Book Review: The Dispossessed
The multi-award winning utopian science fiction novel in Ursula K. Le Guin’s Hainish universe. Jeez, people, just please read this book. Honestly.
This is the first time I’ve gotten to open up my new Library of America hardbacks of Le Guin’s Hainish series, and they’re wonderful. This story is in volume two of the set. The reading experience was much better than I expected. Normally I’m a lover of paperbacks, and to a lesser extent, ebooks. I’ll choose either of those over a hardback. But this is making me reconsider that position. Surprisingly, there is a note in the back that tells me what font size and typeface was used in setting the edition - ITC Galliard Pro - and it’s a very nice face indeed. At 10pt you would expect it to be a little on the small side, but the letterforms are perfect for the size, making the whole thing very readable. I’m honestly seriously considering switching the body copy of my own books away from Times New Roman to ITC Galliard Pro going forwards! I’ll have to see how it looks when I come to typeset The Flight of the Aurora. Anyway, that’s a massive digression; we’re here to talk about The Dispossessed, not my obsession with typesetting!
Blurb
'There was a wall. It did not look important - even a child could climb it. But the idea was real. Like all walls it was ambiguous, two-faced. What was inside it and what was outside it depended upon which side of it you were on...'
Shevek is brilliant scientist who is attempting to find a new theory of time - but there are those who are jealous of his work, and will do anything to block him. So he leaves his homeland, hoping to find a place of more liberty and tolerance. Initially feted, Shevek soon finds himself being used as a pawn in a deadly political game.
Review
Out of all of Ursula K. Le Guin’s books, I think The Dispossessed is the one that was recommended to me the most, especially after I said I had read and enjoyed The Left Hand of Darkness. And just like that book, I think The Dispossessed will be one that I think about probably for the rest of my life. It is truly a remarkable work of science fiction and of literature in general. The book is an exploration of deep political and social themes, pulled together with Le Guin’s masterfully human worldbuilding, exceptionally detailed character work and no-nonsense but elegant prose.
There’s not a lot of substance I can really say about The Dispossessed that hasn’t been said far more eloquently elsewhere. It’s a book deserving of a far deeper literary analysis than I am capable of giving. There’s so much in its themes which dive right into political theory, jurisprudence, anthropology, societal structures and more. I came out of the end of it feeling like Le Guin had actually lived in and studied the book’s disparate societies. To a slightly lesser extent, it’s that way with her entire body of work, but here her ability to construct living worlds from the ground up is in its full glory. On the one side, you have the anarcho-communist society settled on Annares, moon to the planet Urras in the Tau Ceti star system. Urras, on the other hand, is organised much like current-day Earth, a paradise world with one of its two most powerful nations being a direct mirror to the Western late-stage capitalist societies. The contrast between the two is striking, and the attention to detail - especially in the anarchistic “Odonian” (the society founded on the teachings of the anarchist revolutionary, Odo") settlement - is staggering. The Odonian rejection of capitalist propertarian ideology affects every aspect of their society, right down to the language they use. There is no concept of ownership over anything, even the word “my” is absent from their vocabulary - there is no “my father” or “my mother”, or “my handkerchief”, but rather their manner of speech is changed to say things like “the father”, “the mother” and “the handkerchief I use”. It’s honestly incredible worldbuilding. Add to this that it also does an amazing job of expanding the background lore of the Hainish universe. After reading a couple of these, you can sort of get a feeling for which order they’re set in. The Dispossessed is clearly set a very long time before The Left Hand of Darkness, for instance. However, you never get the feeling that you should be reading these in any particular order, which is quite refreshing. It means I can read them in whatever order I want.
The book is structured in such a way that we have alternating chapters: the odd numbered chapters in the present-day, and the even, set in the past, essentially making it so the story is told out of order. Both settings follow the physicist, Shevek, from childhood, through the struggles of growing up and how the average person makes a life on the less-hospitable Annares, to the development of his ground-breaking scientific theories and controversial excursion from Annares to Urras.
The only negative I think I can say about the book - something which I’ve only identified as a potential negative after a lot of thought - is that the ending was a little contrived. Overall, though, The Dispossessed is absolutely one of the best books I’ve ever read and I think everyone will be a little more enriched for having read it.
