Book review: The Left Hand of Darkness, Ursula Le Guin (1969)

This haunting book tries hard to reel you in but it eventually failed with me. I got about 25 percent of the way through before giving up, unconvinced of the value of the poetic vision invested in the narrative. But reading this book reminded me of the feeling I used to get when listening to Romantic orchestral music dating from the 19th century: its pages were strange embrasures for referents that gave off a heady smoke perfumed with scents that gave me feelings characterised by odd reverberations sometimes full of consonance and sometimes discord. All the time, a melody unspooled like a dream, transporting me to other worlds, and other cultures.

But it wasn’t enough for me to care, in the end. Le Guin relies a lot on secondary descriptions to fill in the spaces between episodes occurring at those points where actual information that is used to further the plot is transferred from the writer to the reader. It’s like reading Chinese lyric poetry: lots of descriptions of the effect of the moon on the water or of the wind in the grasses, but few coherent objects to batten onto as you careen, like a caboose detached from the train, through the phantasmagoria the writer produces.

The story is interesting though, I’ll give the author that much praise. You have an envoy from a collective of worlds known as the Ekumen who has been sent to another known world in order to establish links that will serve to further the interests of the collective of species. The envoy finds himself on a cold planet where males become females for a period of time that is sufficient for procreation. Meals are cooked and eaten. Meetings are held with prominent politicians. There’s even the opening of a new piece of infrastructure: an event that a local monarch uses to cement his control over his subjects.

But the envoy is dismissed by this king, and decides to leave the city to go to a distant part of the realm to see the oracles, who live there and can foresee the future. Le Guin has a lot of fun imagining the conclave of oracles as they go about their business of telling the envoy what he has come to hear. And you get some telling insights into the author’s priorities here, in this part of the realm where people shun the routine trappings of wealth and prefer to concentrate on essentials in a community that resembles something like a Buddhist retreat. Le Guin seems to have had a horror of the kind of plenitude that the mind can have at times of anxiety or distress, where it seems to be full of thoughts that violently compete with each other for your attention, tumbling over each other quickly and repeatedly in your head. But Le Guin here also betrays the shallowness of her knowledge of mental illness when she appears to compare schizophrenia with psychopathy, probably mirroring a general lack of understanding in America at the time the book was originally published.

At moments like this the façade of competence the author constructs cracks and you get to see the brickwork under the plaster that covers the narrative with its fine finish. The prose is excellent and the foundational imaginary structures are very convincing, for the most part but, as I have already mentioned, I failed to stay interested in the characters, who are less than perfectly realised. I didn’t really empathise with the exiled prime minister, for example. And the implications of the king’s dismissal of the envoy are not followed up in the story. Why is it important for the king to join the collective? What’s at stake for his people if he doesn’t?

The lack of substance in Le Guin’s primary characters is critically important, as I have mentioned. One way that novelists keep people interested in their narratives is by developing characters. You are invited by the novelist to sympathise with one character or to disapprove of another. In Le Guin’s novel you are supposed to dislike the king but to like the prime minister, but the prime minister’s character is not adequately developed so that it can enable the right kind of link with the reader.

In a science fiction novel, where species might (as in Le Guin’s novel) obey laws of nature that are different from those followed everywhere by humans (who tend to get married at some point in their lives once they reach physical maturity, and have children) it is more difficult than it is in a work of conventional literary fiction to develop characters. In literary fiction, romance, sex, marriage and the begetting of children are common plot elements used by novelists to move things along and to lend depth to characters that can then function as emotional axes providing interest for readers.

In a science fiction novel, on the other hand, where different systems of value can be the norm for non-human characters, it is more challenging for the novelist to give his or her characters the emotional completeness readers need in order to remain engaged with the text. This is where Le Guin’s novel fell down for me. The emotional hooks I needed to stay interested in what happened to the characters she devised were just not there.

I was however reminded at certain junctures of the Macartney embassy that took place around 1793, when the king in the UK, George III, reached out to the Qing emperor, offering him trade and links to Europe. The emperor famously declined the approach, telling the king through a letter given to Macartney that his country had everything it needed and that there was nothing the British could send them that they wanted.

This rebuff (which was predicated entirely on the emperor’s own slender control over his subjects; this was a Mongol emperor, as we all know, who had militarily subjugated the preponderant Han) led several decades later to the Opium Wars and later, in the 20th century, the ultimate failure of the dynasty. And China to this day harbours resentment at the humiliation that the British meted out to them because of superior technology. If only the emperor had been more open, things might have turned out very differently and the world today would be a very different place. So much turns on the decisions made by one man, at times. There might have been opportunities for Le Guin to inject drama of this kind into her story, but she evidently didn’t think it was necessary.