The Telling by Ursula K. Le Guin (2000) is a short sci-fi novel belonging to Le Guin's Hainish cycle. It tells the story of Aka, a vitally conflicted planet. Its cities house a society fueled by propaganda, choked with new technologies, utterly obsessed with matching the progress of other planets in their "March to the Stars". Only in secluded villages does an older, richer culture survive; people tell stories, study texts and live by a complex but non-dogmatic philosophy.
Not one of Le Guin's most fully realized works, The Telling succeeds mostly on the basis of its lucid storytelling; the novel takes up some big themes but does not explore all of them in a satisfying way.
Plot Summary of The Telling
Sutty comes to stay on Aka as a Terran Observer employed by the Ekumen. She has seen too much religious violence and bigotry on Earth to trust the hyper-sophisticated government that greets her. Her business is language and literature, and the Akans at Dovza City have erased all their non-propagandistic stories. Even the old language has been replaced by a new one centred on materialism, wherein the only way to refer to a person is as a "producer-consumer".
Sutty negotiates her way into a journey up the river Ereha, out of the city and toward the small village of Okzat-Ozkat. Here she finds the old language alive and well; here are the people who own the old books, and cling to what the government would call "rotting-corpse ideologies" with passion and determination.
It is the business of these people to keep and tell stories. As one maz (a community-sanctioned educated storyteller) tells Sutty, "The future is nothing yet. How could anybody live there? So what we have is the words that tell what happened... We are the world. We're its language... If we don't say the words, what is there in our world?"
As Sutty learns more about the philosophy she calls "the Telling", a journey up nearby Mount Silong to visit the last of the great libraries becomes a necessity. This journey will be the catalyst for renewed negotiations with the Akan government, and constitute a major step toward healing relations between Aka and the Ekumen.
Themes in The Telling
For a short novel, The Telling tries to say a lot, and is not consistently successful in doing so. For the most part, Le Guin seems to be underscoring how precarious any society’s apparent philosophic position can be; she goes to great pains to show how, on both Earth and Aka, societies have made complete about-faces in terms of their systems of governance. This idea is worked in as part of the deus ex machina that brings the story to the end, but does not push itself toward any conclusion beyond “Learning from the past is essential”.
Much more cogently expressed in this novel is a genuine fondness for the communal art of storytelling as practiced on Aka. Storytelling is a ritual that requires a giver and a receiver; without an audience to listen and absorb, a tale means nothing, to nobody. Le Guin symbolically echoes this idea when she describes the Akan tradition of burning money for good fortune. Akans never ask for something without offering something in return. They pay money, and they pay attention.
Not for the first time in Le Guin’s oeuvre, determinedly creative people are also monogamists; commitment to an abstract ideal in science or art is continuous with emotional commitment to one individual. Maz are monogamists to the point of remaining steadfastly single after a partner dies; Sutty remains emotionally loyal to her girlfriend, who died on Earth in a terrorist attack.
Another important theme in The Telling (and in many of Le Guin’s other works) concerns the concepts of unity and dualism. It was a religiously Unist society that wreaked such discord on Sutty’s Earth, but the Dualist philosophy of the Akans seems to invite improvement without gesturing toward an ideological goal. It is this dualism that Sutty determines to capitalize on at the novel’s end; but as mentioned, the exact mechanics of this arrangement are hard to conceive of.
The Telling in Context of Ursula K. Le Guin’s Oeuvre
As part of the Hainish cycle, The Telling is overshadowed by its more ambitious siblings. Each of these has an obvious thematic peg to hang on: The Dispossessed is an essay on the relative merits of capitalism and non-authoritarian communism; The Left Hand of Darkness experiments with disassociating the concept of gender from a human culture. The Telling lacks such a clear thesis.
However, The Telling is a more than competently executed novel. Its writing is clear, precise, and vivid; the characters are believable if not compelling; its concepts, intriguing in themselves, only lack the ideal framework within which to be understood.
Publication Details
Le Guin, Ursula. The Telling. New York: Ace Books, 2000. ISBN: 0-441-01123-3.
