Review: The Left Hand of Darkness

The Left Hand of Darkness by Ursula K. Le Guin
My rating: 4.5 of 5 stars

4.5 Stars

It's taken me a full day to gather my thoughts about The Left Hand of Darkness and that's considering that I was also trying to parse this book while listening to it all along. 

Did you ever read a book that was important and good for you to read but not love reading it? That, for me, is this book. Maybe part of it has been the place and time in which I'm reading it in my life. I've got a very ill kitty, there's political insanity in the US, I'm contemplating a big move to another state next year and worrying about family that's going to remain here in Miami. My head's all akilter and then Ursula LeGuin's perhaps best-known novel crowds my head asking me things like What is darkness? What is gender? What is sex? What is the value of custom in culture? And what would you do with a calendar in which the year is always 1? I guess I could go on questioning well into next 1 but I owe this book and my readers the review.

Genly Ai is a Terran envoy from the Ekumen, a sort of interplanetary confederation. As I noted in one of my little thought mileposts while I was reading, it is not lost on me that this book was published in the last year of Star Trek, the Original Series, which had a United Federation of Planets ("A dream that became a reality and spread throughout the stars."- James T. Kirk) that sounded a bit more organized than Ekumen. (The religious implications of Ekumen versus ecumen, and spreading the gospel are a whole other topic I'm not getting into.) Admittedly, this is the fourth in the Hainish Cycle of books, though, so her Ekumen had probably been around for a while. In any case, Genly arrives on the planet Gethen, which means Winter in Gethenian, because wow is it always cold in Gethen. It appears to go from just cold (in Summer) to brutally cold (in Winter). Gethen is roughly represented by two cultures/countries- Karhide and Orgoreyn. Gethen is part of the Hainish universe, as is Terra (Earth). Genly is an envoy who seems, frankly, ill-prepared for his injection into Gethenian culture, which to say the least is very different from Terran culture. In this respect, the fact that LeGuin was an anthropologist comes shining through. Genly is an alien man in a strange land with strange people who are ambisexual and who observe a rigid set of unspoken societal rules called shifgrethor. In spite of the fact that Genly can "mindpeak," a sort of spoken telepathy, Gethenians, who should have possessed this capability because of shared heritage with Terrans, have lost this ability. Over the course of a couple of years, Genly tries to understand Karhide culture, having convinced Karhide's Prime Minister Estraven of his purpose in Karhide- that he's an alien with a ship up in the sky that has his fellow shipmates in stasis and oh, by the way, don't you want to join our beautiful Ekumen. Genly finally scores the interview with Karhide's King Agraven, only to find that as Estraven had forewarned him, Estraven, the one person who believed him, has been exiled as a traitor from Karhide. (This exile doesn't really have anything to do with Genly's cause, however). King Agraven says "no, thank you, but enjoy yourself in our country!" and Genly's two years of waiting appear to have been for naught. So off he goes to Orgoreyn and that is where the real action of the story begins. 

There are so many themes in this novel, that of light versus darkness, in personal and in cultural senses, that of changing gender and sex (literally both social and physical changes), and how unsettlingly foreign lack of a defined gender and sex can be to someone from a world with clearly defined sex and gender. There is also the role that customs represent and how easily social custom may mislead a person from a foreign culture. The latter being exactly what happens with Genly and his friendship with Estraven, which has been challenged by a number of Genly's misunderstandings or distrustfulness of aspects of Gethenian shifgrethor. (A word this is going to stick with me...) So yes, there is so much going on and at times I felt like I just did not understand where we were going, or why we were going through so much suffering to get there, basically. 

There were aspects of Gethenian culture that were intriguing, most famously, LeGuin's handling of sex and gender. The ambisexuality of kemmer and sommer states, and changing sex during kemmer according to the sex desired by the individual was fascinating but it was so sooo straight/hetero (and I'm cis/hetero, so how obvious is it that it is so obvious to me) and in a way the lack of homosexuality on Gethen was just odd to me. I realize the author may have figured that if she was going to spin everyone's (including Genly's) head with pronouns and the "now they're androgynous, now they're a guy, oh, look now they are pregnant and female," perhaps adding homosexuality to mix would have been too much. On top of that, the 2010's are definitely not the 1960's. But I felt oddly underwhelmed. Perhaps since we live in an era where transgender and non-binary gender along with intersex states are more openly talked about, we just demand more from books touching on these themes and The Left Hand of Darkness feels slightly dated in this one respect. There are still sexual taboos in Gethen, however, including kemmer vows between siblings, or taking hormones to leave you forever in a kemmer-state of explicit sex to match a desired internally perceived gender state, that play a role in this story. Of course, in a society which is mostly in Somer, the oddly and obviously male envoy Genly, who shows up saying he's an alien from another world, stands out, perhaps not in a good way to Gethenians.

Getting to know the character of Estraven, in all his complexity, was for me the best part of this book. The touching end of this story, when Genly visits Estraven's family and home and has come to better understand shifgrethor, left me wistful.

A fascinating read, but not an easy one. I'm really rather stunned that this has never been adapted for film.

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