ere is some advice for those inclined to give up halfway through reading The Telling, Ursula K. Le Guin's first new novel since the stiff-jointed Tehanu was published back in 1990. It is advice particularly meant for those who have read Jane Yolen's jacket blurb for the new book--a story which, she says, is "not in the hobbledehoy pace of major page-turners but in the graceful elliptical manner of one of the Old Tellers"--and may have thought that this oddly evasive rhetoric (note the Raised Finger Senator Foghorn But) was intended to befuddle us into thinking it said something really positive. The message is simple: Don't stop.
Don't stop, wade through the narcoleptic middle sections of the book, where the telling of The Telling, a story all about how humans make their world by telling it, bogs down in a series of abstract dogpaddle disquisitions on the social structure and Buddhist-like religion of the planet to which the protagonist has been sent to find out stuff and does. Read on.
Don't stop. The last chapters of The Telling may continue to avoid drama like the plague--every significant event in the book is reported to the protagonist, who witnesses almost nothing directly, at any point; but those last chapters subtly and imperturbably raise the ante, make one suddenly care very much about what has been happening, whether or not offstage.
Left Handed structure
The Telling is an addition to Le Guin's Hainish Cycle, which contains her two most famous novels for adults--The Left Hand of Darkness (1969) and The Dispossessed (1974)--and fairly closely parallels the narrative structure of Left Hand, though without any of its overt drama or any sense that real risks might threaten any members of the cast whose fates we care about. Earth is just beginning to bail out from a period of religious fundamentalism, during which much human culture had been snuffed out, burned, edited from existence; the softening of fundamentalist rule seems almost entirely due to complex and catalytic interactions with the Ekumen, the concord of worlds dominated by the planet Hain, to which Earth belongs. Things are beginning to look up.
But Sutty, a young Earth woman in training with the Ekumen, loses her lover in a last-moment act of terrorism, and her first assignment, to the world of Aka as an Observer, is undertaken in a cloud of trauma which may explain (Le Guin is never explicit about this) her inanition, her inattentiveness to the obvious. It does not take her long (but it takes her longer than it takes us) to discover that the materialist fundamentalism which governs Aka, much like the Communist fundamentalism which governs China, is virtually a mirror image of the religious fundamentalism she has escaped on Earth.
Technoshit dystopia
The Ekumen Envoy (her boss) is successful in getting permission for her to travel from the capital city, an urban dystopia full of the technoshit (Le Guin's neat term) typical of a society (like ours) hypnotized by dreams of Progress, by the delusion that the next technological fix will actually make things better. So Sutty travels upriver to the provincial city of Okzat-Ozkat (a formulation which sounds like Le Guin having maybe a little too much fun with Dualism), where the long middle of the book begins.
(Don't stop.)
It is here that we are taught to understand, laboriously, the interactive, godless, subtle, appositional but not oppositional, profoundly pragmatic mysticism that used to govern the entire planet but which, now, suddenly, catastrophically, has been driven underground by the fundamentalists, who seem to have derived the techniques of their faith from a short visit from the fundamentalists of Earth, like Polynesians deriving Coca-Cola from a passing schooner. But the world-structuring faith remains. It is a religion of telling. It is mediated by monks/nuns called maz, who explain to Sutty, not once or twice, what telling is:
"It's the way we have the world. Without the telling, we don't have anything at all. The moment goes by like the water of the river. ... Our minds need to tell, need the telling. To hold. The past has passed, and there's nothing in the future to catch hold of. ... So what we have is the words that tell what happened and what happens. What was and is. ... We're not outside the world. ... We are the world. We're its language. so we live and it lives. You see? If we don't say the words, what is there in our world?"
Following some of the rules
There is a holy mountain, where the last library has been hidden.
Sutty climbs through ice and snow to get there (it is a mild reprise of Genly Ai's epic journey through Gethen), but is followed by her Monitor (an officer of the fundamentalist tyranny) as we know (but she does not) is inevitable. After all, The Telling is a story, and follows at least some of the rules of Story: one of which is that to find a secret haven is to lose it.
Fortunately, his helicopter crashes (offstage) and he is injured. Sutty nurtures him, and it turns out that, under the carapace of life-denying materialism, he is a small boy who has lost his family. He begins to see the light. And it is at this point that The Telling begins to lift, though without any hobbledehoy wham-bam-thank-you-Sam rush to climax, if that is what Yolen meant by hobbledehoy.
The intersections of talk
The flow of words, the intersections of talk, become magically poignant, pointed, sure. Words too deep for tears are almost uttered. "Why," the chastened Monitor asks Sutty finally, "do your people hide the price?" He is talking of the impact of technology, of ideology, on the planet Aka; but he is also speaking directly to us, here in the 21st century on this planet, as we continue to hide the price. "The gift," he says, "is lightning."
In the end The Telling works not as a tale, for it ceaselessly violates almost every good rule of storytelling, but as an ideogram, which the last pages finally knit together. It is an ideogram of the price of being us (redemption is around the corner, perhaps). The people of Earth and the people of Aka are their own Polynesians, I think Le Guin is saying. I think she is saying that, in the end, we do it to ourselves. We have given to ourselves the world we have got. I think she is saying that, in the end, the gift is lightning.
John Clute is a writer, editor, critic and scholar of science fiction. He is the author of Science Fiction: The Illustrated Encyclopedia and co-editor of both The Encyclopedia of Science Fiction and The Encyclopedia of Fantasy, all Hugo Award winners. His criticism and reviews have appeared in The New York Times, The Washington Post, Omni, The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction and other places too numerous to list; much of this material has been collected in Strokes: Reviews and Essays 1966-1986 and Look at the Evidence: Reviews and Essays.
