All posts tagged Winter

The Left Hand of Darkness by Ursula Le Guin (1969)

Lord Berosty rem ir Ipe came to Thangering Fastness and offered forty beryls and half the year’s yield from his orchards as the price of a Foretelling, and the price was acceptable.

Le Guin’s anthropological approach

This is the second Ursula Le Guin novel I’ve read and I’m beginning to realise why all the author blurbs, articles and essays about her tend to start with the fact that she was the daughter of an eminent anthropologist.

It’s because her books are interested in creating whole fictional societies – with languages, customs, social systems and networks and values different from ours – and then sending an outsider into them to explore them on our behalf.

These worlds are often, at root, so schematic that they are indeed like essays in sociology or politics or philosophy. This was very true of The Dispossessed, which amounted to a kind of thought experiment – what would happen if dissidents from an authoritarian capitalist system didn’t just leave their country, but left the entire planet to go and colonise another one, nearby, and set up a cash-free, government-free anarcho-syndicalist society?

To find out, let’s send an inhabitant of the poor but honest utopia back to the corrupt capitalist mother culture so that he (and the reader) can compare and contrast the two of them.

The Left Hand of Darkness dates from five years earlier, but the recipe is similar: imagine a planet with one dominating feature and two fully imagined and distinctive societies, then send in an outsider to explore it for us, report back to us, describe the climate and culture and customs and so on.

And that’s exactly what happens here. In this case it is the planet ‘Gethen’, which the first visitors from the Hainish Federation named Winter because it is, er, always winter – a deep freeze world, a world of snow and cold, ice and pine forests in the mist (and hence, we are informed, the sixty-two Karhidish words for different types and conditions of snow, p.169).

And so it is that the narrative of The Left Hand of Darkness consists of the reports of the envoy Genly Ai back to the Federation – or, to give it its proper name, the Ekumenical Scope.

Genly’s neat, chapter-sized reports are interspersed with folk tales and legends from Gethen which pad out our understanding of their people and folklore – and also the point of view of a completely different narrator, a high-born inhabitant of Gethen, Therem Harth rem ir Estraven, who gives his (or its – see below about hermaphroditism) own first-hand account of its adventures, which join up and then become utterly entwined with Genly’s.

Fantasy nomenclature

So I can see the fictional intention very clearly… but… but… I have real trouble buying into these fantasy novels.

The most obvious reason is the names. The names Le Guin gives planets, people and places and their customs are often so preposterous that I wonder if she’s daring people not to have a fit of the giggles.

Thus the envoy from the Ekumenical Scope is named Genly Ai, her initial contact at the court of King Argaven XV is Therem Harth rem ir Estraven, and the text sounds like this:

[My story] starts on the 44th diurnal of the Year 1491, which on the planet Winter in the nation Karhide was Odhar-hahad Tuwa or the twenty-second day of the third month of spring in the Year One. It is always the Year One here. Only the dating of every past and future year changes each New Year’s Day, as one counts backwards or forwards from the unitary Now. So it was spring of the Year One in Erhenrang, capital city of Karhide…

Ehrenrang. The book is absolutely crammed full of silly sci-fi fantasy names and people, and whether you take to it depends largely on whether you enjoy reading about made-up histories of made-up people with fake-exotic made-up names.

Estraven’s house, sign of the king’s high favor, was the Corner Red Dwelling, built 440 years ago for Harmes, beloved kemmering of Emran III, whose beauty is still celebrated, and who was abducted, mutilated, and rendered imbecile by hirelings of the Inner-land Faction.

As well as sounding plain silly, a more important issue I have with the names is their lack of depth. They all have an eerie sense of familiarity which, I think, is created by mashing up vague bastardised memories of medieval history, with exotic names which seem to have come out of the Central Asia of Genghiz Khan’s time. They all tremble on the edge of pastiche or parody.

‘You know that Karhide and Orgoreyn have a dispute concerning a stretch of our border in the high North Fall near Sassinoth. Argaven’s grandfather claimed the Sinoth Valley for Karhide, and the Commensals have never recognized the claim. A lot of snow out of one cloud, and it grows thicker. I’ve been helping some Karhidish farmers who live in the Valley to move back east across the old border, thinking the argument might settle itself if the Valley were simply left to the Orgota, who have lived there for several thousand years.’

The entire novel is written in this style, with this kind of clutter of faux-exotic names, all the way through, on every page. It’s not an original style. The names sound like they could come from Star Trek, the TV series of which came to an end the same year Left Hand of Darkness was published, 1969. (Top Star Trek enemies included the Klingons, the Cardassians, the Lore, the Romulans, the Holodeck, any of whom could step easily into this book.)

So the degree of your enjoyment will depend on how much imaginative energy you want to invest in characters with names like Ong Tot Oppong, Pemmer Harge rem ir Tibe and Lang Heo Hew. When I read about the summer palace at Warrever, I thought ‘whaddever’, indeed.

Hermaphroditism

Anyway, the regrettable thing is that – as in the Left Hand of Darkness – inextricably mixed up with the silly names are genuinely interesting ‘ideas’. The winter theme is developed up to a point, but far more dominant is the fact that all the inhabitants of Gethen are hermaphrodites. 

In her interest in sex and sex equality, Le Guin sometimes seems like a prophet of our own times, obsessed as we are with ‘gender’ and gender equality and gender issues and transgender rights and so on, and in this book she approaches it with characteristic thoroughness and imaginative depth.

Chapter Seven of the book is a report from another investigator from the Ekumen who, if I understand the dating system correctly, visited Gethen with the first landing party some 50 years before Genly, and wrote a thorough report on all aspects of the inhabitants’ hermaphroditism. Her name is Ong Tot Oppong (stop tittering at the back) but Le Guin’s working through of what a hermaphrodite society would really look and feel and think like makes for fascinating reading.

On the one hand there’s the biology – each Gethenite enters estrus for a week once every month, enters into a bond with another Gethenite, and then subtle hormonal changes decide which one will develop their latent male or female genitalia: everyone has them, it is in the subtle pair-bonding period that hormones decide which one will develop their genitals enough to be used. With the result that a Gethenite can both bear children and father children; may have borne children to one partner, but be father to the children of another partner. It matters not (her fake medieval style is catching) since the children (like the children in The Dispossessed) are taken away and raised communally.

Here, amid all the silly names and fantasy clutter, are some really thought-provoking ideas:

Consider: Anyone can turn his hand to anything. This sounds very simple, but its psychological
effects are incalculable. The fact that everyone between seventeen and thirty-five or so is liable to be (as Nim put it) ‘tied down to childbearing’, implies that no one is quite so thoroughly ‘tied down’ here as women, elsewhere, are likely to be – psychologically or physically. Burden and privilege are shared out pretty equally; everybody has the same risk to run or choice to make.

Consider: There is no division of humanity into strong and weak halves, protective / protected, dominant / submissive, owner / chattel, active / passive. In fact the whole tendency to dualism that pervades human thinking may be found to be lessened, or changed, on Winter.

The most striking speculation in this anthropologist’s report is that the absence of a fixed male or female gender may explain the absence of war, which can be seen as a vainglorious exaggeration of all the worst male characteristics (a theory attributed to the famous sociologist, Tumass Song Angot, p.96).

As in her treatment of an anarchist, egalitarian, propertyless society in The Dispossessed, Le Guin is excellent at thinking through her ideas to great depth and considering all their ramifications.

Thus her envoy gets caught up in the palace politics of Karhide (one of Gethen’s two major cultures) but the novel really binds and engrosses as we are drawn into his honest depiction of his confusion and difficulty in understanding such an alien condition – here, as in numerous other places, the anthropologist’s daughter is doing something really interesting.

Amazingly, by the end of the book, she has you seeing gendered human beings as the weird ones, with several of the intelligent Gethenites pointing out how tiresome, wearing and confusing it must be to be in heat all the time as humans, alone of all mammals, in fact are. In Gethenite society people in heat all the time are referred to as ‘perverts’ and the intelligent people Genly talks to find it hard to overcome their repulsion at the notion of humanoids living in such an icky, sticky condition.

Although, here again, with the best will in the world, I found myself stumbling over the way interesting ideas are inextricably tied up with ludicrous fantasy elements.

Take just the word Le Guin invents for the period during which Gethenite couples pair off – kemmering – it’s just one example of the many places where the high-minded thought experiments are undermined by the dubious or downright laughable words she coins.

At some moments, the narrative grips you as if they really were reports from a strange new world; but the next minute she gives out such an over-ripe burst of pseudo-medieval diction, or preposterous names, or silly made-up words, that I couldn’t help thinking about Monty Python and the Holy Grail.

About two hundred years ago in the Hearth of Shath in the Pering Storm-border there were two brothers who vowed kemmering to each other. In those days, as now, full brothers were permitted to keep kemmer until one of them should bear a child, but after that they must separate; so it was never permitted them to vow kemmering for life. Yet this they had done. When a child was conceived the Lord of Shath commanded them to break their vow and never meet in kemmer again.

‘And the Lord of Shath commandeth that thou shalt never kemmer again!’ – Imagine John Cleese saying it.

When Ai’s contact, Therem Harth rem ir Estraven, is banished for conspiring with the envoy – Genly Ai – to undermine the Kingdom of Karhide, Ai decides it’s also time to make himself scarce and so journeys into the mountains, faring through the passes of Wehoth, in the shadow of the Fastness of Ariskostor, in order to reach the Fastness of Otherhord, where dwell the nine legendary Foretellers of the Handdarra.

Is that anywhere near the Knights Who Say ‘Ni’, I wanted to ask.

That’s what the Yomeshta believe of Meshe: that he saw past and future clear, not for a moment, but all during his life after the Question of Shorth…

Ah, the Question of Shorth. Of course, the world-changing Question of Shorth.

I think that Tolkien is the lord and master of fantasy fiction because he was well aware that he was channelling the myths and legends of North Europe into fictional form and, crucially:

  1. He knew those myths and legends inside out (he translated many of them).
  2. He knew their languages.

The names in The Lord of The Rings have a just-so, just-right quality because Tolkien took many of them from existing Old English or Old German or Old Norse sources, and his intimate familiarity with the sources underpins every sentence.

Tolkien was a philologist by profession, and so his first study was words, words across the full range of Dark Age ad medieval Germanic languages, and so his use of words – and his invention of entire other languages, such as Elvish or Dwarvish – have a phenomenal amount of historical knowledge, authority and depth behind them.

With Le Guin and the hundreds of other authors who have written space fantasy, you have the opposite feeling: you get the sense that they’ve had this or that good idea for a planet (an egalitarian utopia, or a world of hermaphrodites, say) and have then mapped out a narrative which lets the protagonist explore the planet and its culture and customs in some depth – i.e. the ideas and the stories are often deeply worked out – and sometimes so thought-provoking as to be actually gripping…

But by lacking a profound rootedness in genuine myth and legend and, above all, by lacking a sure grasp of medieval languages, both the stories themselves and, above all, the names and the made-up words which play such a central role in sustaining belief in the made-up societies with their made-up customs, the words and names have a shallow, willed, at times laughable quality.

Long ago, before the days of King Argaven I who made Karhide one kingdom, there was blood feud between the Domain of Stok and the Domain of Estre in Kerm Land.

The Domain of Stok.

Eastern religion

In the first sentence of Le Guin’s encyclopedia entry it tells you not only about her 1. being the child of a leading anthropologist, 2. about her interest in ‘gender’ but that 3. she was interested in Eastern philosophy, specifically Taoism.

This is not exactly buried in her fiction – it’s upfront and obvious in both the books I’ve read. In The Dispossessed it is cleverly integrated into the story because the main character is a physicist thinking about the nature of time in a way which overlaps the hard equations of physics with mystical speculations about the nature of time and being.

Here, the Eastern interest felt less integrated, more of a bolt-on tourist feature. Genly Ai tells us that in the kingdom of Karhide are those who practice Handdara and that:

The Handdara is a religion without institution, without priests, without hierarchy, without vows, without creed; I am still unable to say whether it has a God or not. It is elusive. It is always somewhere else. Its only fixed manifestation is in the Fastnesses, retreats to which people may retire and spend the night or a lifetime…

I imagine the incorporation of pseudo-Eastern mysticism was one of the many elements which helped make The Left Hand of Darkness a cult classic in the late-1960s, and helped make Le Guin’s name as a kind of fantasy novelist for the Woodstock generation.

The book came out only a year after the Beatles went to stay with the Maharishi in Rishikesh, and the mystical chapters don’t hold back.

A hundred yards beyond him stood another statue, in blue and white; this one never moved or glanced our way all the time we talked with the first one. They were practicing the Handdara discipline of Presence, which is a kind of trance – the Handdarata, given to negatives, call it an untrance – involving self-loss through extreme sensual receptiveness and awareness. Though the technique is the exact opposite of most techniques of mysticism it probably is a mystical discipline, tending towards the experience of Immanence;

Or as George Harrison once said: ‘What is here is elsewhere, what is not here is nowhere.’

Or as Jeff Beck put it: ‘You’re everywhere and nowhere, baby – that’s where you’re at.’

I suppose that – as with the exploration of the anarcho-syndicalism in The Dispossessed – if this was the first place that you ever came across these Eastern and mystical ideas, then the book would make a deep impact on you, might become a kind of bible of new ideas for the impressionable schoolchild or student.

And at some moments the book does, in fact, express these and related ideas in powerful imaginative settings (amid fantasy mountain fastnesses, full of weird asexual monks), and gives some of the characters interesting and serious things to say:

‘The unknown, the unforetold, the unproven, that is what life is based on. Ignorance is the ground of thought. Unproof is the ground of action.’

But… but… When she describes the frenzied conclave of the filthy, possessed Foretellers of Otherhord, and the way the one in kemmer paws the other one, while those around screech their prophesy… My imaginative bond with the narrative snaps. The Domain of Stok, I think: Is that anywhere near the Fastness of Oxo?

Bible diction

One of the most irritating aspects of this kind of fantasy fiction is the way it shamelessly pastiches the diction of the King James translation of the Bible, on the assumption that readers will find it ‘profound’ and archaic and deep.

Being more familiar with the original King James text than with fantasy fiction, I can’t help finding all these efforts cheap and tacky, a quick-fix way of trying to win respect for the ‘depth’ of your fake folk tales or imaginary myths. Here’s a ripe slice of fake Bible from one of the ‘Gethenite legends’ which are interpolated throughout the text:

When Ennoch was an old man dwelling in the plains of Rer he met a man from his own country, and asked him, ‘How fares Shath Domain?’ The other told him that Shath fared ill. Nothing prospered there in hearth or tilth, all being blighted with illness, the spring seed frozen in the ground or the ripe grain rotten, and so it had been for many years. Then Ennoch told him, ‘I am Getheren of Shath’, and told him how he had gone up on the Ice and what he had met with there. At the end of his tale he said, ‘Tell them at Shath that I take back my name and my shadow.’ Not many days after this Getheren took sick and died. The traveler carried his words back to Shath, and they say that from that time on the domain prospered again, and all went as it should go in field and house and hearth. (p.25)

This is just a ridiculous pastiche of the Old Testament. Ennoch indeed. Any relation to the Biblical Enoch, by any chance? And yet, there is, as a glance at the jam-packed fantasy shelves in any bookshop will show, an enduring audience for this kind of would-be profound, pastiche Bible, fake medieval diction.

‘Seven years we were kemmerings, and had two sons. Being of his flesh born they had his name Foreth rem ir Osboth, and were reared in that Clanhearth. Three years ago he had gone to Orgny Fastness and he wore now the gold chain of a Celibate of the Foretellers.’

‘Being of his flesh born.’

Another example of the way this kind of fiction piggy-backs on the genuine otherness of Christianity, particularly Dark Age and medieval Christianity, is the way the clock is divided into First Hour, Second Hour, Third Hour etc, all announced with great seriousness, as if they weren’t a blatant rip-off of the liturgical hours of Matins, Lauds, Prime, Terce, Sext, None and so on. As if the ideas of mountain fastnesses where monks and holy men practice strange rites wasn’t entirely ripped off from more serious and worthy religions, ripped out of context and sellotaped into narratives about spaceships and alien envoys.

The book has a three-page appendix explaining in detail the period of Gethen’s orbit around its sun (8406 Standard Terran Hours), its daily orbit, the period of rotation of Gethen’s moon (26 days, in case you need to know), the Day and then the meaning of the Hours. Onnetherhad, the 18th of the month (p.61) (The Gethenites often think in terms of 13s, 26s and so on, a function of the lunar calendar, p.170).

I couldn’t help thinking, again and again, that this kind of fantasy fiction wants the praise and profundity of real myth and real religion – it borrows the clothes of the Bible and of pagan myth – without asking the reader to engage with any of the difficulty and the actual strangeness of genuine pagan myth – the difficulty of reading the strange and obscure Prose Edda, for example – or of the difficult doctrines of Christianity.

At its worst, it is a Big Mac version of religion and mysticism – cheap and garish and thin and insubstantial.

A universe of human

Unrelated to its rip-off of religious diction, there is another deeper problem with reading all sci fi stories of this ilk – which is the notion that humans, more or less like us, could be inhabiting numerous other planets around the universe.

The odds against there being loads of other planets inhabited by humanoid creatures are immense, and the odds against them being exactly the same shape and size and talking, and talking languages which we can learn pretty easily, are ridiculous.

Apparently, elsewhere in the ‘Hainish Cycle’ of novels and stories she is explicit that the Hain are the oldest of all the inhabited peoples and they populated the other planets with humans like themselves. We really are all descended from one mother race. I like science fiction, so I like that as a sci fi idea, but it doesn’t quite totally get her off the hook. Having set out to be a ‘serious’ author and put forward ‘serious’ ideas, invites the fairly obvious thought humanoids ‘seeded’ across a wide variety of planets, millions of years ago, would in fact have evolved in all kinds of directions, into different shapes and abilities, and over one million years would have lost anything they’d originally had in common. Compare aborigenes and Indonesians whose lineages diverged only tens of thousands of years ago. A million years divergence would result in wild differences.

And yet, in the novels, the only difference between these races from different planets is some are a bit taller, some a bit shorter, some a bit hairier, some a bit smoother, than the others. they all basically think and speak and act alike, in fact they’ve got more in common than the inhabitants of the diverse London borough I live in (with its population of Asians, Tamils, Sikhs, Muslims, Chinese, Somalis and Eritreans, Nigerians and West Indians).

The plot

Terran envoy Genly Ai has been sent by the Ekumenical Scope to explain to the king of Karhide, one of the several kingdoms on Gethen, that there is a universe of inhabited planets out there, organised into the Ekumen, and they wish to introduce the inhabitants of Gethen to it.

But King Argaven XV is mad. Genly has been working through the King’s Minister (known as the King’s Ear) Therem Harth rem ir Estraven. But the king doesn’t believe there is intelligent life in outer space and so thinks Ai is a spy and Estraven is conspiring with him to overthrow him, the king. So the king banished Estraven who packs his bags and heads east to the rival country of and Ai, after an edgy interview with the mad king, also realises it’s time to leave and himself travels to Orgoreyn.

He travels over the high snowy mountains where he makes a detour to witness the famous Foretellers in action – a chaotic shaman performance involving half madmen, but which does climax with an answer he set them: will Gethen be in the Ekumen within five years? The answer is Yes.

Estraven is replaced by the king’s cousin Pemmer Harge rem ir Tibe and when it is announced that King Argaven XV is pregnant it begins to look like a coup by Tibe.

Meanwhile, Ai is received by the Orgata authorities and impressed by the quickness and efficiency of its bureaucracy and the orderliness of its countryside and capital city. Ai gives a dry factual anthropological report on their habits, especially their child-rearing, and how, since everything is owned and run by the state, there is full employment. The Orgata are very different from the Karhiders:

Orgota, people trained from birth in a discipline of cooperation, obedience, submission to a group purpose ordered from above. The qualities of independence and decision were weakened in them. They had not much capacity for anger. (p.173)

He is placed in the enthusiastic hands of Commissioner Shusgis. To his surprise, at a banquet, he finds himself sitting next to Esraven. Estraven had quite a torrid time of it after he left the court, working his way along the coast as a lowly fish-worker, until spotted and picked up by the Orgata authorities.

There are complicated manoeuvres between characters, but basically none of the Orgatas believe Ai and she is abruptly arrested one night, after having been a guest a a government feast, taken to a big prison, injected with truth drugs and interrogated for days.

When she comes to she is one among 26 or so prisoners, stripped naked, covered in vomit and faces, trapped in the sealed metal back of some horse-drawn cart which spends days and days climbing higher into the mountains, with no food, and only a jar of water once a day between them, as one by one they die off or huddle together for filthy body warmth.

Genly arrives at a labour camp up in the frozen snowy north – the so-called Pulefen Farm – and describes the brutal regime, lack of food, sleeping facilities etc. It is clearly a pastiche of a Soviet labour camp, but without the dignity or authority of being real. For real descriptions of labour camps, read:

Estraven, back in the Orgata capital of Mishnory, having noticed Ai’s disappearance and realised the sceptics on the Grand Commensal didn’t believe his story and so probably also think Estraven must be some kind of traitor in league with him – decides to sneak out of Mishnory.

This he does, fabricating a pass as the fishermen he spent some time with showed him. He buys a sledge and food and joins a trapping party heading north, but then ducks out and off to the labour camp where he has discovered Ai is being held.

And he rescues him. He changes his papers to those of a prison guard, is accepted at the camp and learns the chores and routine, then one night stuns Ai’s (already sleeping unconscious) body, claims he’s dead so as to get past several sets of guards, then invokes the mystical strength, the dothe which adepts at Handdara can call on, to carry Ai’s body to the sledge he’s hidden in the forest, complete with tent and provisions.

Over the next few days both of them recover in the tent, eating the food, lighting small fires, sleeping, and then… the rescue turns into the largest single section of the book, the last third or so, occupying pages 190 to 290 of the 300-page SF Masterworks paperback.

Genly having handed over his ansible, the only way he has of contacting the Ekumenical spaceship which is out in space waiting a message from him – over to Orgata officials, and having been stripped absolutely naked before being shipped off to the labour camp; and Estraven having rescued him but himself now at risk of arrest for disappearing from official view in Mishnore, let alone helping Geny escape…

The only thing for this unlikely and reluctant pair to do is to embark on a massive, heroic, epic seventy-five day hike across the ice caps of Gethen, experiencing blizzards, snowstorms, slippery glaciers and treacherous crevices, by day strapped up to the sledge bearing all their kit, by night huddled in a small (but conveniently hi-tech and efficient) tent, round the (conveniently small, light and durable heater-cum-stove) warming up the (conveniently freeze-dried and light, nutritious) food blocks in a pan of warmed ice.

his is the core of the book, its narrative but especially its emotional core because, mirabile dictu, what happens is Genly finds himself falling in love with Estraven; while Estraven undergoes kemmering during the epic journey and delicately tells Genly he must avoid contact with him.

Both characters, therefore, undergo feelings and emotions quite outside the limit of human experience. Suddenly – as in the final sections of The Dispossessed – finally, you feel you’ve arrived at the core of a far more serious and searching and mysterious and wonderful work of fiction than the opening sections suggested.

Le Guin’s hand-drawn map of Gethen showing the two main states of Orgoreyn and Karhide, and the (top left) route of Genly and Estraven’s trek across the ice

The long journey and the shared privations, risks, fears and experiences of extreme cold, frostbite, snowstorms and so on which the pair experience together are the heart of the book.

The silly names fade away, for the pair could be sledging across Antarctica or Canada or Siberia. What is weird and wonderful is that Le Guin draws you into the eerie possibility of a previously unknown, unnamed emotion felt between a male human and a hermaphrodite alien. The book takes you to an entirely new place never before explored in literature. This is why it won prizes and made her name, not for the tiresome fol-de-rol about Ennoch of Rer and the Indwellers of Otherhord.

So deep does the pair’s suffering and endurance go, that Genly offers to teach Estraven the off-world skill of telepathy and after many failed attempts, finally manages to speak directly into the latter’s head – although, in a moment which is clearly meant to be deeply moving – he speaks in the voice of Estraven’s long-lost, estranged and dead younger brother – causing the Gethenite to shout with terror.

Eventually the pair survive their immense ordeal and come down into the villages of northern Karhide where they are made welcome in the way of all travellers in folk stories. good honest yeomen who don’t have much but share what they have with an open heart. Ooo-ar.

Except that the kindly old man who gives them shelter in fact betrays them to the Karhide authorities and Estraven, unwisely, tries to make a run for it on his skis across the snowy landscape.

He is shot down at the border by Karhidish gaurds who have been tipped off. As in a thousand buddy, adventure and war movies, his friend and – at least in emotional terms – his lover, the bewildered Genly, skis up just in time to hold Estraven’s gashed body as the Gethenite breathes his last.

Shocked and stunned, Genly is taken off by the guards to Ehrenrang, where he is treated kindly, given a personal doctor, lots of food and then meets the king again. This time they believe him, and he signals his spaceship to land.

Like so many voyagers to distant lands he now finds the appearance of his gendered colleagues – half tall and deep-voiced, half shorter and light-voiced – repulsive. This notion, of the traveller who has stayed so long with another race that he now finds his own people repulsive, dates back at least as far as Gulliver’s Travels, at the end of which, after living among the peaceful horse-like creatures for so long Gulliver finds he can’t stand the sight of his own hairy, savage brethren. And that was back in 1726. Two hundred and fifty three years before the Left Hand of Darkness was published.

As so often with genre fiction, with sci fi or fantasy, they sell themselves as being somehow bold new innovations and exciting new ideas – but they are, in fact, old old old fictional ideas, deliberately told in an old old old fake-Bible, faux-medieval diction.

Glossary

I compiled a glossary, for my own reference and to get an in-depth feel for the made-up vocabulary.

Places

  • Ekumenical Scope – name of the federation of 83 inhabited planets (p.34)
  • Ehrenrang – capital of Karhide
  • Gethen – planet the book is set on
  • Hain –  the Prime World of the Ekumenical Scope (p.37)
  • Karhide – one of the nations of Gethen
  • Kerm Land
  • Kuseben on the Gulf, 85 miles from Ehrenrang (p.72)
  • Mishnory – capital of Orgereyn
  • Orgny Fastness – there are lots of fastnesses, remote communities up in the mountains
  • Orgoreyn – Karhide’s rival and neighbour: Orgota, adjective meaning of Orgoreyn
  • Otherhord – where the Indwellers of Otherhord live
  • the Pering Stormborder
  • Sassinoth – disputed location between Karhide and Orgoreyn
  • Terra – earth

Names

  • the Foretellers – go into a kind of trance and can tell the future
  • Genly Ai – Ekumen envoy to Gethen and main narrator of the story
  • halfdeads – Karhidish slang for the infertile
  • Handdara – mystical religion – Handdarata – followers of Handdara
  • the Indwellers or Otherhord
  • King Argaven XV of Karhide
  • Lord Meshe – figurehead of the Yomeshta, born 2,202 years ago (p.47) founder of the Yomesh cult (p.60)
  • the Lord of Shorth – come on, everyone knows who the Lord of Shorth is
  • Commensal Obsle –
  • Ong Tot Oppong – undercover Ekumenical visitor to Gethen, who compiles a detailed report on the natives’ hermaphroditism
  • Pemmer Harge rem ir Tibe – King Argaven’s cousin, takes over running Karhide
  • Stabile – the Stabiles are the senior officials of the Ekumen who Ai reports back to (p.16)
  • Therem Harth rem ir Estraven – formerly chief minister to King Argaven, goes into exile and narrates a number of the chapters
  • Yegey –

Things

  • amha – parent in the flesh (p.92)
  • ansible – instant communicator owned by Hainish envoys, explained on page 37
  • Commensals – the Great Commensality of Orgoreyn is divided into 33 commensals or districts
  • dothe-strength cf thangen-sleep – deep sleep, ‘the dark sleep’, after you’ve willed a period of dothe-strength (p.196)
  • farfetching – Hainish word for training given to envoys in forming a holistic picture of the society they’re investigating (p.146)
  • foray – Getheian word for attack, violence
  • gossiwor – musical instrument played in royal processions
  • kemmer – process of sexualisation and emotional attachment which allows Gethenians to mate;
    • secher – first phase of kemmer
    • thorharmen – second phase of kemmer
    • thokemmer – culminant phase of kemmer
    • oskyommer – vowing kemmering to another Gethenian
  • the kyorremy , the upper chamber or parliament in Karhide which Estraven heads
  • lifewater – a drink (p.84), ‘a fierce licquor’ (p.134)
  • mind-speech – telepathy, brought to Terra by Rokkanians, according to Genly
  • nusuth – no matter, the wilful wish for ignorance among the Handdara
  • orsh – ‘a brown, sweetsour drink, strong in vitamins A and C, sugar, and a pleasant stimulant related to lobeline’
  • sarf – gutter Orgata meaning ‘trash’
  • shifgrethor – prestige, place, pride (p.13)
  • thore-forest – deep snowy pine forest

Throw it together and you get things like:

‘I’m a Yomeshta, praise to the nine hundred Throne-Upholders and blest be the Milk of Meshe, and one can be a Yomeshta anywhere. We’re a lot of newcomers, see, for my Lord Meshe was born 2,202 years-ago, but the Old Way of the Handdara goes back ten thousand years before that.’

Credit

The Left Hand of Darkness by Usrula Le Guin was published by Ace Books in 1969. All references are to the 2017 SF Masterworks paperback edition.

Related links

Science fiction reviews

Leave a comment
by Simon on December 3, 2019  •  Permalink
Posted in Books, Novel, Science Fiction
Tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

Posted by Simon on December 3, 2019

https://astrofella.wordpress.com/2019/12/03/the-left-hand-of-darkness-ursula-le-guin/

Winter by Len Deighton (1987)

‘And how would Himmler benefit?’
‘If Fritsch went, the Reihsführer-SS would also take the opportunity to extend his powers.’
‘Himmler, extend his powers? My God, the fellow has taken over all the police forces in Germany. And now he’s expanded this SS army of his to two regiments, plus a combat-engineer company and a communications unit.’ (Winter p.339)

‘I like diagrams.’ (Len Deighton, interview January 2014)

The Deighton Dossier seems to be the main site on the internet dedicated to Len and his work and contains lots of fascinating material, including a bunch of interviews from recent years. Reading through these one thing comes over loud and clear, which is Len’s fascination with technology. Whether it’s the early computers and word processors he wrote his novels on (an interest crystallised in Billion Dollar Brain, which is about a vast super-computer), or the technical histories of tanks and warplanes which are at the heart of his two classic history books (Blitzkrieg and Fighter), Len is warmly sympathetic to the designers and engineers who overcame practical obstacles with inventiveness and creativity (and often critical of the politicians and senior civil servants who frequently made a complete shambles of deploying these wonderful machines).

This knowledge of Len’s profound interest in engineering, design, diagrams, maps, charts and technical details coloured my reading of Winter. This is by far Len’s longest book, an ‘epic’ novel describing the lives, loves and destinies of several German families – the wealthy parents, the sons and daughters, the husbands and wives, the friends and relations – from 1899 to 1945 ie through the Great War, the Weimar Republic, the rise of Hitler and World War Two.

Winter is very readable, being written in Len’s characteristic no-nonsense, factual style. It is packed to the gills with eye-witness accounts of world important historical moments and never misses an opportunity to reference the key technical, military, political and cultural events at each stage of the story. And this is part of the problem. It feels too schematic. Information trumps character.

Plot

Prosperous German industrialist Harry Winter has an American wife, Victoria Rensselaer, a mistress in Vienna and two blonde sons, Peter (b.1896) and Paul, born on the first day of the new century. The text jumps briskly between snapshots of key events in their lives, the chapters simply named after the relevant years (1899, 1900, 1906, 1908 etc).

We read about their privileged childhood in the Edwardian years and move swiftly to the outbreak of the Great War and their differing careers as soldiers. While slim elegant Peter remains an aloof officer, stocky clumsy Pauli serves in the trenches and, on one fateful occasion, breaks the rules to visit his brother behind the lines. This breach of discipline could be punished by death but instead he is consigned to a punishment battalion, then to a stormtrooper unit, which turns him a hardened fighter.

In the chaos of post-war Germany Paul finds himself drawn into the Freikorps, the anarchic militias of generally right-wing soldiers, formed to combat the communists in the street battles which shook many German cities. We meet Pauli’s friend Alex Horner; their tough bastard NCO, Brand, who helps get Pauli punished and then becomes a rising star in the Nazi movement; another tough soldier, Graf, who goes on to become a power in the Sturmabteilung.

We also meet Victoria’s American family, her father Cyrus and her adventurous brother, Glenn. One summer, back when the boys were still small the dinghy they were learning to sail in was blown out to sea, they both pitched over board and were likely to drown until saved by the rough, crude, son of a local pig farmer, Fritz Esser. Their paths are to cross and cross again as Esser also becomes a power in the Nazi Party, rising to become a senior adviser to Heinrich Himmler.

We meet the three pretty daughters of Frau Wisliceny: Inge worships Peter but Peter loves Lisl but Lisl marries Erich Hennig, the smarmy boy who rivals Peter at their shared skill of piano playing. Peter then breaks Inge’s heart by marrying an American woman (like his mother), Lottie Danziger, daughter of an American Jewish businessman. Inge, after years of mourning this decision, to everyone’s surprise abruptly marries the other brother, Pauli, in a whirlwind romance. Her support helps Pauli through his training as a lawyer and then as his early contacts with the Nazis evolve into full-time employment as a senior Nazi lawyer. Much later, disillusioned and cynical, she has a prolonged adulterous affair with Fritz Esser.

Problems

There is no denying the range of characters and the cleverness of the network of relationships Deighton builds up between them. It is a phenomenal feat of planning to map out the lives not only of the main players but of the thirty or so minor characters whose paths cross and recross the central narrative, and to dovetail all of them with the complex political events of these fraught years.

There is no denying Deighton’s extraordinarily detailed knowledge of the period, his grasp of the political, military and technological developments year by year, the sheer depth of his research. If Len says the weather was terrible on Sunday April 10 1932, the day of the second presidential election, with pelting rain in Berlin (p.271), then you can bet the house this was the case and that Len has checked and double checked it. But:

a) Overfamiliarity

I did the rise of Hitler for O-Level 40 years ago. My son did it for GCSE 3 years ago. My daughter is doing it this year. We are in the middle of the 100 year commemorations of the Great War, with the BBC and umpteen other outlets following the events day by day. A month ago was the 70th anniversary of VE Day, with ceremonies involving the Queen, and all autumn there are shows around the country involving flypasts of the remaining World War Two planes. All these events are marked by TV, radio, newspaper and magazine coverage. In other words – the political and military events surrounding the build up to, and the prosecution of, the First and Second World Wars, must be the most intensively written-about and repeatedly dramatised, described, raked over and discussed historical period in our culture. It is a very very familiar story.

b) Overschematic

This tends to give the entire narrative an inevitable, predictable character. It is 1908, so the characters are at the Baltic Sea watching the Kaiser’s fleet of Dreadnoughts and wondering about German’s naval rivalry with Britain. July 1914? The characters are feeling tense about Russia’s mobilisation; surely this Balkan nonsense will blow over. Spring 1918? Could the two boys in different parts of the German Army be about to be swept up in the German Spring Offensive? Yep. Christmas 1918? Is it all over, and our boys are eye witnesses to German society collapsing into chaos with the Army fighting communist insurgents on the street. 1924? Are we going to learn how the Winter family has survived the appalling hyperinflation (very well) and their views on Hitler’s 1923 Munich Putsch? Yes. 1929, could one of the characters be directly involved in the Wall Street Crash (yes, old man Danziger (Peter’s father-in-law) who commits suicide when he loses everything).

The new trends and fashions sweeping Europe? Let’s give Pauli a glitzy birthday party featuring young women sporting the new ‘flapper’ look and a band playing the new ‘jazz’ music. Does the novel need insight into the extraordinary cultural turmoil and creativity of the era? Let’s have Peter the piano-playing Army officer very unexpectedly get a job playing piano for Bertolt Brecht’s theatre company, so he can tell stories about Brecht’s genius at directing and play the latest numbers written by Kurt Weill. Hey, here’s a new one called Mack the Knife!

And so it goes on in a rather inevitable way, perilously close to a dramatisation of the BBC Bitesize guide to German history. 1930 election giving the Nazis 100 seats in the Reichstag? The characters express their various levels of disbelief. 1933 election of Hitler as Chancellor? In various conversations the characters react. Pauli is an eye-witness to the Night of the Long Knives in July 1934: he personally accompanies Hitler, Goebbels and others to the hotel where Röhm and the other SA leaders are hiding out; he gives legal advice about how the sentencing and execution can be speeded up and then he watches his old colleague from the War, Graf, be shot by firing squad.

Indeed the two brothers, Peter and Paul, have an uncanny knack for being in exactly the right place at the right time. When the Army is ordered to storm the Kaiser’s Palace in Berlin to evict the drunken sailors who have taken it over (1919), Pauli is at hand to persuade big, bear-like Fritz Esser to leave the sailors who he’s spent most of the war promoting communist propaganda among, and to join Pauli and his fellow officer Alex Horner, in the new right-wing Freikorps.

This latter incident is typical of the way you feel the characters are manipulated to fit the events. I found it frankly unbelievable that Esser, the angry, illiterate son of the village pig man who’s spent most of the war as a communist agent provocateur, could be persuaded to abandon his comrades at the moment of their greatest peril to go on a Berlin pub crawl with Pauli and then, what the hell, join the proto-Fascist Freikorps. Once the deed is done he swiftly rises to become the Adjutant and admin to the Berlin Freikorps commander and, further down the line, right hand man to Heinrich Himmler.

This is phenomenally convenient to the narrative because it means Fritz can drop into Pauli’s apartment at will for the rest of the novel and tell him the latest about senior Nazi machinations, for example Himmler’s consolidation of power via the SS. Much later it allows him to spell out the tentative peace feelers Himmler puts out towards the end of the war, and the various unsuccessful conspiracies to assassinate the Führer.

Fitz’s repeated visits are given the fictional pretext of him having a long-running affair with Pauli’s wife, Inge. Maybe so. The affair is fairly well portrayed or repeatedly described – but I didn’t believe in it half as much as I believed Fritz’s insights into political and historical events, which seemed immediate and convincing. Information trumps character.

No doubt people’s beliefs were fluid in this chaotic period and real people did make astonishing and unexpected changes of belief and loyalty. But you expect a novel to explore the psychology of these characters, of their allegiances and beliefs. You could argue that a novel is useful insofar as it sheds light on the minds of others. This novel doesn’t do that so much. The characters are dexterously moved and manipulated to allow us to be eye witnesses to key events, and to witness the changing political currents of the period. Their motivation, their psychology, comes second.

Early in the novel we see how the brothers’ father, Harald Winter the banker, gains a parcel of land in Bavaria after the suicide of a Jew who owed the bank money. Anybody who knows about the subject will smile when they read it is near the pretty village of Berchesgarten, because we know this is where Hitler was to build his rural Bavarian hideaway. And sure enough, 300 pages later, Pauli and Peter are invited, along with his other neighbours, for an audience at Hitler’s house, after the Nazi Party has gained its first big election victory. Paul and Inge go so we can get a first-hand account of Hitler’s rambling speeches and compulsive mannerisms. But – true to the schematic, diagrammatic nature of the narrative – Peter refuses to go on the insistence of his Jewish wife, Lottie.

One brother has married Jew, one has married Aryan, with predictable divergence of destinies: German Inge insists Hitler’s speeches are all hot air designed to appeal to the sentimental German soul; Lottie the Jewess says, ‘But can’t you hear the genuine hatred of the Jews in his speeches?’ It is a problem that the different views don’t have the same imaginative weight: we overwhelmingly know which one was right, there is no imaginative freedom to choose between characters, the weight of history presses us down on one side.

Schematic conversations

Thus too many conversations relate schematically to the timeline and bear little relation to either the characters or to how people actually talk. ‘Have you heard about the Munich Beerhall Putsch?’ ‘You mean the attempt by the crazy man Adolf Hitler and his Nazi party to take over the regional government by force? Thank goodness it failed and he and all his colleagues were arrested!’ ‘Yes, but did you hear he wasn’t sentenced to hard labour, the judge gave him a six month sentence in good conditions and I hear he is dictating his masterwork, Mein Kampf which will set out his core beliefs and ideas for a Nazi-run Germany!’ That’s a caricature but lots of the conversations veer in that direction:

‘Pauli couldn’t come. Pauli’s packing to go off to Vienna…’
‘Vienna? So the Anschluss is happening?’
‘At dawn tomorrow, our troops cross the border. Please God the Austrians don’t start shooting.’ (p.342)

Or sound like Wikipedia articles rewritten into dialogue.

‘They’re not tanks at all,’ complained von Kleindorf, thumping the thin steel of the PzKw IA with his fist. ‘Five metres long, and armed with nothing better than a couple of machine guns. The damned thing only weighs six tons!’ (p.346)

Moral development

Literature courses teach that the classic novel deals with ‘morality’ and this long novel shows in detail how people lived under the Nazis and came to accommodations with them or thrived. One aspect of the novel is to suggest to the reader how any of us would continue to live, seek promotion or take opportunities under a regime which leads us step by step into horror.

The main vehicle for this ‘moral’ thread is Paul, initially the hesitant, clumsy, younger son, who ends up becoming a proficient lawyer and, when his lay clients dry up a bit, takes on work for the local Nazi office in Berlin and finds himself becoming more and more indispensable.

It is Paul who suggests how Hitler can concentrate power in his hands after the death of President Hindenburg by leaving the office of President permanently vacant and superseding it with office of Führer. It is Pauli who devises a short form of sentencing for the SS executioners to quickly mutter before they murder the top brass of the SA in the Night of The Long Knives. And then, very casually, it is mentioned that it is the quiet, patient lawyer Pauli who writes a paper suggesting that the newly formed concentration camps could and should become economically self-sufficient – which helps spur the organisational structure and purpose of the camps right across Europe.

And, in the only really chilling moment of the novel (I have read too many books and seen too many movies about the Holocaust or the fighting in Russia to be shocked by many of this book’s revolting details) Pauli admits that he was only able to prevent Peter’s Jewish wife Lottie being sent to a concentration camp by swapping her identity papers with his father – Harald’s – Jewish mistress in Vienna, Martha. In an electrifying scene Pauli is forced to admit what he has done to his own father who, with hatred in his voice, bans him for the family house or from ever visiting him again.

In such a vast and compendious novel other readers may well find scenes which horrify and move them, but that one did it for me.

Narrative voice

Deighton’s Bernard Samson spy novels are so enjoyable because they are told in the first person in a voice which is persuasively warm and human (lots of stuff about his wife and kids and sister-in-law etc), ironic and questioning (about his espionage work) and, from time to time, dryly funny (especially about his dim Oxbridge bosses). The convoluted plots are – for me – secondary to this very readable voice and to the reassuringly familiar, sitcom-ish quality of the small group of bickering characters who crop up in each book. If the novels are sometimes rather dry and lacking in emotion and depth, well, that can be put down to the narrator’s costive character.

It is in novels told in the third person that Deighton’s lack of interest in the subtlety of human psychology becomes a bit more obvious. In Goodbye, Mickey Mouse, whereas the technical descriptions of the American fighter pilots, procedures and planes are totally convincing, the main emotional relationships – between Jamie Farebrother and his father, and Jamie and his lover – are contrived and unconvincing, and Deighton’s attempts to bring them out, to describe them and extract from them generalisations about human nature, a little trite and superficial.

This novel, Winter, falls into the second camp, the factually super-researched, emotionally underpowered third-person narratives: fascinating in their skilled retelling of technical and historical detail, reassuringly familiar in ticking off all those GCSE Important Dates – often weak in terms of human psychology and characterisation.

Characters from the Bernard Samson books

Winter has the added attraction for Deighton fans of being the fourth in the series of novels about jaded spy Bernard Samson. As the story unfolds we read, with a thrill of recognition, names of characters we have come to know very well in the first trilogy of Samson novels, because we are reading about their parents.

Thus Harald Winter has married into the Rensselaer family, which makes Veronica’s brother, Glenn, Peter and Paul’s uncle. But it is another branch of the family we’re interested in, for when Glenn and Veronica’s mother dies, their father marries again, and it is one of the step-mother’s three children who has a child who will become the Bret Rensselaer who features so prominently in the Samson novels.

It is a thunderbolt when Samson’s father, Brian, makes his first appearance as an enthusiastic young intelligence officer on page 275. He goes on to play a more and more prominent role in the story as he is put in charge of Peter Winter. Peter had been visiting America at the outbreak of the war, is marooned there for years but, at the prompting of his uncle Glenn Rensselaer, agrees to work for the Allies and so is parachuted back into Germany just before the end of the war as an agent for British Intelligence, supervised by Bernard’s dad!

Similarly, as soon as the character Erich Hennig is introduced and becomes an item with Lisl Wisliceny, I realised she is the old lady, Tante Lisl, who Samson stays with whenever he’s visiting Berlin (in the spy trilogy), because it is in her house that his father set up shop immediately at war’s end, was married and raised young Bernard. The scenes of elegant salons, parties and piano recitals which we witness in this novel are her backstory which is referred to in the trilogy.

Another major character in the Samson stories is the German Jew, Werner Volkmann, Samson’s oldest friend. In Winter we follow the tribulations of his father, a fashionable dentist, who sees his practice destroyed by the Nazi boycott and who only survives by the slenderest of margins, becoming a gravedigger in Berlin’s Jewish cemetery, a job no Gentile will do, which ensures his survival.

In fact, it is through old man Volkmann’s eyes that we see the final Russian push into the heart of Berlin, and the terrifying arbitrariness of total war, as his colleagues decide to walk towards the advancing Russian infantry waving a home-made red flag – and are promptly machine gunned and run over by the advancing communists – whereas Volkmann simply sets off home to his wife and young children and himself only escapes an encounter with one of the last-minute SS execution squads because their officer happened to have his teeth fixed by Volkmann 20 years earlier, in the peaceful Weimar days. In increasingly horrifying examples, the novel powerfully demonstrates that it is by such slender threads that our fragile destinies dangle.

Unlike the rather heavy inevitability of the Political Chronology, these touches and flashing insights into the back stories of characters from the Samson novels are unexpected and delightful, giving a distinct layer of pleasure and enjoyment to what is a very enjoyable but very long and too-often wooden narrative.

Conclusion

It’s a challenging book – long, complex, historical – and not really quite a novel if novels are meant to be concerned with character, psychology and motivation. But as a fictionalised account of the disaster years of German history, as a gripping, comprehensive, awe-inspiring and very readable history lesson, and as a storming backgrounder to the Samson spy novels, Winter is a huge and hugely enjoyable read.

Related links

Related reviews

Leave a comment
by Simon on September 6, 2015  •  Permalink
Posted in European History, Novel, Spy novel, Thriller, War
Tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

Posted by Simon on September 6, 2015

https://astrofella.wordpress.com/2015/09/06/winter-len-deighton/