Fiction Reviews
Always Coming Home
(1985 / 2016) Ursula K. LeGuin, Gollancz, £12.99, pbk, xi + 525pp, ISBN 978-1-473-20580-2
Ursula K LeGuin is (quite rightly, in my opinion) seen as one of the genre’s leading icons for fantasy and SF. Her writing on the Earthsea fantasy series and her SF, with novels such as The Left Hand of Darkness, The Word for World is Forest and The Dispossessed are still regarded as classics that hold up today.
Always Coming Home is one of her later works, and perhaps her last major work before her death in 2018. First published in 1985, I remember it back then being a big book, and was accompanied by a cassette tape (yes!) of music to accompany it.
I also found it deadly dull, long-winded and pretentious. Back in 1985 I didn’t finish it and went back to my more-usual reads.
Forty years on, I thought I would give it another go – minus the cassette (although it is out there on You Tube. (Be warned: cats and dogs may whimper at some of the high squeaky noises!))
Would my years of reading and greater life experience give me a better understanding or appreciation of the novel? I know that the book in 1986 was shortlisted for the Locus Award for the Best Science Fiction Novel, the 1986 Mythopoeic Fantasy Award and the 1985 National Book Award for Fiction. It did make me question whether I had got it wrong.
First off, I should say for clarity that this is not a new version of the original 1985 text, nor the latest. Although this edition is over 500 pages of fairly small print. The Library of America has an author’s ‘preferred version’, as it were, at over 800 pages. However, this 2016 Gollancz edition does have a new introduction by John Scalzi, who (perhaps unsurprisingly) raves about the book.
It’s a slow-burn, mosaic type of book, heavy on social anthropology (as you might expect from LeGuin, given her father’s profession of cultural anthropologist) and her own personal interest.
The framing part of the book is that a person named Pandora from our future is collating what is known about people living in the Northern California area long ago. From the beginning though it is clear that this is an ‘archaeology of the future’, a future that is very different to ours now, but written as if it has already happened long ago.
The majority of the book is given over to this assemblage of materials. This involves written translations of oral descriptions by someone named Stone Telling, with details of her life as part of the Kesh in ‘the Valley’. Pandora intersperses Stone Telling’s narrative of her life with folk tales, songs, and poetry. It seems all rather traditional Native American in style, with descriptions of the beauty of nature and the generally gentle pace generating an often bucolic mood amongst the folk tales, although Stone Telling also describes the time she spent there with her father’s people, known as the Condor, who live away from the Valley. There the life is very different, not only in societal terms but also in terms of technology. There is talk of electronic information stores, of cybernetic populations and computer terminals there and a much more regimented way of life.
There’s a lot to unpack here that you have to read carefully to get its full meaning and importance, I think. To illustrate this further, the last part of the book (simply named “The Back of the Book”) has maps, music, poetry, and physical descriptions of their housing, what they ate, their written language and a fourteen-page Glossary of terms, all of which create context. The book has over 100 illustrations of plants, animals, symbols and objects by original illustrations by Margaret Chodos interspersed throughout.
Telling stories and singing may not be for everyone, and there’s a lot of it here. This was a problem for me. I’ll admit that I am the sort of reader who often skips over or skims the poetry if it’s given at the beginning of a chapter. Here the book is mainly made up of such material, and there are many, many chapters of poetry, music, drama scripts and folktales that are spoken rather than written – as it used to be done, of course.
With this in mind, whilst I now get how the book works and what it tells, I still found it hard work to read, despite what John Scalzi says. I was thinking, for comparison, that to me it is more like Tolkien’s Silmarillion compared with his Lord of the Rings, less about plot and more about academic detail, atmosphere and mood. And like The Silmarillion, Always Coming Home is a book to admire for its depth, detail and complexity, but not (for me anyway) to love. It is still very detailed, very long-winded and possibly even pretentious. quite challenging, although I can see at the same time how immersive this book could be to those who are engaged by its detail.
Always Coming Home is clearly a work of love and passion on the part of the author. I understand that it was a book that took five years to write, and I can imagine LeGuin poring over every sentence, every paragraph and chapter. As a reader you have to pay attention in order to understand, and for that reason I am sure that there are some who will love this anthropological study of a post-apocalyptic society. It is a complex and mature work, more of an experience than a novel, an assemblage based on cultural and social heritage, a book that you could read parts of intermittently and keep coming back to – always coming home, if you like. I can see why it was award-short-listed.
Consequently, I would also suggest that this is not the book I suggest to anyone first wanting to try LeGuin’s oeuvre, as it is not really typical of her other work. However, more experienced readers may marvel at Always Coming Home’s depth and detail, and revel in the experience. Personally, I still found it deadly dull, long-winded and pretentious, though less than before. Result? File under ‘Not the author’s best’, although I accept that some may think so!
Mark Yon
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