conforms to the natural, traditional way that humans were meant to live. You don't get a sense that this society is just copying Native American culture here, on the contrary, you get a sense that these people are being completely themselves in intimate interconnection with the natural world around them. When you do this it just naturally begins to parallel the Native Americans- without conscious effort.

It is appropriate that LeGuinn brings up the Tao te Ching in the introduction. This is a way of life perfectly in accordance with the Tao. The first time I read this book I did not yet realize what a perfect symbol the double spiral motif that runs through all the book, all the society, is. I now get it. You slowly spiral in to the center- then you slowly spiral on out- or up.

In spite of the fact that they retain some modern knowledge of technology- appropriate technology- this it isn't a life without work. It isn't a fantasy utopia. Yet, I wouldn't hesitate a second to go there.

Another thing, the section on healthy vs. unhealthy generative metaphors for different societies is worth the price of the book alone. Briefly, this compares and contrasts such metaphors as THE WAR, THE LORD, THE MACHINE with those of THE ANIMAL, THE DANCE, THE HOUSE, and THE WAY. It really gets you to think about how the underpinning way that we see the world produces different outcomes.

One other thing. I don't think I've ever seen a case where illustrations, maps, songs, poems, myths, tales, etc. all interweave and compliment each other so seamlessly. I didn't think people were smart enough to consciously create a work like this- I'm gratified that at least one person was this smart.

I really want to read this again, soon.

To understand this book (other than simply enjoying it), the reader needs to know that Ursula LeGuin's parents were Alfred and Theodora Kroeber. While neither of these names come immediately to most people's minds, another name might -- Ishi. Alfred Kroeber, as a professor of anthropology at Berkeley, was the man who wrote about Ishi, the last member of his native tribe. While by some modern sensibilities Ishi was seen as mistreated, Alfred Kroeber's work with him allowed a vast store of native lore and knowledge to be preserved. Alfred also worked very hard to bring a respect, knowledge and even admiration to the first peoples of California, a group often ignored because they fought no major wars and had, compared to the Plains, Mesa, Northwest Coast, and Woodland tribes, a very simple material culture; Alfred Kroeber tried to show that simple did not mean non-existent, and certainly not unimportant.

Theodora Kroeber worked in an area her husband, but not her daughter, overlooked -- the stories. Her collection "The Inland Whale" is a wonderful and charming preservations of Pomo, Noyo, Nolo and other northern California tales.

Combine these influences with Ms. LeGuin's known stands on the environment, feminism, and the like, stir very, very gently, add people willing to work on music, language, and art and the result is "Always Coming Home".

The book is part anthropological/archaeological report, part recording of stories, and part cycle of life. There is a strange and beautiful poetry to this work. Consider the very first sentence: "The people in this book might be going to have lived a long, long time from now in Northern California." I'm not sure how I would even begin to parse that sentence for translation, but there is something about the use of multiple tenses that sets the tone for the entire book.

Are there faults with this book? Yes, certainly. There are strong diatribes against machines and industrialization, yet the way of life of the Kesh is at least partially possible because of this technology, especially in communications (a standard trope in LeGuin's works -- ease of communications). There is also a heavy handed way to pointing out males as the source of all conflict; I do find this annoying. But these are comparatively small points in the book. Read it first and foremost as a love letter to the land and her parents and you will find the joy, the hope and the heart of it all.

Ursula K. LeGuin's novel Always Coming Home, published in 1985, is a story of our own earth in the distant future. Ms. le Guin has set her novel in what is today the small community of Rutherford , in the western Napa Valley of Northern California. Nothing remains of twentieth-century civilization except an occasional piece of rubble and some areas poisoned by residual pesticide. Much of our present-day land is under water, including California's Central Valley and some of the coastal region, and the human population is sparse.

However, the tone of the book is neither cautionary nor obtrusively alien; the topography, plants and animals of Northern California are easily recognizable, and the human culture--the people are the Kesh, or "Valley People"--although different from our own, is not jarringly so.

The book is the story of one woman's life, from childhood to old age. North Owl is born in Sinshan, one of the nine small communities in the Valley of the Na (our Napa River

Ursula LeGuin's Kafka Award winner and 1985 National Book Award runner-up is the deepest deep-ecology fiction I know of and my favorite novel. It's the only scifi book to earn such honors [her 1972 National Book Award for "The Farthest Shore" was in Childrens Books]. "Always Coming Home" is less a book about landscape than a book that inhabits a landscape. I've just finished my third reading in twenty years.

True to her anthropological scifi themes, LeGuin creates the feeling of living in a very different culture better than any other writer I've read. In negative reviews I've seen, [not just here] aside from problems reading it's "experimental" format, I've been struck by reviewers simply not getting it at a fundamental level.

Many years ago, the credo of my graduate fiction-writing workshops was "Show, don't tell" and "Be concrete", both accomplished through use of details. Thus defined, ACH is a fiction-writing tour de force in which she not only invents an Amerindian-like culture [with advanced technology, sort of], but has us participate in its calendar of rituals, oral wisdom and parables, eco-knowledge, recipes, poems, songs and family fights. The original boxed editions included a cassette tape of fables, poems, songs, and sacred chanting in a language she invented for these people, the Kesh. And the Kesh are embedded within the natural landscape of California's Napa Valley sometime in the nebulous future.

The story takes place millenia after a worldwide industrial apocalypse. Fossil fuels are exhausted, wide swaths of territory are poisoned by chemicals and radiation and sterilized by plastic sands. Large geological events have put the San Francisco Bay basin, California's central valley and the Great Basin under the ocean.

The book's antagonist, the Condor culture, Leguin's version of the warrior-dominated Indo-Europeans migrating from the steppes into agrarian Europe circa 3500 B.C. is an almost cartoonish sketch. A foil for Kesh society, Condor society is a social and material culture as unsustainable as our current rapacious, consumption-at-all-costs society [which may be changing]. But it's a mistake to read ACH as a simple industrialization versus environmentalism vision. It's not primarily about that, nor is it about the future, nor a metaphor for today, nor utopian fare, although it's partly all those.

Ultimately, with science-hunger moved off-stage, ACH is about how it has felt and what it has meant to be human over our million or so years on the planet. This hasn't changed, nor will it, despite today's technological veener. LeGuin's vision sums up this entire experience of being human and particularizes it to one specific biophysical environment just as all cultures have been so particularized, except in some instances over the last few millenia.

The Kesh do have industry. For example, much of their Na valley floor is covered with vineyards and a railroad delivers barrels of wine to the coast where a farflung maritime trading system begins. But it's appropriate technology use; their culture is rooted in being human, not in production. The Kesh are not poor, nor subsistence-level livers, nor backward in any way, but their material lives service their non-material lives -- their humaness -- and not vice versa. They still have teenagers, testosterone-driven conflicts between groups, curious and lazy people, firebrands, hermits, dissidents, warriors, mystics, cliques, social outcasts and the joys and tribulations of sexuality.

Anyone familiar with the structure and daily lives of primal cultures will recognize the verisimilitude under the scifi novel conventions here. And if you know a bit about the vanished, semi-sedentary cultures of the California Indians you'll find LeGuin's fictitious one as real as rain. [The cultures that inspired her are revived in "The Ohlone Way", a gem of a book by Malcolm Margolin.]

The book's major weakness is it's stiff, shallow, and simplistic antogonist [culture], a characteristic problem in LeGuin's work; she doesn't write good villians. Another is the actual narrative, the story of Stone Telling, only 112 extracted pages and our primary view of Condor culture, so I wish she'd developed it more. Her P.O.V. -- that of a socially immature, pre-adolescent in a restrictive harem -- may be the problem in both instances. I want some plot device to get her out of the house. Still, Stone Telling's story resolves perfectly for this symphony of life in the Na Valley.

The book's non-linear format will turn many people off, and it's flawed, but for me ACH is in a class by itself, even beyond the novels of my favorite novelist, William Faulkner. Faulkner is the better writer, perhaps, but the realization of the Na Valley exceeds that of Yoknapatawpha County.

LeGuin's anthropological slant is developed to it's structural extreme: a collection of field notes and texts including visual and impeccably accurate oral material -- a file cabinet -- as novel. This hints at the epistolary origin of the English novel. Giving the book the time and attitude it requires means buying or borrowing the CD/tape. You not only hear the Kesh speak and sing, a suprisingly evocative tool, but even the Na Valley landscape itself. This audio portion of a novel is not only unique but integral to LeGuin's mosaic. She's constructed a complete culture, a formidable creative accomplishment.

LeGuin spent formative years in the Na valley and the village of Sinshan itself. I live in the Bay Area and know it's ecosystems and pre-contact Native American culture. She's nailed them. Sit on a shaded, worn redwood deck bordering a bay laurel or redwood grove, gaze out at the dry, yellow, August hills of the California coast range, and it's easy to see, feel, and smell the ancient stone and redwood Kesh family great houses. Easy.

The Kesh live in a numinous environment that is mostly lost now but is still here for us to rediscover. Give this book a chance and you will breathe with the Kesh.

On the one hand, I agree with all the good things other reviewers have mentioned. On the other hand, I also agree with all the bad things.

The cultures in the book struck me not so much as "simple" but as "simplistic." I think I was also really bothered by the lack of enough story to illuminate the practices of the society. The story parts were great. The poetry parts frequently drove me up the wall (true also of my reading of Tolkein). It was choppy, which made it difficult to read without the concentration one reserves for *actual* archaeological study.

I think in the end that might have been my biggest problem with it. I wanted to read about a world that never was, a world that might be, a world of people different from me. Instead, I was stuck reading fake archaeology. I was uncomfortable with the in-between-ness of it - I either wanted real archaeology, or real fiction, not a mishmash of the two. The book is incredibly self-indulgent of the author; what saves it is that LeGuin is so phenominally gifted that even her self-indulgence is interesting and well-written.

It was compelling (in places) and maddeningly dull (in places). I think I'm glad I read it - but I'm not sure - and I don't think I'll read it again - but I'm not sure.

I'm sorry this isn't a more coherent review. It's hard for me to know if the problem was mine, or the book's. A very strange, in-between book that left me in a strange, in-between place.

In sum: Very well written, very unique book, that left me very ambivalent about whether it was "worth it" as a reader.