The perils of comparison when reading more than one book: Two book reviews

 I have recently finished two books that I was reading simultaneously (actually I'm reading three, as my Agatha Christie re-read project continues, but two new-to-me books!) One of them was a book I'd not read by one of my favourite authors of all time, the incomparable Ursula K. Le Guin. The other was a recently popular book that is my book club's selection for this month, so I was reading it to be able to discuss it properly at the meeting.

I finished the two within a day of each other (Le Guin's The Lathe of Heaven first), and I think that my judgement of Chosen Family, the other book, was undeniably harsher because of how incredibly good the Le Guin work is. This really magnified my disappointed feeling that Chosen Family was incredibly unsuccessful - as a story, as a character study, as a piece of writing. Had I not been spoiled for the mundane by Le Guin's elevated prose and complex ideas, I might have judged Chosen Family a little less stringently, although I doubt I would have liked it in any context.

With that caveat, here are my thoughts on the two!

The Lathe of Heaven was published three years before Le Guin's masterpiece, The Dispossessed, and shows some of the themes of the more substantial later novel, although mingled with a more magic-realist (and even, arguably, magical) framing. 

It is the story of an ordinary man, George Orr, with an extraordinary ability - he has what he terms "effective dreams". Some (not all - or at least, initially not all) of his dreams come true, and materially change the external world. His first awareness of this is as a teenager, when he is bothered and distressed by his aunt's sexual harassment of him, and has a vivid dream that she died in a car accident rather than ever coming to live with his family. When he awakens, he finds that that is the new reality - his mother is sad that her sister is dead, and as far as anyone else can recall, *this is always how it was*. The original reality / timeline, in which teenage George was badgered and harassed by his aunt, never happened. But George can remember both timelines, a fact that causes him increasing distress as more effective dreams arrive.

Due to the particular construct of the dystopian future that Le Guin locates George in (Portland, in a climate breakdown and population explosion era), George is effectively busted for illegally procuring drugs to suppress his dreams, as he is terrified of the impacts he is having on the world. His "punishment" is psychotherapy, for which he gets referred to the extroverted, positivist, and (in my view) raging narcissist Dr Haber. This is where the action of the book truly begins.

Haber quickly discovers that George's ability is real, although he continues to gaslight him for a long time into thinking that Haber does not believe in it. He finds a way to implant suggestions in George directing what dreams he should have, causing dramatic and far-reaching results, some of which go in different directions than Haber had anticipated.

The book is a fascinating study of character, ideas, and morality. Haber, the positivist utilitarian, is contrasted explicitly with Orr, whose passivist belief that the world should not be tampered with can at times be maddening but is ultimately revealed to be the key to his own psychic survival. As George says to Haber: "You have to help another person. But it's not right to play God with masses of people. To be God you have to know what you're doing. And to do any good at all, just believing you're right and your motives are good isn't enough." 

Haber disagrees, and therein lies the rub and the engine for a plot that, itself dreamlike, leads to the population of the world being reduced sevenfold, wars being stopped and started, political philosophies rising and falling, aliens winked into existence and brought first into conflict then into alliance with earth, and individual people moving in and out of the timeline like bubbles of soap on the wind.

It's possible to argue that the ultimate resolution Lathe is a foreshadowing of The Dispossessed in another key way - love is essential to giving the pivot character the strength and moral clarity to make the breakthrough or do the thing that must be done. In The Dispossessed, Takver's love for Shevek is what makes it possible for him to unlock the Principle of Simultaneity. In Lathe, George's straightforward, quiet love for Heather is what finally shocks him out of passivity and allows him to bring the endless cycle of despair to an end.

There is so much going on at the ideas and concepts level - I don't think I have ever read a better fictional exploration of the chilling cost of utilitarianism, or a greater encapsulation of Taoism - while the story remains gripping and propulsive, and the use of language, deceptively simple, pulsates with beauty and meaning. 

George Orr has joined my pantheon of unlikely Le Guin heroes (one of the things I love the most about her work is that none of her protagonists are conventionally heroic, but all show a complex relationship to action and belief that renders them much more interesting as a vehicle for exploring ideas and tropes).

George's own words probably best sum up the message that I think Le Guin was ultimately conveying with this text:

"We're in the world, not against it. It doesn't work to try to stand outside things and run them, that way. It just doesn't work, it goes against life. There is a way but you have to follow it. The world is, no matter how we think it ought to be. You have to be with it. You have to let it be."

It's a book I will be thinking about forever, I suspect, and this will be the first of many journeys with it. 

9/10, only deducting one point for some of the physical descriptions of the characters which I found a little offputting.

The first and perhaps most important comment I can make on this book: it is IRRITATING. I mean teeth-achingly, constantly, annoying. The characters, the writing style, the story, the inexplicable decision to use present tense in a text that absolutely screams for past continuous - all of it drove me up the wall.

With that out of the way, here's a brief precis. This is the story of Eve and Nell, who meet at high school.

- Eve has a crush on Nell that isn't at that time reciprocated.

- Nell and a mean girl homophobically bully Eve.

- Eve and Nell later reconnect when both are at uni and rekindle a friendship.

- Now Eve is an active lesbian living best lyf while Nell realises she is the one with the crush on Eve.

- With two gay friends, they build a (truncated and shallow) chosen family situation. Nell and Eve remain platonic.

- Eve is aware of Nell's crush but, whether consciously or not, torments her by never acknowledging it and sleeping in the same bed "platonically"

- Eve decides to have a baby, using one of the gay friend's sperm. She asks Nell to coparent with her platonically. Nell, helplessly obsessed with Eve, agrees. Tao, one of the gay friends, sounds a warning alarm, but no one listens because every other character in this book is emotionally either a spiteful five-year-old, or enslaved to their hormones, and in some cases both.

- It turns to shit because Eve is extremely stupid and (again, possibly subconsciously?) vindictive, still paying out from her teenage humiliation. Nell leaves. 

- Eve, now alone with her seven year old daughter Lake, experiences some regret, but still very much in the way that a particularly bratty 12 year old might.

- The book ends with a tentative resumption of contact.

The good news for you is that now I have given you the high notes (such as they are) of the plot, so you can choose to skip it, AND YOU SHOULD. The plot is juvenilia (and not the good kind). The characters are awful (Nell less so, but her whiny moping wore me down after a while too). The concepts are paper thin. The attempted engagement with theory is embarrassingly poorly done.

All of that I *might* have overlooked if the language / writing was beautiful, or at least readable, but oh my God it is not. It's, as the kids would say, incredibly cringe - I understand "like" is used as a conversational filler when people speak, but using it in written text does not work at all - and it is flat as a pancake. To link back to Le Guin for a moment, she once described banal writing as "Poughkeepsie"; although she was specifically talking about fantasy writing, this book is Poughkeepsie on steroids.

In short, I hated it, and I finished it only so I can credibly say that when discussing it soon. 

2/10, one of which is for the kid character (Lake, who I didn't mind) and one of which is for a couple of scenes of uni share house living that felt quite authentic.