Always Coming Home

Ursula Le Guin is my favorite living author, and this is my favorite of her novels. If you don't want a review that comes from that position, which has developed over thirty years and uncountable books and is not (quite) as facile as it sounds, stop now. This book, though, received a lot of criticism, some of it, perhaps, just. It was criticized for appropriating Native American culture, and although Le Guin is explicit in denying that as her intent, it's an issue worth discussing. Because Le Guin is the daughter of anthropologists specializing in deep study of native cultures, it might be truer to say that those visions of the world have appropriated and influenced her. Nonetheless, this is something to discuss if you teach the book, or recommend it to a friend. Le Guin's also been variously accused of predicting the future with that least forgivable sin, earnestness, and of creating a prescriptive utopia in which no reasonable reader can believe. These charges, though, I find less worthy of discussion. Those who say it's unbelievable cite a) the Kesh's success in dealing with the military-industrial Condor through nonviolent resistance (nonviolent resistance actually work? Ridiculous! Oh, wait a minute...), b) the improbability of the Condor getting so caught up in their exploding toys that they don't make good use of them (also ridiculous! no one would build more and more bombers while failing to provide body armor for their troops, and the Afghanis never drove out the techno-heavy USSR with flintlock rifles), and c) the belief that the culture of the Kesh "really" wouldn't be anything like this. If we're talking of earnestness and prescriptive prediction, though, I think such critics undermine their own position. It doesn't get much more earnest, or much more prescriptive, than saying that someone else's imaginary culture "would" "really" have done thus-and-such. One of Le Guin's points is that the world doesn't *have* to go the way that some military-industrial-consumer Americans are prone to believe it must; there are other choices, though perhaps only after some very regrettable ecological catastrophes. She's also mildly famous for pointing out that SF authors don't predict the future; they observe the present. By that standard, ACH doesn't say that people will live in Kesh-like valleys, or that they should live in Kesh-like valleys, but that some people, right now, do in some sort live this way. And that, in my experience, is the literal truth. Those people are silenced and ignored and sneered at and mocked, but they exist, and not just in straw-bale solar houses. In terms of Utopia, Le Guin explicitly rejects it(in the passage "Pandora Converses with the Archivist.") Now maybe she needs more than a single rejection to prove that this doesn't function as an improbable utopia; but it doesn't hurt to actually read the thing before dismissing it, and see what she does say. I tend to think that it avoids utopianism

I truly do not think that any one has ever created a better or more thoroughly thought out alternative future society. It is just so perfectly humane. This isn't a "primitive" society- it is just a society that fully conforms to the natural, traditional way that humans were meant to live. You don't get a sense that this society is just copying Native American culture here, on the contrary, you get a sense that these people are being completely themselves in intimate interconnection with the natural world around them. When you do this it just naturally begins to parallel the Native Americans- without conscious effort.It is appropriate that LeGuinn brings up the Tao te Ching in the introduction. This is a way of life perfectly in accordance with the Tao. The first time I read this book I did not yet realize what a perfect symbol the double spiral motif that runs through all the book, all the society, is. I now get it. You slowly spiral in to the center- then you slowly spiral on out- or up. In spite of the fact that they retain some modern knowledge of technology- appropriate technology- this it isn't a life without work. It isn't a fantasy utopia. Yet, I wouldn't hesitate a second to go there.Another thing, the section on healthy vs. unhealthy generative metaphors for different societies is worth the price of the book alone. Briefly, this compares and contrasts such metaphors as THE WAR, THE LORD, THE MACHINE with those of THE ANIMAL, THE DANCE, THE HOUSE, and THE WAY. It really gets you to think about how the underpinning way that we see the world produces different outcomes.One other thing. I don't think I've ever seen a case where illustrations, maps, songs, poems, myths, tales, etc. all interweave and compliment each other so seamlessly. I didn't think people were smart enough to consciously create a work like this- I'm gratified that at least one person was this smart.I really want to read this again, soon.

The Oxford Times said of 'Always Coming Home' that "sometimes you open a book and find in a dozen pages the world inside more solid than the room where you sit". It is definitely such a book. From the obscurity of the future, Le Guin has drawn a people that are at the same time as wild as their surroundings and as civilised as we, as human beings, could ever hope to be. She says in her first note that the people who call themselves the Kesh might be going to have lived a long, long time from now in Northern California. The emphasis in this first note should be placed on the 'might', this is utterly and completely a work of speculative fiction. It is a marvelous thought-experiment that allows us to peek at the way the world might be, at one possible destination. But the world Le Guin has created is not a Utopia, although the idyllic, slow-paced nature of the Kesh is an attractive prospect. Nothing in Le Guin's work comes easily, she is not a woman that believes in easy answers. This is an admirable quality. If anything, I would say that the world the Kesh inhabit is a critical utopia, it is a hope for a better future, but one that is flawed, and this is the way Le Guin has intended it to be. It is what makes the work so believable and so heart-wrenchingly beautiful. The wilderness of the Kesh is neither better or worse than our own. It is simply different. hence its appeal. I believe the seeds for this book were sown during the author's summer holidays to the Napa Valley as a child and teenager, where she roamed the hills and creekbeds and devoured books as only a young adult can. This is a work that has grown out of the geographical imagition of a child, and later, the earnest, hopeful, complex, strong-willed mind of an adult hoping for a better world, aware that it may not be possible. 'Always Coming Home' is imbued with the strongest and most deeply felt 'sense of place' I have ever encountered, her world is so deeply realised, so easy to step into. It is a masterpiece for so many reasons, a critical exploration of utopia, a work of ecocriticsm (the study of the way ecological principles, landscape studies and literature meet), as well as an experimental novel that lets informal and formal voices stand side by side, a work that lets the voices of the people of the Kesh speak for themselves, their poems, their personal and social histories, their rituals framing a more organised central narrative in which a young woman learns what it means to be an outsider, and what it means to know a place called home. It has been over 15 years since Always Coming Home was written, but I think that the potential for personal understanding and scholarship that it carries with it is still untapped. It's not a book for everyone, but those that it is for will love it dearly all their lives. I recommend trying to find the first edition by Grafton Books for its beautiful cover illustration by Mike Van Houten, it captures the balmy twilight of the

This book is a marvelous collection of "an anthropology of the future." LeGuin excavates stories, songs, beliefs, myths, traditions, and more of the people who "will be might have been" someday living in what is now Northern California. At once Utopian and Dystopian, the culture that LeGuin shares with us is beautiful and complex. I read this book when it was first published in paperback in the mid-80's. It planted and nurtured in me a seed of hope that humans are capable of someday living in community in different ways than we do now. It opened in my imagination doors that I had never before noticed. Here is an example of a new narrative structure, or anti-structure. Here, too, is an example of a new-old social structure, a post-modern tribalism that has returned to "traditional" values such as living in harmony with oneself and one's environment, and recognizing the strength and beauty in ritual and tradition. Though others (including she) may disagree, I personally have always considered this work Mrs. LeGuin's crowning achievement. As Tolkien did in his Middle Earth stories, LeGuin in "Always Coming Home" creates a new-old world that is unfamiliar yet recognizable, someplace we want to go back to again and again. We are lucky indeed that this book is now back in print!

Ursula K. LeGuin's novel Always Coming Home, published in 1985, is a story of our own earth in the distant future. Ms. le Guin has set her novel in what is today the small community of Rutherford , in the western Napa Valley of Northern California. Nothing remains of twentieth-century civilization except an occasional piece of rubble and some areas poisoned by residual pesticide. Much of our present-day land is under water, including California's Central Valley and some of the coastal region, and the human population is sparse. However, the tone of the book is neither cautionary nor obtrusively alien; the topography, plants and animals of Northern California are easily recognizable, and the human culture--the people are the Kesh, or "Valley People"--although different from our own, is not jarringly so. The book is the story of one woman's life, from childhood to old age. North Owl is born in Sinshan, one of the nine small communities in the Valley of the Na (our Napa River