Customer Reviews

The Telling

5 star:		(15)
4 star:		(9)
3 star:		(14)
2 star:		(8)
1 star:		(8)

 

 

"The Telling," like Le Guin's 1972 novella "The World for Word is Forest," is much more about our own world than the world it explores.

Here, a lesbian woman of East Indian descent, Sutty, signs on to be an ambassador for the Hainish Ekumen (the Hainish originally seeded human life on all the member planets) when her lover is killed by fundamentalist terrorists on earth.

But in transit, relativity plays a cruel trick on her: In the 60 years she's been traveling in a Nearly-As-Fast-As-Light starship, the planet Aka has adopted a severe, technophilic society not unlike that of Maoist China. Indeed, the Corporation State has done its best to eradicate its previous culture, a Tao-like, creedless system of wisdom known as "The Telling."

Sutty eventually travels to a distant, mountainous place where people secretly maintain their old system, and there she discovers how her own planet Terra may have catalyzed the culture-destroying changes.

As in Le Guin's 1969 classic, "The Left Hand of Darkness," the protagonist enters the society hoping to learn, and eventually undertakes a journey, this time deep into the heart of the high mountains. Here, the village of Ozkat-Ozkat is sharply reminiscent of Chinese-occupied Tibet.

Le Guin is brilliant at this sort of thing, and while the story is quite simple and takes a while to catch fire, the denouement is moving, engaging and illuminating. I still think she has a penchant for somewhat cold and distant, even a bit sterile, characters, but that detracts only a bit from this tale.

It's not as adventurous as "Left Hand," not as detailed in its world-building as "The Dispossessed," and lacking the action of "...World is Forest," but it's still a thoughtful, entertaining read.

"The Telling" is a meditation on cultural decimation, fundamentalism, colonialism and even gay rights, Earthly issues, that just happens to be played out on a distant world.

I came to review this, even though I got my copy before the book's original publication, because I've been teaching *A Fisherman of the Inland Sea* this morning and watched it fall flat. Since it's one of my favorite stories in the world, that stung; and it made me remember how the reviews here stung, a year or so back, and want to defend Le Guin, if not to my students (being defensive is the kiss of death to teaching) then to someone.

So: *The Telling*. Some of the critiques here are fair; there is, perhaps appropriately, more telling than showing, and the "spare" language characteristic of Le Guin is sparer than ever. That the moral, or anyway one of the morals, that trashing Tao in favor of Mao wasn't too smart, is very clear is also true. I'm not sure why or whether that's an inherently bad thing; but there are less evident "morals" too. That the "evil" new culture isn't actually evil is one of them; the problem was that no one knew what that culture expected of the Ekumen. The motif of "footsteps on the air", the mourning for the value we all throw away, is a major issue, more major even than the capital-M moral that Tao is Good. Or how about the idea that knowledge and stories have inherent value, and that it's not degrading to bargain for them and pay for them? If we took that "moral" to heart from *The Telling*, maybe our teachers and nannies and daycare providers--yes, and writers--would be paid as much as the people who build strip malls and destroy the world.

But (here's the defense) I certainly can't agree that we know nothing about the characters; on the contrary, we learn a great deal about the central character, Sutty, from deft handling of remarkably succinct evidence. How, someone asks, does Sutty feel about sex? About Pao? But these feelings are presented with great lucidity and in the deadpan voice of someone who knows how great and lasting grief can be. Sutty, of course, loves Pao, whom she has lost, without any real cessation either of mourning or of love; and so great is the love that the mourning is moved to the background, because Pao is so large a part of Sutty. But Sutty is so used to this, and takes it so calmly, that it's easy to miss. We are told that though her throat aches in telling of the death of Pao--her own telling, and a turning point in the book--that that didn't matter; it always would ache. She can have casual sex, and both enjoy it and feel essentially nothing from it, because sex that's not with Pao can ONLY be casual. It means nothing, it neither degrades Pao's memory nor sharpens it. Perhaps this is truer than most of us want to admit for most sex: the only significance it has is the significance we give it. If our country, with its odd combination of teenaged salaciousness and puritanical hypocrisy, took THIS moral to heart, maybe we'd spend less time talking about our leaders' sexual peccadilloes and more about what value they're really offering.

In short, I like this book. It's dead on about mourning, love, the value of stories, the perils of absolutism, the need for more mindful cooking practices, and lots of other things. While there are some valid reasons not to like this book, I think a reasonable number of them, though not all, boil down to lack of attention. And one can't really blame Le Guin for that.

In this book Ursula K. Le Guin creates a world where technology is the all seeing, all doing God of the people. A world where the old ways are condemned and literature and art are "corpse rotten" and have to be destroyed. There are no books to read and no history to remember. Only a consumer-producer society is acceptable, and anyone who deviates from this path is condemned, punished and forcibly re-educated. Enter Sutty Dass a young girl of East Indian descent who is desperate to hold onto the past whilst living in the future. On the plant Aka as an official observer she gets the chance to see the past as it used to be, in fragments so tantalizingly small you can only get a taste of what used to be. But Sutty is an intelligent young woman and she realizes very quickly that the old ways are not as dead as the technology-controlled government would like to believe and an underground system of "telling" the past has sprung up in order for people to remember what once was. What starts as a job of work for Sutty, becomes a spiritual quest for redemption in the guise of story telling and mystical encounters. Sutty herself is being reborn from the flames of the past, as her name implies, as Suttee means death by fire for widows and Sutty is a widow of sorts. We find ourselves gently drawn into this illicit world of Guru's, mystics and ancient wise ones, whilst looking over our shoulders for the ever-present danger of Government Monitors whose task it is stamp on everything to do with the past. We are eventually led to a hidden library high in the Aka mountains and it is here that Sutty learns the true meaning of the past and how she as an outsider can help redress the balance for those who hanker for the old days, and those who fear the loss of technology. A vibrant book, filled with laughter and tears, and a host of characters who are larger than life and totally memorable. This is a novel for those readers who like a book to get their teeth into, a novel, which makes them think and wonder, and then think so more. An excellent and understated read that deserves six stars out of five in my opinion.

Although there are many beautiful passages in The Telling, there are some surprising and catastrophic weaknesses in this novel by Ursula Leguin. The principal weakeness of the work is the one-dimensionality both of the Corporation-State of Aka and the religion of the Telling which it has surpressed. Aka is B-A-D, the consumer, totalitarian, homophobic result of intervention by an evil, theocratic government on Earth. The religion of the Telling is G-O-O-D, gentle, yoga-practicing, process oriented and panentheistic. LeGuin is consistently concerned with nuance and tint in her portraits of alien societies, I was surprised at the tiny, tiny pallet with which she constructed Aka.

In addition to the basic cliched nature of the conflict in Akan society, LeGuin surprisingly has the Telling's plot turn on the classic cliched character that has gone bad as a result of a single and overwhelming childhood familial trauma. It may be cliched because it's true, but I can always rent Marnie or watch Lifetime if I need a dose.

It's hard to not recommend a novel by LeGuin because her prose style can be breath-taking, so buy the novel if you are a LeGuin junkie or have the money to burn.

But, difficult as it is, I suggest waiting until the Telling comes out in paperback or skipping it all together. To enjoy her writing without being distracted by the weakness and cliche, there's always the chance to re-read the Dispossesed, the Left Hand of Darkness, Always Coming Home, or Searoad.

The Telling was my first U.K.LeGuin book, and I was instantly hooked. I read more of her work later, but this is still one of my favorites. I was quite shocked at the mediocre-to-bad reviews that the book got on Amazon.

But, if you think of it, of course it's not so surprising. The other reviewers are probably all (or at least, mostly) from the ruling culture of today's earth, the West. (To top it all, they are perhaps also White and American.)

They have probably not seen their culture and lifestyle being replaced and forced-out by a 'superior' culture, as people all over the Third World today are witnessing.

I could imagine that the plight of the Eastern Akans is totally foreign to them, the nearest they can think of is a Tao-vs-Mao analogy, or a China-Tibet thing that is so popular to talk about in the West.

Ahh, if you saw your world fall apart in front of your eyes, if you watched your people turning into a hollow imitation of the West, and the coconut-water on your streets being driven away by coca-cola... then, maybe then, you'd appreciate the Eastern Akan phenomenon in a way that the book wouldn't seem like an abstract political lecture.

Your position and identity WILL affect the way you see things, no matter how intelligent, or liberal, you are. The ruling caste and the oppressed will often get totally different things out of the same book.

Having said that, how does Ursula LeGuin, white lady from California, write as she does? Was she an opressed-colonized in her last life? A 3rd-worlder, a darkskinned slave --- to know our pain and our transformations so well? I don't know. With LeGuin, I've stopped wondering. LeGuin is a phenomenon. I wish I had discovered her earlier in my life.

The different reactions that the rulers (North-American/European) and the ruled (3rd-World) readers have to this book is actually quite typical.

My Canadian friend, upon reading Chinua Achebe's Things Fall Apart,recoiled at the 'violence of the old culture'. Reading the same book, I saw the Colonizing British, from other Colonized eyes.

Garcia-Marquez is an instant hit to readers in Asia, Africa, Latin America; he touches a deep core in all former-colony people. Many 1st-World readers think he is okay, or mediocre.

Some previous reviewer said something about one-dimensional characters... ONE-DIMENSIONAL? I must be missing something here. I thought Sutty's pain and mourning screamed out at me throughout the book. And near the end, the revelation! Pao the lover, killed by religious zealots, and how it contradicts to now help preserve old religion on Aka, and memories of Pao, and how she must still do what her conscience tells her to do, and learn about the old culture, and protect something very valuable from being lost.

And how secularism can be as intolerant as religion, Especially when, instead of secular-practical philosophy coming out of Enlightenment, it comes from blind/forced imitation of percieived-superior aliens, the Ekumen in poor Aka's case, the West in the case of 3 million poor people in my suffering Third World today.

And the Monitor character, One-Dimensional? I thought it was totally brilliant how he was made to transform, in the readers' eyes, from a caricature police-villain in the beginning of the book, into a conflicted, tortured being at the end.

And which person in the Third World today does not know some of that same conflict? How many of us were born of parents and grandparents of one universe, but grew up into another, and were forced to adopt and acculturate as the omnivorous West eats up all other universes... and what conflicts we hold within ourselves!

Converted to the Dovzan capitalist-producer-consumer ideas, but able to read the old texts. Of the West, but of the East. Speaking Yoruba at home, but English in school. Born of slaves, but lost their culture and serving the Dominant group.

One-Dimensional? Maybe to the Rulers' eyes.

_The Telling_, by Ursula K. Le Guin, is another return to her Hainish universe. This universe features a loose interstellar political structure called The Ekumen, linking any number of divergent but essentially human planets and cultures. Obviously she finds the structure of this universe, with its many planets seeded with basically human stock, but with widely varying social structures, very fertile ground for thought experiments and stories. In this case, her protagonist is a native of Earth, named Sutty, during whose youth Earth was under the grip of a book-burning theocracy. With the help of the Ekumen, that dictatorship was vanquished, and now Sutty is herself an Observer for the Ekumen. She is one of four members of the Ekumen on the planet Aka, which is (oh so ironically! oh so obviously!) under the grip of a book-burning technocracy. (See, the theocracy on Earth banned books because they taught people science, while the technocracy on Aka banned books because they taught superstitious legends.) After considerable effort, Sutty is allowed to travel upriver to a small town in the mountains, where she begins to encounter hints that some people are secretly keeping the old secrets alive. These secrets are transmitted by stories, and they are collectively called The Telling. While a harsh young official of the government seems to be following her, she manages to arrange for a journey into the actual mountains, where there might even be a surviving library. And there she learns much more about the history of Aka, about The Telling, and even about the motives of the bitter government man who has been tracking her.

Le Guin can really write, and this book is beautifully written. Just for that reason it is worth reading, and it is also a fairly engaging story with a good moral, and mostly well-drawn characters. Unfortunately, the moral is not only good, but rather obvious, and it is reinforced by cartoonish depiction of the Bad Guys. This isn't Le Guin at her most preachy, but it is more preachy than is good for fiction. In addition, the story itself seems a bit thin, the ending too abrupt, the whole scheme too straightforward. I enjoyed _The Telling_, but it's a long way from Le Guin's best work.

This is a successful piece of Taoist propaganda, slickly written, without a misstep from the first page to the last. Another Le Guin protaganist, shaky, confused, learns to trust the shaky confusion inside herself and stop searching for certainty. Sutty, a Terran from a particularly nasty theocratic part of Terra's future history, has come as an Ekumenical Observer to the planet Aka. In the time lost to her during nearly-as-fast-as-light travel, Aka has shifted from a culture valuing serenity, past wisdom, and literature, to a high-tech, march-to-the-stars culture, a culture which has criminalized all forms of ritual, even those of greeting and thanks, which has replaced the native word "fellow person" with a borrowed word meaning "producer-consumer." imagine a graduate student who's spent the last five years immersed in classical Chinese literature, trying to make sense of and live in modern Beijing.

Sutty leaves the capital city and finds a cross between the Gethenians and the Kesh in the mountains, and events unfold, predictably. Blind adherence ot science loses to the wider view, rationality strangles itself; there's a miracle, but no one makes a big deal of it. It's connect-the-dots Le Guin.

The last great Le Guin piece, "Always Coming Home," is a work that only be compared in this century to "Gravity's Rainbow," or, dare I say, "Ulysses." And considering that it's never going to be recognized as such, maybe I should accept that a writer who will never receive the acclaim she deserves outside of her genre is not going to bother anymore, and instead is going to churn out formula novels like this one. What bugs me though is that "The Telling" lacks even the cheap emotional excitement of her last few works, the heterosexual romantic drive of "Four Ways to Forgiveness," the mono-no-aware regret of most of "A Fisherman of the Inland Sea." It's what I would NEVER expect Le Guin to be - it's dry. It's unsatisfactory.

Oh Grandmother Little Bear Woman: Give us more, please. Who else but you has your vision?

Le Guin is a major American writer. Two of her novels, The Dispossessed and The Left Hand of Darkness, are among the best novels written in this country in past half century. She has written also some very good novels, like The Word for World is Forest and The Lathe of Heaven, as well several fine short stories and some outstanding children's books. The Telling is not her best work. It returns to the Hainish universe, a future history is which our part of the galaxy was settled millenia ago by colonists from the planet Hain. Following an interstellar catastrophe, Hain is gradually recovering contact with the human settled worlds and incorporating them into a benign information sharing order, The Ekumen. The Telling takes place on a recently rediscovered world, Aka. It uses familiar themes and devices. There is the Terran envoy discovering the complexities of a foreign world, as in the Left Hand of Darkness. There is the catastrophic impact of aggressive Terran culture on a native society, as in The Word for World is Forest. One of the characters was essentially abandoned as a child by his mother, similar to the hero of The Dispossessed. For readers familar with Le Guin, this book lacks the originality of her previous works. It lacks also the powerful writing that characterizes Le Guin's best work. There is little in The Telling that can match the best scenes of The Dispossessed, The Left Hand of Darkness, the Earthsea books, or her best short stories. It is not that this book lacks artistry. For example, the heroine of this tale is a woman of Hindu descent named Sutty. This is likely a reference to the Hindu practice of immolating widows after their husband's deaths; suttee. Sutty has essentially been widowed by a catatrophe on Earth and then leaves everything behind her by the long relativistically sundering journey to Aka. A metaphorical reincarnation, also a reference to Hinduism. Despite these touches, The Telling is not Le Guin's second tier works, let alone major works such as The Dispossessed.

Twenty years ago I discovered Ursula Le Guin's Hainish novels, and devoured them. Two books in this series ----"The Left Hand of Darkness" and "The Dispossessed" --- are classics that transcended the Science Fiction genre. Le Guin's novels could always be read on two levels - as science fiction adventure stories and as insightful social commentaries that used the medium of science fiction to hold a mirror up to our own society. Her strength was in weaving these two aspects of her work together with wonderfully language and imagery that would grab hold of the reader and not let them go until the last page - and then you would want to read the book again.

So when I heard Le Guin had finally written another Hainish novel, "The Telling", I rushed to buy it. As the jacket cover says, "The Telling" is indeed a reflection on the conflict of politics and religion in the modern world. The novel is based on the world of Aka. There we find a monolithic corporate state populated by monochrome "producer-consumers". The corporate state dominates Aka, having recently replaced, but not totally suppressed, a society based on a religion with East Asian undertones whose central characteristic is an elaborate oral tradition know as "The Telling". The catalyst for this societal shift was first contact with the known worlds of the Ekumen. The central protagonist in the novel, Sutty, is an Earthwoman, who has been sent to Aka as an Observer. Earth itself is dominated by a monolithic religious state, which provides another point of contrast. Sutty's travels on Aka thrust her into the center of conflict between these ideologies.

Well it's not a bad topic for a novel. There are certainly parallels here with our modern world that could be mined for literary gold, and Le Guin has shown herself up to that task in the past. But I can't finish the book. I've read 172 pages and really, it's dreadfully dull. The adventure is almost non-existence, the central characters are poorly developed and uninteresting, the pace of the narrative is glacial, and the social commentary seems forced and hackneyed. It just isn't that good a book. What a disappointment. I wondered whether it was my appetite that had changed over the last twenty years. Perhaps I had become too middle aged and conservative to get it? So I cracked open an old copy of the "The Left Hand of Darkness", and found myself drawn in again. No, I still love the stuff Le Guin use to write, but "The Telling" doesn't come close to recapturing the magic. My advice for readers, don't waste your time here. Instead, discover for the first time, or once again, her remarkable early novels.

Ursula Le Guin's "The Telling" is not her greatest work. However, I don't think it's as disappointing as some people have said. We merely have higher expectations of Le Guin than of other authors.

In "The Telling," Sutty Dass, born on an Earth ruled by a fanatic, monotheistic theocracy bent on exterminating science, is an Ekumenical Observer on Aka, a planet first contacted by Terrans. Aka is now ruled by a fanatic, consumeristic technocracy bent on exterminating religion. Sutty leaves Dovza, the center of the technocracy, and travels to Okzat-Ozkat, a mountain village where some of the old ways survive. While there, she tries to understand the old Akan philosophsy/religion/way of life, and to learn why Aka has changed so radically. It is true that Sutty's character is a bit hard to pin down, but I think that's because she's avoiding her past and doesn't understand herself.

Le Guin's writing is subtle, and should be read slowly; if you miss any little detail, the whole picture becomes blurred and two-dimensional. While some reviewers have said that Le Guin shows the Corporation State as Bad, and the old ways, known as the Telling, as Good, they are missing details. The Telling was perverted in Dovza before the Terrans came, and the Corporation was in part a reaction against that, which is perfectly understandable. Furthermore, the Corporation embodies some values of the Telling, and much of its fanaticism against religion comes not from a reaction against Akan culture, but against the Terran theocracy. Also, Aka suffered from wars and sickness under the old ways, and the Telling contains a lot of mystic mumbo-jumbo; it's not perfect.

Still, these things are subtle, and one of the other complaints, that much is told while little is shown, is fairly accurate. Le Guin has said that the best writing should completely embody a theme within its characters and story, so you don't realize you're reading a sermon of sorts; she has also said she tends to fail at total embodiment of themes. She fails again here. But "The Telling" is lovely and poetic, despite a deliberate pace and an occasional sense of preachiness.

I do wish Le Guin had drawn her characters a bit more clearly. I wish the ending didn't feel quite so rushed. I wish she had shown a bit more of Sutty's research into the Telling, which I found quite interesting. But I think some of the abruptness and lack of explanation come because she's demonstrating a characteristic of the Telling: to tell, not to explain.

If speculative literature makes you think, whether you agree with the book's premise or not, it succeeds. By that criterion, I think "The Telling" is successful. If a novel is enjoyable, it also succeeds. For me, "The Telling" is successful on both levels.