books

Most books ask to be read in a straight line. Always Coming Home, published in 1985 and the strangest beast in Ursula K. Le Guin's bibliography, does not. It does not even quite ask to be called a novel, though one is buried inside it. What Le Guin produced after more than five years of work is something closer to an anthropological field report from a future that will not arrive in our lifetimes, or any lifetime adjacent to it: a thick weave of biography, myth, recipe, poem, song, dictionary entry, map, dramatic fragment, and editorial aside, all of it concerning a people called the Kesh, who live, or will live, in what is currently the Napa Valley after some long, slow, cumulative ecological unmaking of our own civilisation.

The closest thing to a spine is the life story of Stone Telling, a Kesh woman whose biography Le Guin breaks into three sections and threads through the larger collage. Stone Telling is the daughter of a Kesh mother and a man of the Dayao, also known as the Condor, a militarised, patriarchal, hierarchical people who function as the book's foil. She leaves the Valley to live among her father's people. She does not flourish there. Her sections are reliably the most readable thing in the book, and they are, by a noticeable margin, where Le Guin's storytelling gift is operating at full power. Whenever Stone Telling's voice returns, the book locks back into focus.

The trouble, if it is trouble, is the rest of it. There are stretches that read frankly like a writer determined to publish every note she took on a culture she invented, and some of the poetry is closer in spirit to ethnographic transcription than to Le Guin's finest verse. The Back of the Book - an explicitly academic appendix covering Kesh houses, lodges, kinship, and naming conventions - is illuminating in the way a field anthropologist's monograph is illuminating, which is to say it requires a particular kind of patience. The comparison most often reached for is Tolkien's Silmarillion, and it earns it. This is a book that rewards close attention and frustrates browsing in roughly equal measure.

Le Guin clearly anticipated the obvious charge. Roughly halfway through, she stages a conversation between her authorial stand-in, Pandora, and a Kesh archivist in which Pandora effectively accuses the Kesh world of being a utopia. The archivist concedes the charge and demolishes it at once, calling the Valley a dream dreamed in a bad time by a middle-aged housewife, a critique of civilisation only the civilised could produce, a pacifist affectation. It is a remarkable piece of metafictional self-correction, and it gets at why the book holds up better than most of its philosophical neighbours. The Kesh are peaceful, ecologically modest, sexually liberated, and decentralised, but they are not happy in any uncomplicated sense. Some of them are profoundly unhappy. The Valley is not paradise. It is a place where being human still hurts.

Not every gambit lands. The Condor are a thinner construction than the Kesh, more polemical foil than functioning society, and the explanation for why their imperial expansion sputters out - some implied shift in human nature itself, some absence of the fossil-fuel surplus that fed historical empires - is the kind of argumentative shortcut Le Guin would not have accepted from another writer. The Dispossessed, written a decade earlier, faced its utopia's contradictions more squarely. Always Coming Home is the more imaginatively ambitious book, but it is less intellectually pugilistic, and the difference shows.

What lifts it above its own slack passages is the sheer integrity of the imagining. The City of Mind, a vast post-human computer network with which the Kesh maintain a courteous, limited relationship. The heyiya-if, the recurring spiral symbol that operates as cosmology, philosophy, and structural principle all at once. The recordings of Kesh music that came with the original boxed edition, which actually exist as a real album, written and performed by Todd Barton. The hundred original illustrations by Margaret Chodos. The whole thing is a sustained act of attention to a culture that does not exist, and the attention is contagious.

You do not have to read every word. The book seems to know this and seems to forgive it. What it asks instead is that you let a place become familiar to you, slowly, until the strangeness becomes a kind of homecoming. The title is not a metaphor.