Writing Wrongs

Ursula K. Le Guin's Five Ways to Forgiveness

Note: My reviews of Sarah Ruden’s I Am the Arrow: The Life & Art of Sylvia Plath in Six Poems for RealClearBooks and of Jonathan Coe’s The Proof of My Innocence for Chicago Review of Books.

Five Ways to Forgiveness. By Ursula K. Le Guin. New York: Union Square & Co., 2025. 336 pp. $17.99.

Four Ways to Forgiveness, a collection of four short stories set in the future on the planets Werel and Yeowe, was published in 1995. These are part of the Hainish Cycle, which includes better known works like The Left Hand of Darkness and The Dispossessed. The stories have points of connection without forming one longer story, and later volumes, including this one, have added a fifth story to the set, involving a character mentioned in three of the others. These can be read by those who haven’t read any of the Hainish Cycle, nor indeed any Le Guin, as Werel and Yeowe are not settings for any of her other novels or stories. They are given an introduction here in the “Notes on Werel and Yeowe” that closes the volume.

There has been much blather about the “wondrous imagination” or the “beauty and subversive power of the imagination” as used by Le Guin in her work, but it’s difficult to see what exactly her achievement is meant to be in terms beyond generic ingenuity and popular success. For the fan or academic, systematic study no doubt reveals complicated patterns of allegory, subtle interweaving of real world and fictional history, and so on, but few seem to claim that she actually wrote well for the average reader. The marquee strengths are “ethical seriousness”, “tough-minded feminist sensibility”, and all that sort of thing, sometimes accompanied by “subtlety”, or “wit”. She is a political heroine, whose work is to be admired as an abstract, creative activism, the writing of other worlds in order to show up how unjust and arbitrary this one is. Some will find that as literature or fiction, it’s all rather dull.

One enters a new, highly elaborated science fiction world with a sigh at the mental task ahead. A couple of these stories get the most daunting stuff out onto the page right near the beginning. “Forgiveness Day” starts with the CV of its heroine Solly: “. . . she had been through a revolution on Alterra, learned aiji on Terra and farthinking from an old hilfer on Rokanan, breezed through the Schools on Hain, and survived an assignment as Observer in murderous, dying Keakh. . .” Some of the obvious questions are answered sooner and more clearly than others. In another story starting in a place called “Stse” (whose pronunciation can be found in the notes), we meet a hero this time, named Mattinyehedarheddyuragamuruskets Havzhiva. Is this Le Guin’s “wit”, a purposeful exaggeration of the genre’s extravagances? Her humor doesn’t tend this way, alighting instead on human folly—and perhaps it should be mentioned here that the characters are all basically human, though with some differently evolved features. Either way, that phonetic odyssey is a lineage name, important to rural family tradition on the planet Hain.

The larger schemes in which Solly and Havzhiva, as he is thankfully known, find themselves, are of religion (Tual vs. Arkamye), race (essentially black vs white), class (owners and “gareots” vs. assets), and politics (liberationists, the regime, nationalism vs. the interplanetary Ekumen), in addition to family ties. And Five Ways to Forgiveness, all five of them, are very schematic, so much so that you feel like you’re being shunted along grids as you read them. Where in the humbler sort of science fiction you are taken between ships, planets, factions, timelines, and so on, in Le Guin’s you are made well aware of additional vectors. The mental world of every character, every scene, very nearly every line of dialogue—and there is a lot of dialogue—involves some conflict between the cosmopolitan and the local, or the rational and the spiritual, or men and women, as represented by their loyalties, their changing sense of home, and their relationships. The above is intended not as analysis but merely to communicate that Le Guin’s ways of signaling these themes are rather obvious and insistent. This could be called clarity, but one wishes for episodes within the stories written for their own sake, or flourishes in detail or dialogue without strict thematic purpose.

Perhaps some or all of these stories were novels-in-writing that sputtered to a stop. The first, “Betrayals”, which with its village setting incidentally shows Le Guin’s folksy side, is paced like two chapters of a novel, and others are wanting development. There are gaps and seams which had better be ignored. “He did well, and after two years was asked, in the polite fashion of the Ekumenical [get it?] councils, if he would care to go to Werel.” By the end of the collection, such narrative ellipses of around two years or so have become a motif, probably accidental, as characters have been hastened through early youth and towards some crisis. Each crisis will be a test of ideology, loyalty, or conviction, and as a learning opportunity, not just an ordeal to be survived, it will hold some implication for the real world from which we read into Le Guin’s. If this all fails to fascinate, the reader has at least a series of portraits for five characters, each representing different aspects of this fictional world, and for whom their creator has an appreciable fondness, if not any more intense interest.

A lack of intensity is perhaps the most basic problem in Le Guin’s writing, to judge from Five Ways to Forgiveness. There is one surprising moment in over three hundred pages, and it surprises because it promptly reveals, figuratively, what one had hoped for in a work of “imaginative” fiction. The hero and some new friends have to hide in the cellar when the campaigning for Liberation turns violent, and they are panicking in the dark, but then someone finds or makes a light: “The world of the cellar flashed into being around them, amazing in its intricate precision.” Even had Le Guin this power of illumination, her world, which consists mostly of sociological abstractions, could not be seen in this kind of brilliance, or in such texture. Creation, or the genesis of other worlds demanded by this genre is, as these stories remind us, a very difficult task.