September 13, 2011

Book 32: The Dispossessed

The Dispossessed: A Novel
Ursula K. Le Guin

While I am admittedly a sucker for utopian and dystopian literature for the unique, detached views it provides of modern society, it is often difficult to separate the author from what often becomes a polemic. Given the relative absence of plot in The Dispossessed, the nuances and balance inherent in Ursula K. Le Guin's novel are remarkable, and the book is a powerful force of literature that successfully taps into deep, fluid characterization both of individuals and of two disparate, disconnected societies to create a satisfying, if slightly aimless, story. Le Guin turns her anthropologically-oriented attentions to lush Urras, a blatant stand-in for the dual-superpower Earth of the 1970s, and its barren moon Anarres, home to a self-exiled colony of anarchists. The plot, such as it is, revolves around Shevek, an Anarresti physicist traveling to Urras, though the chronological interweaving of his unprecedented journey and the life that led him there clearly illustrates the importance and interconnectedness of past and future. In this book, as in Shevek's pseudo-physics (which seems to this Terran mind to be much more mythologically and philosophically oriented), time is like, well, a book, and the thematic unity between its seldom-disorienting structure, its content, and its primary themes is remarkable for any work of fiction, let alone one so firmly and unapologetically written in the oft-maligned genre of science fiction.

This novel is remarkable not for its simplistic plot and somewhat maudlin ending, but for the ideas it so seamlessly explores within. Le Guin extrapolates the future of an idealistically anarchic society, describing not only what it might look like but also examining those elements of power that might necessarily manifest themselves in such a community despite, and perhaps because of, the lofty ambitions of its people. The setting is clearly well thought out, as are the practical implications of anarchist philosophy as applied in an unforgiving and nearly uninhabitable environment. Yet more realistic than the setting of the novel is its people, who range from the dogmatic to the schemers to the outcasts, those who dare to think differently but who run into walls even in the most ostensibly free systems. Walls, both visible and invisible, are a recurring theme within the book, which deals with barriers to communication and, more importantly, to truth. Though the book's plot denouement is clunky, the ideas it explores are potent and relevant both to the worlds of Urras an Anarres and to our own. The allusion to U.S./Soviet conflict in Southeast Asia is a bit thin and can make the book appear dated, but Le Guin's concern with feminism, though clearly predicated on the concerns of her era, remains (sadly) relevant to contemporary readers, as does much of the social criticism. This novel is brilliantly composed, told in beautiful prose that, even at its most flowery, only serves to illuminate its beauty and the simplicity of its meaning; though Le Guin spins artful sentences, they are never indulgent, instead representing simply the best ways to convey their implicit ideas. The Dispossessed fulfills the greatest promise of science fiction, getting away from our Earth and our present to explore the philosophies that drive us, presenting a grand thought experiment that is always enlightening yet rarely heavy-handed, driven by an adequate plot, keen observations, and realistic characterization.

Grade: A

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