This reads at first like old-school adventure sf, beginning with a sequence on a spaceship launchpad that could have come straight from a Dumarest novel. Sadly, that is no indication of where the book is heading. It is set several hundred years in the future. The Cetians (as humans have labelled the people of the two worlds, and as they have begun to call themselves) know of Earth but we are aliens to them. We have an ambassador on Urras, but no contact at all with the isolated colony founded on its moon, Anarres, two hundred years ago.
The book concerns a humourless physicist, Shevek, who grew up on Anarres, but travels to Urras. His society is based on communal, anarchist principles. Resources are scarce and egoising is considered a grave sin. Shevek has been exchanging letters and ideas with the physicists of Urras, and realises that some of the greatest physicists of his own world are mere plagiarists of their work. He is encouraged to visit, and he does, riding a trade ship. Urras, it turns out, is quite a bit like our world in the twentieth century, with Shevek staying in a capitalist and sexist country reminiscent of the USA of the 1950s.
Lengthy chapters alternate between rather tedious explorations of Shevek’s past and present. On the moon we see his growing discontent and frustration, not with its anarchist politics as such, but with the ways in which anarchism has hardened into unacknowledged governance and control, and how that blocks his scientific progress, and the progress of others, such as a composer who spends his life building canals because not enough people approve of his music. On the planet Urras he sees continued evidence of the problems his people fled from, but also a freedom of ideas that surprises him.
The Dispossessed is regarded by many as a classic of the genre, but I found it very hard going, as evidenced by the fact it took me one hundred and seventeen days to finish it. I thought maybe it was the bulkiness of this Folio edition slowing me down – this chunky hardback is for when you’ve got an evening lined up in an armchair, not for bus stops and waiting rooms – but it was just as slow going with the more portable Library of America and SF Masterworks editions. Curiously, once I admitted to myself that I found it boring, and stopped trying to enjoy it, I had it finished within a week.
Like some other books of the era, it has a rather dodgy attitude to children and sexuality: “No law, no limit, no penalty, no disapproval applied to any sexual practice of any kind, except the rape of a child or woman”, we are told. In practice we see that this means children having sex with each other, and adults having sex with children, and it all feels uncomfortably similar to Marion Zimmer Bradley’s defence of her husband: propositioning children wasn’t a problem as long as he took no for an answer. When Shevek tries to rape a woman on Urras, he suffers no consequences, but the unfortunate reader has to spend another hundred pages with him.
So this isn’t a book I liked or enjoyed, but I suspect that the target audience for this edition are those who already know and love the novel. As you would expect from the Folio Society, it is a very nice edition. They describe it as bound in printed and blocked cloth, with printed map endpapers, a printed slipcase and 14 integrated illustrations (eight in duotone, six in greyscale) by David Lupton, who also worked on their editions of A Wizard of Earthsea and The Left Hand of Darkness. Bleak and sombre, they reflect the mood of the book very well. Professor Brian Attebery, who worked with Le Guin and edited two volumes of Hainish Novels & Stories for the Library of America, provides an introduction, which should definitely be read after the novel. Stephen Theaker ***
The book can be purchased here: https://www.foliosociety.com/the-dispossessed.html
No comments:
Post a Comment