Fantasy review: The Left Hand of Darkness

Like half the books I write about here, I picked up The Left Hand of Darkness from my favorite used bookstore during one of their half-off sales. This one I searched for intentionally on the recommendation of one of my writing group friends. 

The Left Hand of Darkness is about a person who goes alone to a new planet as an Envoy from an organization that claims to be a non-governmental entity supporting the good of mankind. The Envoy works with various governments on the new planet to negotiate their entry into the organization, and makes notes on their customs. 

It took me two tries to make it through this book. I started it a couple weeks ago, and barely crawled through the first chapter before losing interest. When I picked up back up two months later, I had to re-start it. This time I pushed through the opening, hoping that the prose would pick up and that some amount of tension would grab me. 

It never did. I got through this book by committing to reading 25 pages each time I sat down with it. More than the story itself I enjoyed the methodical march of my bookmark through the pages. 

Since I've been in the middle of editing a draft of my own, I noticed that The Left Hand of Darkness contained a lot of the "issues" that I'm currently addressing--repetition of the same word multiple times on the page, overload of passive voice, an unequal distribution of the action-dialogue-thought-feeling balance. I'm not sure that this book would be published if it were written today--or maybe it just leans much more literary than I usually read. The Genly Ai's story was interrupted frequently by snippets of legend, cultural observation, and journal entries from his lone friend. While interesting in terms of understanding the world, these snippets didn't do much to carry the story or my interest in the plot. It was an example of how structure could take away from tension. 

Where this book does have weight was in its social commentary. The planet Winter contains a sexless people, who transform randomly into a sexed beings during their monthly period. Le Guin explores what would happen to a society if there weren't men and women, but people. She delves beyond the surface of gender into the weight of expectations, career impacts of childrearing, communication styles, and war. 

The Left Hand of Darkness I think must also be considered in its historical context. First published in 1969, this book explores how inter-cultural communication is more than just language, and the deep ways that legend, myth, and culture play in understanding other people. This could be part of a conversation about globalization and people from various countries understand each other, or it can be taken within the microcosm of publishing. Returning to the subject of what is "publishable", we have to examine how our own expectations change how we communicate and what we understand. Maybe reading this book would help both readers and publishing to think about what they mean when they don't understand a story from a cultural tradition different from their own. 

Overall, I'm glad I read this book, but it will probably be a long time before I pick it up again. I think the book poses great questions about common humanity, cross-cultural understanding, the role of gender in our lives, and what it means to be patriotic when so much exists beyond borders.