Gabrielle (Reading Rampage)'s Reviews > Always Coming Home

Ursula K. Le Guin is easily one of my favorite writers, regardless of genre lines: I truly believe that her work transcends the labels of science fiction and fantasy because she used those genres to create stories that are much more universal and important than what average readers associate with those labels. In her skilled hands, aliens were never simply aliens, nor were dragons simply dragons.

It took me a long time to get to this book, but I really needed a little balm for my frayed nerves, and there’s nothing quite like a Le Guin book for that. She refused to think of “Always Coming Home” as a utopia; even when she addressed that concept in “The Dispossessed” (https://www.goodreads.com/review/show...), she was always careful to add the adjective ‘ambiguous’ to the idea of a perfect society, because she knew very well that no such thing exists. But I get the strong feeling that this is the society she wishes she could have lived in. Her parents were anthropologists, and you can see how familiar she is with ethnographies by the way she built this wonderful little tome: this is a unique method for world-building, and while it may seem scattered and uneven, I am actually quite impressed with the way she built this collection, united by a core narrative in the voice of a character who lives between two different societies. When we aren’t reading about North Owl’s journey to her father’s people, we have poems, folk tales, descriptions of how her society is built, how family units organize themselves, how their economy functions, all assembled together lovingly by archaeologists and archivists.

As such, there’s no way to really summarize what happens in this book, you simply have to go along with the flow and explore. I get how that won’t be for every reader, it’s nowhere near a traditional novel format, and probably reads a lot more like non-fiction. It’s a book of fiction that aims to entertain and give you a sense of escapism, but it’s very hard to judge it using the same benchmark one would use for any other work of sci-fi that I have read before; we are really in a unique place here, and Le Guin pulled it off because she was a master of world-building, I don’t think another writer could have done this. The only other work I can think of that is anything like this book is Jeff VanderMeer’s “City of Saints and Madmen” (https://www.goodreads.com/review/show...) which is also a collection of documents that build the story of his city of Ambergris and introduces the reader to the world, but there are not connected by one narrative strand like we have here: they are just kind of stitched together, and it’s brilliant, but also kind of frustrating to read.

I got similar feelings reading this book: I loved it, but there were times where I was just hungry for a story, and I wasn’t getting it. This woman has written some of my favorite books, and I think I hold her to her own extremely high standard and expect everything she’s written to be pure genius. And this book is, but more from a technical perspective than from a pure enjoyment one, if that makes sense. I don’t think this is where you should start if you have never read her work before, but if you are a fan who appreciates how she thinks, this is an important book in her bibliography because it shows you what it’s like to really build a speculative world from (almost) scratch. In a way, it might be more of a writers’ book than a readers’ book.

I am also quite sure that Becky Chambers is a Le Guin fan, as I was reminded of her ‘Monk and Robot’ (https://www.goodreads.com/review/show...) series (which I recommend to anyone who needs a little cozy break) reading this. I would also love to go live in that world, where people understand that the core of a society should be to take care of each other instead of needlessly pointing fingers, pushing and pulling and hoarding. In the North Owl chapters, the contrast between her life in the valley and in her father’s tribe accomplished the same trick we got from watching Shevek navigate the different between Urras and Anarres: we take the existence of capitalist and patriarchal ‘rules’ for granted because that’s all we know, and don’t realize how absurd they would seem to someone who comes from a culture/planet where those things just don’t exist.

The introduction in my copy mentions that the book gave her hope, because even if we fail as a civilization, perhaps the ones that will come after us will get it right. I don’t know if I believe in that right now, but it’s a nice dream, and a very unusual book that may not be her best, but is nevertheless a brilliant example of what can be done with imagination, compassion and insight.