History of an Imagined World Always Coming Home

By Paul Gray

Her father A.L. Kroeber was a renowned anthropologist, and her mother Theodora wrote nonfiction, principally on the American Indian. Those who do not know these facts about Ursula K. Le Guin could probably deduce them from her 23rd book. Always Coming Home can be read as a novel, but it is really something else: a scientific-looking compendium of information about a people who might exist in the distant future. They are called the Kesh, a gentle tribe living in the nine towns of the valley of the river Na, somewhere in Northern California. Le Guin's fieldwork into their rites and customs comes decked out with maps, charts, tables and drawings. Also accompanying the book (and accounting for its steeper-than-normal price) is a tape recording of Kesh poetry and music.

A multimedia book sounds like a terrible idea. If a cassette has to do the work that properly belongs to words on the page, then everyone involved should forget the whole thing. Fortunately, Le Guin's language is thoroughly up to the task she sets herself, which is an encyclopedic history of an imagined world. The sounds are only special effects.

The most important element in Always Coming Home is the autobiographical narrative of a woman called Stone Telling. Although her story takes up roughly one-fifth of the book, it provides an accessible focus for the bigger picture that Le Guin wishes to convey. Stone Telling looks back on her childhood, when she was called North Owl (Kesh people change their names whenever it seems appropriate to do so). She lives with her mother and grandmother in a matrilineal society whose rituals harmonize with nature and the passing seasons. She studies the habits of animals and learns the Kesh song of happiness and praise: "Heya hey heya heya heya."

Her only unhappiness among all these Edenic ways stems from the fact that her father is a member of the Condor people, a fierce warrior tribe to the north. His name is Terter Abhao, which translates into Kesh as Kills. When North Owl is nine, he reappears and spends the autumn and winter. The young girl watches his behavior toward the soldiers under his command. He tells her how to give them an order. She does so, and they instantly obey: "So I first felt the great energy of the power that originates in imbalance."

This knowledge guarantees that she will some day journey with her father to observe Condor society firsthand. But once she makes the trip, she is sorry. The Condors are everything that the Kesh are not: violent, destructive, acquisitive, caste ridden, competitive. "Everything they did," North Owl notes, "was war." High-born women are forced into lives of idle seclusion. All other females, along with foreigners and animals, are routinely abused as hontik. Condor warriors worship the god One and kill for his glory. North Owl concludes that her hosts are "a sick people destroying themselves" and yearns for the day when she can change her name to Woman Coming Home.

Prophetic literature is intrinsically political, since it is either a reaction against or an extension of known conditions of life. And Le Guin, who has moved gradually from straight science fiction toward visionary narrative, makes no secret of her polemical intentions. The Condor people manifest all the darker impulses of contemporary superpower states. The Kesh are what humans could become if they would stop trying to impose their wills and designs on the earth. The enormous swatches of pseudoanthropological material in Always Coming Home amount to a blueprint for an allegedly better world.

No one can fault Le Guin for a lack of ambition. But her book erects several serious hurdles. Readers are likely to respond to its argument along partisan lines. Those who believe that man began stumbling toward destruction when he stopped being a noble savage will find their fondest dreams fulfilled. Watch for a Kesh cult to spring up on college campuses. Others, who think primitive societies formed a nasty, brutish and short phase in the evolution toward civility, will be unmoved by the serene monotony of Kesh life.

The Condors are far more interesting, perhaps because narrative quickens in the presence of evil and strife. John Milton faced such a problem when he portrayed Satan in Paradise Lost, and Le Guin, working on a different level, explicitly acknowledges the dilemma. One of the chorus of voices in the book belongs to Pandora, who seems to represent both the character from Greek mythology and contemporary Western consciousness. Through the magic of time travel, Pandora converses with a Kesh woman librarian. These enlightened people routinely throw away books and documents. As the dialogue continues, Pandora grows frustrated. "I never did like smartass utopians," she says. "People who have the answers are boring, niece. Boring, boring, boring." She has a point. But Stone Telling's story, with Le Guin's inspired assistance, is enchanting enough to rise above it.