Ursula K. Le Guin – The Telling – review by Anthony Nanson

The Telling is the last of Ursula Le Guin’s Hainish novels, set in a galaxy in which numerous planets, including Terra, have been colonised over the millennia by the ancient civilisation of Hain and then have gradually been recontacted to become part of an interstellar community of planets, the Ekumen. This milieu gave Le Guin huge scope to explore in many novels and stories her interests in social structures and comparative ethnography, inspired by her father the anthropologist Alfred Kroeber.

The consequences for the planet Aka of contact by spaceships from Terra have been unfortunate. Terra having been briefly under the sway of a puritanical book-burning Unist religion, the Akans have succumbed to a similar but more secular regime, the Corporation, which has attempted to expunge the indigenous traditional culture, in a manner that recalls the Chinese Communist treatment of Tibet. The Telling follows a Terran anthropologist, Sutty, who’s investigating the remnants of this traditional culture in a remote region of the planet. What she gradually uncovers is the eponymous ‘Telling’, the interconnected totality of oral and literary knowledge and all its ramifications in education, healing, wisdom, ritual, and community.

The novel is a paean to both oral storytelling and written literature. Le Guin seems to be summing up in this late work her heartfelt views about the profound importance of the telling of stories and all that follows from that. The scenes of face-to-face storytelling, taken together with Le Guin’s essay ‘Telling Is Listening’ – published in The Wave in the Mind shortly after The Telling – convey a deep appreciation of the spoken word, yet the novel acknowledges also the advantages of permanency and refinement offered by writing, Le Guin’s own chosen art. The Corporation’s mission to burn old books wherever they can find them is central to the plot. Being both a storyteller and a writer, I love the way that oral and literary ‘telling’ are intricately interwoven in Akan culture, as they once were in Tibet and indeed in Britain and many other European and Asian cultures with a long history of literacy.

The Telling is written with a tremendously spacious lightness of touch compared with earlier Hainish novels such as The Left Hand of Darkness and The Dispossessed. The implicit comment upon on our own world is multivalent and indirect. It applies not only to the Chinese in Tibet but to Christian and Muslim puritans in various countries and to the secular New Puritanism that has become increasingly evident since The Telling was published in 2000. The novel might be characterised as a critical dystopia that reveals the utopian in the traditional lifeways that have been suppressed. On its own terms, it is a perfect novel. Its limitation is that it looks only to the relics of the past to find the good.