The Telling [Englisch] [Taschenbuch]

Here, a lesbian woman of East Indian descent, Sutty, signs on to be an ambassador for the Hainish Ekumen (the Hainish originally seeded human life on all the member planets) when her lover is killed by fundamentalist terrorists on earth.

But in transit, relativity plays a cruel trick on her: In the 60 years she's been traveling in a Nearly-As-Fast-As-Light starship, the planet Aka has adopted a severe, technophilic society not unlike that of Maoist China. Indeed, the Corporation State has done its best to eradicate its previous culture, a Tao-like, creedless system of wisdom known as "The Telling."

Sutty eventually travels to a distant, mountainous place where people secretly maintain their old system, and there she discovers how her own planet Terra may have catalyzed the culture-destroying changes.

As in Le Guin's 1969 classic, "The Left Hand of Darkness," the protagonist enters the society hoping to learn, and eventually undertakes a journey, this time deep into the heart of the high mountains. Here, the village of Ozkat-Ozkat is sharply reminiscent of Chinese-occupied Tibet.

Le Guin is brilliant at this sort of thing, and while the story is quite simple and takes a while to catch fire, the denouement is moving, engaging and illuminating. I still think she has a penchant for somewhat cold and distant, even a bit sterile, characters, but that detracts only a bit from this tale.

It's not as adventurous as "Left Hand," not as detailed in its world-building as "The Dispossessed," and lacking the action of "...World is Forest," but it's still a thoughtful, entertaining read.

"The Telling" is a meditation on cultural decimation, fundamentalism, colonialism and even gay rights, Earthly issues, that just happens to be played out on a distant world.

So: *The Telling*. Some of the critiques here are fair; there is, perhaps appropriately, more telling than showing, and the "spare" language characteristic of Le Guin is sparer than ever. That the moral, or anyway one of the morals, that trashing Tao in favor of Mao wasn't too smart, is very clear is also true. I'm not sure why or whether that's an inherently bad thing; but there are less evident "morals" too. That the "evil" new culture isn't actually evil is one of them; the problem was that no one knew what that culture expected of the Ekumen. The motif of "footsteps on the air", the mourning for the value we all throw away, is a major issue, more major even than the capital-M moral that Tao is Good. Or how about the idea that knowledge and stories have inherent value, and that it's not degrading to bargain for them and pay for them? If we took that "moral" to heart from *The Telling*, maybe our teachers and nannies and daycare providers--yes, and writers--would be paid as much as the people who build strip malls and destroy the world.

But (here's the defense) I certainly can't agree that we know nothing about the characters; on the contrary, we learn a great deal about the central character, Sutty, from deft handling of remarkably succinct evidence. How, someone asks, does Sutty feel about sex? About Pao? But these feelings are presented with great lucidity and in the deadpan voice of someone who knows how great and lasting grief can be. Sutty, of course, loves Pao, whom she has lost, without any real cessation either of mourning or of love; and so great is the love that the mourning is moved to the background, because Pao is so large a part of Sutty. But Sutty is so used to this, and takes it so calmly, that it's easy to miss. We are told that though her throat aches in telling of the death of Pao--her own telling, and a turning point in the book--that that didn't matter; it always would ache. She can have casual sex, and both enjoy it and feel essentially nothing from it, because sex that's not with Pao can ONLY be casual. It means nothing, it neither degrades Pao's memory nor sharpens it. Perhaps this is truer than most of us want to admit for most sex: the only significance it has is the significance we give it. If our country, with its odd combination of teenaged salaciousness and puritanical hypocrisy, took THIS moral to heart, maybe we'd spend less time talking about our leaders' sexual peccadilloes and more about what value they're really offering.

In short, I like this book. It's dead on about mourning, love, the value of stories, the perils of absolutism, the need for more mindful cooking practices, and lots of other things. While there are some valid reasons not to like this book, I think a reasonable number of them, though not all, boil down to lack of attention. And one can't really blame Le Guin for that.