28 June 2005, 2:06 AM

On The Left Hand of Darkness

Ursula K. Le Guin's The Left Hand of Darkness is one of my all-time favorite books. My high opinion of it is shared by...er...pretty much everyone I've ever talked to about it. It's also one of the books I see most recommended to people who aren't science fiction fans, which plays into one of the reasons I really enjoy it: the way the experience of the story morphs from reading to reading.

The first time I read the book, Genly Ai was a window. I didn't pay attention to his character at all; I was him, interacting with the people of Gethen, learning about them, making the journey at the end, feeling the weirdness of the final moments. The first reading for me was a mind-blowing story of politics and the study of the other; what I remember pulling from the book was a fascination with the social system involved, especially in how it may or may not have related to the word around me. I was about fourteen at the time, and this was my second Le Guin book.

The second reading, a couple of years later, was a completely different experience. Now I knew the culture and the people; the story this time was Genly's, how he grew and changed as a character, with help from a hard-to-penetrate Gethenian named Estraven. This was the first time I really paid attention to the...oh, heavens, I can't remember the word for it; the foretelling. And I paid attention as well to the structure of the story, how even the parts from Estraven's viewpoint reflect on what we can assume is Genly's retelling or translation. For a more capable reader, I assume this type of reading and the previous one would be combined.

And then the third reading. The third reading is where I decided I loved this book, because on the third reading the entire story is about Estraven. And Estraven is really damn cool. But I think knowing Genly first is a prerequisite—because Estraven rarely (to my memory) tells you anything about himself, and when he does, you have to deal with Genly's reactions. The rest of the story, and thus Estraven's actions, are also told in one way or another from Genly's point of view. So you need to know Genly, you need to know your filter, before you can understand the pain and the hope and the joy of Estraven's story.

The fourth reading was the reading of shifgrethor, but I'm very bad at social things, so perhaps it was a more integral part of the story for everybody else.

Anyway, if others' reading experiences are similar to my own, I think this is one of the reasons we tend to recomend LHoD (other than its quality, of course). Genly is an excellent proxy to understanding the world, explaining it to a level that you rarely see in sf, especially while engaging so directly with its inhabitants. Genly's attempts with the Gethenians mirror the way readers may be struggling to understand science fiction, and so the experience is less jarring than it might otherwise have been for readers used to a purely mimetic experience.

Thus wrote Melanie in the categories: Reading