From Maine to Japan

(Map of the Valley. North is to the left of the map)

"The people in this book might be going to have lived a long, long time from now in Northern California. . . The difficulty of translation from a language that doesn't yet exist is considerable, but there's no need to exaggerate it."

So begins one of my favorite books by Ursula LeGuin, and probably one of her lesser-known works, "Always Coming Home." She calls it "an archaeology of the future," and it's a beautiful example of world-creation. The main narrative of the book is the autobiography of Stone Telling, a young woman of the Valley, but her story is broken up with digressions into songs, recipes, rituals, novels and other anthropological observations of her people. I desperately want to put "digressions" in scare-quotes, to make the implicit argument that they're actually quite key, but since part of what LeGuin is positing is that digressions are part of the dance, I'll let it stand.

This is a slow-moving book and I was about halfway through it the first time before I realized that things were not entirely as they seemed at first. It's nothing shocking like Sheri Tepper's also-wonderful speculative feminist novels like "Grass" and "The Gate to Women's Country," but it's a beautiful unfolding that invites you to see what you've been taking for granted, what you haven't noticed, and what the Valley narrators have been taking for granted themselves.

LeGuin is a Taoist, and this time through I noticed what I hadn't before--that the ritualistic Valley symbol of the gyre or hinge creates a stylized yin-yang symbol that weaves its way through society. This is a Taoist utopia, but achieved at prices LeGuin doesn't gloss over--staggeringly high infant mortality being only one of them. And it's got a self-aware irony that cuts some of the inevitable utopian smugness: LeGuin imagines herself in a conversation with an archivist of the Valley in which she sighs "I never did like smartass utopians. Always so much healthier and saner and sounder and fitter and kinder and tougher and wiser and righter than me and my family and friends."

The book is a beautiful example of world-building, based on a deep and lovingly intimate knowledge of the Northern California landscape. The world unfurls around the edges of Stone Telling's story, alluringly realized and temptingly unfinished. I remember the first time I read it studying the charts of the different clans and deciding that the me that lived in the Valley would be a member of the Serpentine House and the Oak Society, which covered the areas of writing and poetry. She'd make beautiful paper and raise sheep and live near a stream. Her name was Ubbuarra, Words in the Middle. She still lives there, always.