Always Coming Home (California Fiction)
by Ursula K. Le Guin
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Book Summary Information
Author: Ursula K. Le GuinEdition: Paperback
Audio: English (Unknown); English (Original Language); English (Published)
Published: 2001-02-05
ISBN: 0520227352
Number of pages: 525
Publisher: University of California Press
Book Reviews of Always Coming Home (California Fiction)
Book Review: Deserves a Much Wider Audience
Summary: 5 Stars
Ursula LeGuin's Kafka Award winner and 1985 National Book Award runner-up is the deepest deep-ecology fiction I know of and my favorite novel. It's the only scifi book to earn such honors [her 1972 National Book Award for "The Farthest Shore" was in Childrens Books]. "Always Coming Home" is less a book about landscape than a book that inhabits a landscape. I've just finished my third reading in twenty years.
True to her anthropological scifi themes, LeGuin creates the feeling of living in a very different culture better than any other writer I've read. In negative reviews I've seen, [not just here] aside from problems reading it's "experimental" format, I've been struck by reviewers simply not getting it at a fundamental level.
Many years ago, the credo of my graduate fiction-writing workshops was "Show, don't tell" and "Be concrete", both accomplished through use of details. Thus defined, ACH is a fiction-writing tour de force in which she not only invents an Amerindian-like culture [with advanced technology, sort of], but has us participate in its calendar of rituals, oral wisdom and parables, eco-knowledge, recipes, poems, songs and family fights. The original boxed editions included a cassette tape of fables, poems, songs, and sacred chanting in a language she invented for these people, the Kesh. And the Kesh are embedded within the natural landscape of California's Napa Valley sometime in the nebulous future.
The story takes place millenia after a worldwide industrial apocalypse. Fossil fuels are exhausted, wide swaths of territory are poisoned by chemicals and radiation and sterilized by plastic sands. Large geological events have put the San Francisco Bay basin, California's central valley and the Great Basin under the ocean.
The book's antagonist, the Condor culture, Leguin's version of the warrior-dominated Indo-Europeans migrating from the steppes into agrarian Europe circa 3500 B.C. is an almost cartoonish sketch. A foil for Kesh society, Condor society is a social and material culture as unsustainable as our current rapacious, consumption-at-all-costs society [which may be changing]. But it's a mistake to read ACH as a simple industrialization versus environmentalism vision. It's not primarily about that, nor is it about the future, nor a metaphor for today, nor utopian fare, although it's partly all those.
Ultimately, with science-hunger moved off-stage, ACH is about how it has felt and what it has meant to be human over our million or so years on the planet. This hasn't changed, nor will it, despite today's technological veener. LeGuin's vision sums up this entire experience of being human and particularizes it to one specific biophysical environment just as all cultures have been so particularized, except in some instances over the last few millenia.
The Kesh do have industry. For example, much of their Na valley floor is covered with vineyards and a railroad delivers barrels of wine to the coast where a farflung maritime trading system begins. But it's appropriate technology use; their culture is rooted in being human, not in production. The Kesh are not poor, nor subsistence-level livers, nor backward in any way, but their material lives service their non-material lives -- their humaness -- and not vice versa. They still have teenagers, testosterone-driven conflicts between groups, curious and lazy people, firebrands, hermits, dissidents, warriors, mystics, cliques, social outcasts and the joys and tribulations of sexuality.
Anyone familiar with the structure and daily lives of primal cultures will recognize the verisimilitude under the scifi novel conventions here. And if you know a bit about the vanished, semi-sedentary cultures of the California Indians you'll find LeGuin's fictitious one as real as rain. [The cultures that inspired her are revived in "The Ohlone Way", a gem of a book by Malcolm Margolin.]
The book's major weakness is it's stiff, shallow, and simplistic antogonist [culture], a characteristic problem in LeGuin's work; she doesn't write good villians. Another is the actual narrative, the story of Stone Telling, only 112 extracted pages and our primary view of Condor culture, so I wish she'd developed it more. Her P.O.V. -- that of a socially immature, pre-adolescent in a restrictive harem -- may be the problem in both instances. I want some plot device to get her out of the house. Still, Stone Telling's story resolves perfectly for this symphony of life in the Na Valley.
The book's non-linear format will turn many people off, and it's flawed, but for me ACH is in a class by itself, even beyond the novels of my favorite novelist, William Faulkner. Faulkner is the better writer, perhaps, but the realization of the Na Valley exceeds that of Yoknapatawpha County.
LeGuin's anthropological slant is developed to it's structural extreme: a collection of field notes and texts including visual and impeccably accurate oral material -- a file cabinet -- as novel. This hints at the epistolary origin of the English novel. Giving the book the time and attitude it requires means buying or borrowing the CD/tape. You not only hear the Kesh speak and sing, a suprisingly evocative tool, but even the Na Valley landscape itself. This audio portion of a novel is not only unique but integral to LeGuin's mosaic. She's constructed a complete culture, a formidable creative accomplishment.
LeGuin spent formative years in the Na valley and the village of Sinshan itself. I live in the Bay Area and know it's ecosystems and pre-contact Native American culture. She's nailed them. Sit on a shaded, worn redwood deck bordering a bay laurel or redwood grove, gaze out at the dry, yellow, August hills of the California coast range, and it's easy to see, feel, and smell the ancient stone and redwood Kesh family great houses. Easy.
The Kesh live in a numinous environment that is mostly lost now but is still here for us to rediscover. Give this book a chance and you will breathe with the Kesh.
Summary of Always Coming Home (California Fiction)
Ursula Le Guin's Always Coming Home is a major work of the imagination from one of America's most respected writers of science fiction. More than five years in the making, it is a novel unlike any other. A rich and complex interweaving of story and fable, poem, artwork, and music, it totally immerses the reader in the culture of the Kesh, a peaceful people of the far future who inhabit a place called the Valley on the Northern Pacific Coast.Graphic Novels Books
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