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chu_totoro) wrote2009-03-04 07:32 pm
chu_totoro) wrote2009-03-04 07:32 pm
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The Left Hand of Darkness
So, in light of all my undoubtedly tedious emo posts of late, I’ve decided to post something a bit less depressing. Such as a book review! Oh, boy.
The Left Hand of Darkness by Ursula K. Le Guin.
The first thing I have to say is that I would not have finished this book without Saturday school. It’s the simple truth. I would read a little, read a little more, put it down, forget about it... it just did not grab me. It was interesting, but that was just that – I did not care enough about the characters to want to keep reading. And that’s my first problem with this book.
The beginning is too much worldbuilding. It’s too much politics. Le Guin creates definitely a very interesting place (this is sci-fi, so it’s set on another planet; in fact it’s about a galactic envoy going to this particular planet to try to convince them to join an intergalactic alliance), but there isn’t enough personality. Part of it may be because a lot of the people the narrator’s dealing with are aliens (of a sort), and so in the beginning, especially from the narrator’s POV, they are hard to place. Cold, impersonal. You can’t get a distinct sense of the person enough to care. But that’s not the crux of it. The main problem is that it is hard to care about the narrator himself. The tale is told in first-person by the envoy, for the most part, and it takes the form of the “report” of his mission, told in a story-like way. I think that may be part of the issue. His personality isn’t particularly distinct, and I get the feel of info-dumping, particularly in the earlier chapters. To put it succinctly, I did not really start to engross myself in this book until some real trouble happens to the envoy about 150 pages in, and I did not really start to like it until the journey across the snow, which takes place after that.
This is a roughly 300 page book. If it took 150 pages to get me interested, that’s a problem.
However, I will grant that after I finished the book (and really grew to like one of the other characters whilst reading the last 1/3rd of it), it was a lot more worthwhile to go back and chew on some of the stuff from the beginning. The first time through, though. blagh.
The first chapter is especially bad. I had a devil of a time with it because I would pick it up, read, and it was just so boring. Le Guin, as in her Earthsea series, tends to take a high-handed, loquacious tone of voice, and in this setting it becomes particularly rambly. Third person’s better for that, I think.
The second chapter is better. It’s a folktale from this ‘world’, and it fits better with her tone of voice, and is an interesting little tale of its own. She has tales like these spread out throughout the book, and they are fun little reads, but in terms of the beginning it’s still more or less worldbuilding. Further extrapolation on the world, of a sort.
Another slight issue I had with this book was POV jumping. It starts out, as I say, from the 1st person POV of the envoy (with some tales interspersed), which is clear enough. In chapter 6 it randomly jumps to 1st person Estraven with no prior notification and no clear indication whatsoever. In the beginning of the narrative he mentions that the cook shakes him, saying “wake up, wake up, Lord Estraven,” but after being so accustomed to the POV of the envoy, it really takes a while into the chapter before I realized that this was somebody else altogether. The rest of the chapters jump between the envoy, Estraven, folktales, and Estraven’s journal which is fairly straightforward as it’s in journal form. You get used to it, but I think it could have been done better.
The first person narrative style is also much the same. In general, Le Guin tends to be a storyteller, with ample description tempered by grandiose flow. It isn’t straight telling, like Card, it’s storytelling telling, which tends to feel very different. Characters tend to soliloquize (monologue-ize?) dialogue. They give grandiose mini-speeches a lot more than they talk true dialogue. For example, on p.85, when a group of Orgotans “discuss” the envoy, one bit of the “dialogue” runs as follows:
“I’d like to think that you’ve been too long with the madman in his palace and had gone mad yourself.... Name of Meshe! What’s this babble of alliances with the suns and treaties with the moon? How did the fellow come here, riding on a comet? Astride a meteor? A ship, what sort of ship floats on air? On void space? Yet you’re no madder than you ever were, Estraven, which is to say shrewdly mad, wisely mad. All Karhiders are insane. Lead on, my lord, I follow. Go on!”
(all ellipses are the author’s, not mine)
So you see, a lot of the dialogue tends to sound rather like monologue. Even the short dialogue is typically very elegant and succinct. That's not to say it’s a bad thing. In fact I personally rather like it, but either way I thought it was worth pointing out.
The last little pickle I have with this book is fantasized names. I don’t know, I can take them in reasonable quantity (Robin Hobb’s names never bother me, for example), but here they began to grate on me. Karhide, Orgota, Turuf, shifgrethor, presthry-hunter... too much! Too many consonants! All the days in Estraven’s records were Gethen days/months so it was all stuff like:
Guyrny Thanern. I yadda yadda yadda did such and such today.
Odsorsny Susmy. And today I did this.
Give me a break! Gives off that aura of trying-too-hard, you know? Even if they're on a different month/day cycle, I don't see the issue of putting "Day 1, Day 2, Day 3." Who cares if it ends on Day 18 instead of Day 31. I mean, if you've "translated" the rest of his journal, why not the dates?
Overall, this was not a bad book. I really loved the last third of it, and I think it is worth reading if you need to kill some time and have nothing better to do, but it is not a favorite nor do I rec it with particular relish. The world is great, it’s strange, it’s alien, but in general I found it too wordy; too much storytelling and not enough story, so to speak.
Other people may think differently, who knows. But I have to say I liked the Earthsea books more.
The Left Hand of Darkness by Ursula K. Le Guin.
The first thing I have to say is that I would not have finished this book without Saturday school. It’s the simple truth. I would read a little, read a little more, put it down, forget about it... it just did not grab me. It was interesting, but that was just that – I did not care enough about the characters to want to keep reading. And that’s my first problem with this book.
The beginning is too much worldbuilding. It’s too much politics. Le Guin creates definitely a very interesting place (this is sci-fi, so it’s set on another planet; in fact it’s about a galactic envoy going to this particular planet to try to convince them to join an intergalactic alliance), but there isn’t enough personality. Part of it may be because a lot of the people the narrator’s dealing with are aliens (of a sort), and so in the beginning, especially from the narrator’s POV, they are hard to place. Cold, impersonal. You can’t get a distinct sense of the person enough to care. But that’s not the crux of it. The main problem is that it is hard to care about the narrator himself. The tale is told in first-person by the envoy, for the most part, and it takes the form of the “report” of his mission, told in a story-like way. I think that may be part of the issue. His personality isn’t particularly distinct, and I get the feel of info-dumping, particularly in the earlier chapters. To put it succinctly, I did not really start to engross myself in this book until some real trouble happens to the envoy about 150 pages in, and I did not really start to like it until the journey across the snow, which takes place after that.
This is a roughly 300 page book. If it took 150 pages to get me interested, that’s a problem.
However, I will grant that after I finished the book (and really grew to like one of the other characters whilst reading the last 1/3rd of it), it was a lot more worthwhile to go back and chew on some of the stuff from the beginning. The first time through, though. blagh.
The first chapter is especially bad. I had a devil of a time with it because I would pick it up, read, and it was just so boring. Le Guin, as in her Earthsea series, tends to take a high-handed, loquacious tone of voice, and in this setting it becomes particularly rambly. Third person’s better for that, I think.
The second chapter is better. It’s a folktale from this ‘world’, and it fits better with her tone of voice, and is an interesting little tale of its own. She has tales like these spread out throughout the book, and they are fun little reads, but in terms of the beginning it’s still more or less worldbuilding. Further extrapolation on the world, of a sort.
Another slight issue I had with this book was POV jumping. It starts out, as I say, from the 1st person POV of the envoy (with some tales interspersed), which is clear enough. In chapter 6 it randomly jumps to 1st person Estraven with no prior notification and no clear indication whatsoever. In the beginning of the narrative he mentions that the cook shakes him, saying “wake up, wake up, Lord Estraven,” but after being so accustomed to the POV of the envoy, it really takes a while into the chapter before I realized that this was somebody else altogether. The rest of the chapters jump between the envoy, Estraven, folktales, and Estraven’s journal which is fairly straightforward as it’s in journal form. You get used to it, but I think it could have been done better.
The first person narrative style is also much the same. In general, Le Guin tends to be a storyteller, with ample description tempered by grandiose flow. It isn’t straight telling, like Card, it’s storytelling telling, which tends to feel very different. Characters tend to soliloquize (monologue-ize?) dialogue. They give grandiose mini-speeches a lot more than they talk true dialogue. For example, on p.85, when a group of Orgotans “discuss” the envoy, one bit of the “dialogue” runs as follows:
“I’d like to think that you’ve been too long with the madman in his palace and had gone mad yourself.... Name of Meshe! What’s this babble of alliances with the suns and treaties with the moon? How did the fellow come here, riding on a comet? Astride a meteor? A ship, what sort of ship floats on air? On void space? Yet you’re no madder than you ever were, Estraven, which is to say shrewdly mad, wisely mad. All Karhiders are insane. Lead on, my lord, I follow. Go on!”
(all ellipses are the author’s, not mine)
So you see, a lot of the dialogue tends to sound rather like monologue. Even the short dialogue is typically very elegant and succinct. That's not to say it’s a bad thing. In fact I personally rather like it, but either way I thought it was worth pointing out.
The last little pickle I have with this book is fantasized names. I don’t know, I can take them in reasonable quantity (Robin Hobb’s names never bother me, for example), but here they began to grate on me. Karhide, Orgota, Turuf, shifgrethor, presthry-hunter... too much! Too many consonants! All the days in Estraven’s records were Gethen days/months so it was all stuff like:
Guyrny Thanern. I yadda yadda yadda did such and such today.
Odsorsny Susmy. And today I did this.
Give me a break! Gives off that aura of trying-too-hard, you know? Even if they're on a different month/day cycle, I don't see the issue of putting "Day 1, Day 2, Day 3." Who cares if it ends on Day 18 instead of Day 31. I mean, if you've "translated" the rest of his journal, why not the dates?
Overall, this was not a bad book. I really loved the last third of it, and I think it is worth reading if you need to kill some time and have nothing better to do, but it is not a favorite nor do I rec it with particular relish. The world is great, it’s strange, it’s alien, but in general I found it too wordy; too much storytelling and not enough story, so to speak.
Other people may think differently, who knows. But I have to say I liked the Earthsea books more.