The Left Hand of Darkness

Short Review: This is a fantastic book that, using beautiful language, encourages you to think deeply about gender roles, political systems, spirituality, love, language and the environment. It is deeply moving.

Longer Review: Wow. I've read this several times now at different times of my life and each time something different jumps out at me.

* Age 10ish: So this is about a man who visits a world where once a month people can switch into a girl or boy. Oh and the man is put into prison and escapes over the north pole on a sled.....Pretty cool.

(Note: I was reading Babysitter's Club and Sweet Valley High and getting made fun of because they were “Girl Books”. I thought in this world I could read Girl Books and get away with it!)

Moral of Story: Girls and Boys are just as good as each other, and frostbite really hurts.

*Age 20ish: This is a really deep story about our preconceived notions about our place in society. This book is best known for encouraging people to question traditional gender roles, by imagining a society where there are no genders (once per month an individual will assume one sex purely for reproductive purposes). This is a very good thought experiment because it make us realise just how deeply ingrained these preconceptions are, but this is only one aspect of the book, it raises issues of economic systems, the destruction of the environment, how governments should be run, preconceptions of courtesy, the nature of God, the nature of the self and other...the list just goes on.

* Now: This book is deeply moving and disturbingly relevant. All of what I've already said is true (even the frostbite bit), but what really jumped out at me this time was the political side. Genly Ai, the protagonist, is an emissary sent to invite the world of Gethen to join a loose union of worlds. He lands in a rather laissez faire kingdom called Karhide, but his arrival sparks the development of nationalisim, the misuse of the concept of patriotism and the slow development of the tools of a totalitarian state. It is during this development, while broadcasts stoke fear of the neighboring country, that we read this passage:

“I don't mean love, when I say patriotism. I mean fear. The fear of the other. And its expressions are political, not poetical: hate, rivalry, aggression. It grows in us, that fear. It grows in us year by year. We've followed our road too far.”

“He wanted his hearers to be frightened and angry. His themes were not pride and love at all, though he used the words perpetually; as he used them they meant self-praise and hate. He talked a great deal about Truth also, for he was, he said, “cutting down beneath the veneer of civilization”. It is a durable, ubiquitous, specious metaphor, that one about veneer (or paint, or pliofilm, or whatever) hiding the nobler reality beneath. It can conceal a dozen fallacies at once. One of the most dangerous is the implication that civilization, being artificial, is unnatural: that it is the opposite of primitiveness... Of course there is no veneer, the process is one of growth, and primitiveness and civilization are degrees of the same thing. If civilization has an opposite, it is war. Of those two things, you have either one, or the other.”

“To oppose vulgarity is inevitably to be vulgar. You must go somewhere else; you must have another goal; then you walk a different road.”

“How does one hate a country, or love one?... I know people, I know towns, farms, hills and rivers and rocks, I know how the sun at sunset in autumn falls on the side of a certain plowland in the hills; but what is the sense of giving a boundary to all that, of giving a name and ceasing to love where the name ceases to apply? What is the love of one's country; is it hate of one's uncountry? Then it's not a good thing.”

Light is the left hand of darknessand darkness the right hand of light.Two are one, life and death, lyingtogether like lovers in kemmer,like hands joined together,like the end and the way.

Short Update: