(Review by Nick Gevers, Ph.D., Cape Town, South Africa)

In the 1990s, Ursula Le Guin has revisited the territories of her prime. In a sense, this is the homecoming about which she has so often written, as in Always Coming Home (1985): a return in order to make good omissions and impetuosities in her earlier works, but also a bid to regain the vigour of her youth, that time from 1968 to 1975 in which she could do no wrong. In Tehanu (1990), Le Guin added a strong feminist coda to the ‘Earthsea’ books; more recently, she has published a dozen new short stories and novellas set in the ‘Hainish’ universe, which she last employed in the mid-1970s. The original ‘Hainish’ novels included The Left Hand of Darkness and The Dispossessed; the revival of this sequence suggests renewed high ambition on Le Guin’s part, as well as her sense that her feminist utopian agenda has advanced far since 1975, and that she can profitably revise her conclusions of twenty-five years ago. The first collection to assemble new ‘Hainish’ stories was A Fisherman of the Inland Sea (1994), whose three related ‘churten’ stories are superb demonstrations of technology as metaphor; more substantial, if less innovative, is the cycle of four linked novellas entitled Four Ways to Forgiveness (1995).

Four Ways is not, it must be said, another The Dispossessed. For one thing, its structure as a story cycle denies it a proper narrative unity; for another, Le Guin’s latter-day manner is at times dry and preachy, lacking in the effortless complex clarity of her intermediate periods. But these novellas are magisterial all the same. Their common background has a strong familiarity for South Africans: on the planet Werel, the dominant culture has only recently abandoned slavery, and an uneasy political transition is in progress: in ironic inversion, the emancipated whites are seeking political rights in lands still dominated by their former black masters. Werel’s colony planet, Yeowe, has won independence after a long Vietnam-style war, and there also uneasy truces are observed, as women attempt to win their freedom from a militaristic patriarchy. The twin worlds thus express Le Guin’s concerns as to both race and gender, in one of her characteristic binary linkages. In the foreground, the tales relate how individuals forgive others, forgive themselves, obtain forgiveness; we see how people are constructed by their cultures, carry the guilt of those cultures, and are liberated through the operations of their consciences and the love they share with others. In essence, the novellas are love stories, bringing together in conjugal harmony disparate men and women, whose personal reconciliations sum up the wider reconciliations of the societies that contain them. Each ‘way’ to forgiveness is of course a variation on the Tao, the Taoist Way; oppressor and oppressed, male and female, yang and yin, forgive, and recombine.

If this seems too obviously diagrammatic, the fault lies with the repetitive inevitability of the heterosexual pairings Le Guin insists on employing as examples of and metaphors for forgiveness. The characters are all sympathetically and affectingly drawn; the experiences that have shaped them are brilliantly sketched in; they are fine characters. They express Le Guin’s undeniable wisdom. But their fates – to be together – are as predictable as the marriages Barbara Cartland inflicts on her heroines. Four Ways, for all its merits, is not a masterpiece, because Le Guin’s philosophy has become dowdy as well as Taoist.

HARPER PRISM (US). 1995. HARDCOVER.

MA thesis on Ursula K. le Guin by Rethea Deetlefs