Quote:
Originally Posted by Ralph Sir Edward
The Dispossessed...
This is going to be a highly political review of the book. That is unavoidable, because political structure and its results are the book. It had been given a scientific veneer, but this is a political Utopian novel.
It is a two-fold novel. First, it is a book about the political doctrine called Anarcho-Syndicalism. A gazetteer, so to speak. What is life like (at least as far as the author believes) under that political doctrine. There has been no actual polity under it to draw from.
Second, it is an answer novel. What is an answer novel? It is one writer's response to another author's book, show where the first writer got it wrong. There's nothing wrong with an answer novel, they can be as good as, (or even better) that the original novel, and the good ones can stand alone, without any knowledge of the first author's book. But they gain even greater resonance, when you understand the book that it is an answer to.
I've set the stage. The book The Dispossessed is an answer to, is Atlas Shrugged. Stop screaming at me, look at the similarities.
Both are about a physicist who is going to change the world (universe) with his creation.
Both are about how the existing political orders try to control and possess the knowledge. (Sabul in The Dispossessed, anyone?)
Both show how the system limits and controls the individual inside it. (Shevek notes “What good is it to live in an anarchist world if you can't be an anarchist...” or word to that effect.)
Now Le Guin is a much better writer, but then again English is her first language. She got fancy with her narrative structure, that's a matter of taste. On the other hand, Le Guin was not a person who had been personally stepped on by totalitarianism. Such occurrences tend to warp one's perspective...
In the end, the book shows you nothing more than political power structures. No other ideas, no effects of technology on the human (or other) species, nothing to make me think. (I'd already studied Anarcho-Sydicalism before I read the book, the book added nothing to my knowledge, other than human are a sorry species, and always will be. But we are survivors....usually from ourselves...)
|
This post I'm filing away in a corner of my brain when the latter will be numb enough to try reading The Dispossessed.