Review: Always Coming Home, by Ursula K. Le Guin

Review: Always Coming Home, by Ursula K. Le Guin

by Rich Horton

Ursula K. Le Guin wrote over 20 novels (adult and YA and some that could be either) and of course many many shorter works. I had read all the fiction she published (except some stories for younger children: the Catwings pieces and Leese Webster) -- with one exception, a pretty big one: Always Coming Home. Le Guin is one of my favorite writers, and many of her stories are absolute favorites of mine, in particular the novels Lavinia and The Left Hand of Darkness, and stories like "Nine Lives", "Winter's King", "The Stars Below" and "Another Story; or, A Fisherman of the Inland Sea."

So -- why not Always Coming Home? I've owned a copy of the boxed trade paperback edition, complete with the cassette tape, since the novel came out. I've leafed through it, I know the main story is about a woman called Stone Telling, I've listened to the cassette (once!*) ... Why not read the whole book? 

Well, it's kind of intimidating, or it was then. It is, by some measurements, her longest novel.** More to the point, it's very unusually structured, as sort of a fictional anthropological study of the people called the Kesh, living centuries in our future in a much altered Northern California (specifically the Valley of the Na.) This didn't grab me, to be honest. It seemed like a case of a writer including her study notes. (And, to be sure, she literally does -- in the final section, some 100 pages, called "The Back of the Book". I should emphasize, by the way, that this work is a collaborative project, significantly enhanced by the music Todd Barton wrote for the Music and Poetry of the Kesh; and by the drawings by Margaret Chodos. (Le Guin credits many further contributors in the Back of the Book.)) And so, for nearly forty years, it's moldered on my bookshelves.

But no longer! Almost on random impulse, I finally decided to read it. And what did I think? Well, two things. One, I was pretty much right in many ways. It does read, to a great extent, like a writer deciding to include all her notes. Mind you, I am certain that Le Guin did this with full intention. (And no doubt she had MANY more notes!) And the anthropological bits are illuminating. That said, they are also kind of boring (to me.) They make the book rather a slog. There are also a great many poems, of, to my mind, varying quality. Le Guin is trying, I think, to capture the voice and viewpoints of people of the Valley, the Kesh. Which is sensible. But I don't think the poems stand with Le Guin's best poems, either. There are also snippets from the point of view of "Pandora", a stand in for the author or the future anthropologist who is recording all this data -- and these, too, though they give some context, aren't gripping. 

But -- there is also plenty of narrative. These include some fiction and drama of the Kesh, some folk stories, some quasi-biographies, and one long autobiographical piece, in three parts, about a woman named Stone Telling. The stories include "Romances" -- mostly cautionary tales about sexual transgression; "life stories" -- narratives about actual people's lives, sometimes fictionalized; and an excerpt from a "novel" -- which is to say a piece of realistic fiction. Most of these are effective, quite involving. Stone Telling's narrative is wonderful, the novel excerpt, "Dangerous People", is quite good, and so are some of the shorter pieces, particularly "At the Spring of Orlu", "The Third Child's Story", and "The Visionary".

What is the basic outline? The novel is set a long time in the future, after environmental collapse and war has led to a great reduction in the human population. There has also been geological change, noticeably in the setting of the book, so that there is an "inland sea" in the San Francisco area, which is where the Valley of the Na is located. The Kesh live very lightly on the land, though, it becomes clear, with somewhat sly assistance from fairly advanced technology. Their society is very egalitarian, yet with distinct (but not always rigid) divisions between men and women. There is birth control by social means -- their culture frowns strongly on any couple having more than 2 children. (I've never understood that in SF novels -- the implication is that that will lead to a constant population, but instead it means a continually declining population (because of people who can't or won't have children, and children who die before adulthood.)) Animals are considered people too, and live interwined with humans (though the Kesh are by no means vegetarian.) 

Behind all that, only lightly referred to, is a wider world, which includes a fair amount of high technology, notably the "Exchange", a vaguely internet-like system apparently maintained by AIs, and which has a network that extends well into space. We never learn much about other societies on Earth, with one exception, but it is an interesting question: how many other polities are there? How many different ways of living? This wasn't Le Guin's interest in that novel, and that's OK -- but it does interest me. The one other society we see is a pretty terrible one, and we learn of it through Stone Telling's story. She was the daughter of an outsider, a "Condor" who married her mother on a sort of scouting mission. Stone Telling ends up leaving with her father when he returns in her teens -- for reasons, including that she was in some ways not fully accepted due to her half non-Kesh ancestry, and also for reasons tied to her adolescence. But what she finds in his city -- and the fact that it is a city is significant -- is horrifying: it is a wholly hierachical community, ruled by a paranoid leader, tied to a fanatical religion, with women definitely at the bottom of the heap: confined to a sort of purdah, not allowed to read, etc. The problem with this depiction is not that it's wrong -- it's that it's so exaggerated as the only other society we see that it seems more a construct than an honest portrait of that future.

What's my final verdict? I'm glad I read Always Coming Home. And parts of it I truly loved. Stone Telling's narrative is really involving and moving, and so were many other narratives. The poetry is a mixed bag -- it's interesting but it rarely, to my ears, truly sings. The ethnographic bits -- and they are not just "bits" -- are intellectually intriguing, but, really, often a struggle to read. It is in the end a novel (or "book" or "construct" or whatever) that is more impressive than it is involving. It's a book I feel like Le Guin had to write, had to grapple with -- but the best of her work is elsewhere. And yet -- it's a book you ought to read.

There are a couple more things that I am reminded of by Always Coming Home. Both are post-Apocalyptic works, set in societies devoted to living more lightly on the land. One is even set fairly close, geographically, to Always Coming Home. This is Carrie Vaughn's Bannerless saga, comprising two novels and several short stories. I do wonder how much Vaughn was influenced by Always Coming Home (if at all). That society does portray an interesting future California, with in particular careful birth control, and other social adapations. It's both less impressive an intellectual creation that Le Guin's, and in some ways more convincing. The other novel I'd like to mention is John Crowley's Engine Summer, which certainly was not influenced by Always Coming Home (it was published six years earlier.) But it is profoundly more powerful -- fully as fascinating a society, embedded in a far more effective story. This isn't to denigrate Le Guin's work -- it's simply to say that something very good is worthwhile, but something truly great -- Engine Summer is one of my favorite SF novels of all time -- is at another level. (A level Le Guin reached in other work, I'll add.) For all that, I think comparing Carrie Vaughn's future with Le Guin's and all with Crowley's is a worthwhile enterprise.

*My comment that I listened to the cassette just "once" comes off, I know, as dismissive, and that does capture my attitude in 1985. But I listened to it again for this reading, and I have much greater appreciation for it now. It's a bit New-Agey, to be sure, but that isn't necessarily bad. I don't think it will become a regular part of my music background, but it's worth hearing.

**I might add that the Library of America edition, from 2019, is labeled "Author's Expanded Edition", and it runs to 800 pages, suggesting that it really is significantly expanded. I haven't seen this version, so I don't know much about it, though my review implies that I might not think an expansion a great idea.