If my life depended on naming any one writer in a myriad as my "favourite", it would have to be Ursula K. Le Guin.
This storyteller from Oregon has been a friend and constant companion down the decades almost since the thumb came out of my mouth and I found real pleasure in reading words of more than two syllables for myself.
When French publishers took even a fine translation of Ursula's 'Earthsea Quartet' out of print for several years, just as the Kid was approaching an age to enjoy this one of her many worlds, I was furious.
"They'll be back," one store assistant told me. "They can't not be! Except of course for 'Tehanu'. That was rubbish compared to the rest, don't you think?"
"I most certainly don't! Why on earth do you say that?"
"Well, who's really interested in a wizard who has lost all his power? The last one is boring because it just doesn't have the magic of the others."
"Mmm. I think you may have missed the point!"
Anyway, the Quartet did come back, with 'Tehanu' in its rightful place alongside its predecessors. And the Kid was soon as hooked as I was 30 years ago.
Once her English is up to it, I'll invite her to explore more of Le Guin's imaginative domains and the poetry too; she's already made a passing acquaintance with another of those parallel universes, the Ekumen.
Parallel? Oh yes. Though neatly labelled by over-ordered minds as a "fantasy and science fiction writer," there's not a novel or short story in all her prolific work where Ursula isn't really writing about us, our human condition and other creatures with whom we share our fragile world, however far she may seem to steer her words into other dimensions and remote places and times.
Last night, I finished 'The Telling' (2001; Gollancz, out in paperback last year). The cover of my copy calls it "a novel of the Hainish", but that's a misleading description serving merely to situate the tale in one of Le Guin's mental spaces.
The Hainish play only a small part in a story about Sutty, an Observer of Anglo-Hindu origin who is granted permission by the rulers on Aka, a government known as the Corporation, to leave the capital on an exploratory mission to a backwoods town in the foothills of a soaring mountain range.
While to Corporation officials whose planet is a newcomer to Ursula's Ekumen community of worlds, Okzat-Ozkat may be a backwards place by a remote upstream stretch of river, Sutty swiftly starts to discover far more than she expected.
Within a few days, she has begun to meet the "maz", the "tellers" of the town, sometimes physicians, sometimes teachers, sometimes akin to the priests of our Terra. All are guardians of banned traditions, old languages and a history white-washed off the very walls of Aka's brave new egalitarian world of consumer-producers.
Sutty bears a painful past of her own. On the earth she left, the proselytising religions and superstitions effaced on Aka in the name of scientific progress had gained the upper hand, bringing fanaticism, book-burning -- and the violent death of the love of her life.
But it's not until she is given leave to extend her stay in the hinterland and travel up into the mountains that Sutty comes to confront her own true enemy, in the shape of a zealous Corporation official, the Monitor initially tasked to spy on her.
As in so much of Le Guin's work, it's impossible for the captivated reader's mind to fail to see analogies to the history of our own world and its ways. Aspects of Aka recall the China of the years after the Cultural Revolution and if the parody is laid on with less subtlety than has been Ursula's wont, some characters more sketchy than usual, such thick brushwork serves mainly as backdrop for the confrontation that comes to the fore.
This is not Le Guin at her brilliant best. She doesn't, however, oversimplify a near collision of cultures in the fashion only too current in contemporary political circles, while some passages attain the heights of her more extensive novels.
The finesse of Le Guin's satirical strokes is never more immediately apparent than in one of her masterpieces, a book I have read several times and often given away, 'The Dispossessed.'
11/12/03: For more on the wealth of "Ursula's worlds", please go to the rest of this article.
Back in the 1970s, long before the Net made it possible to steal pictures like Marian Wood Kolisch's portrait of the author, Oregon and the fact that Ursula lives there were my two best reasons to want some day to visit the United States, knock on the door of a "stranger" and plant a big smacker on each cheek to say "Thank you".
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