Joseph Conrad - Lord Jim

Ever since I totally failed to grasp the appeal of Conrad as a 16 year old reading ‘The Heart Of Darkness’, I’ve been wondering what all the fuss was about. For the first 150 odd pages of this book, I couldn’t find much of a clue. The prose is dense and it’s difficult to get going with the story, told through the recollections of the mysterious Capt Marlow (same name as ‘THoD’). I felt like everything was over-wrought and his sentences are too intricate, sometimes making it hard to decipher their significance or even who’s saying what. Added to that, the characters didn’t grasp my imagination, with the exception of the repulsive Capt. Gustav.



I don’t know if it takes 100-odd pages to tune in to Conrad’s wavelength or whether I totally missed earlier references to the fact that all the passengers on board the ‘Patna’ survived; but halfway down p141 Capt Marlow’s words, “and there were no dead” brought me to a standstill. This wasn’t a book about a naval disaster but one about a personal disaster. Jim’s disaster of having his romantic ideals tested and to be found deeply wanting. What I thought was a long and rather tedious recollection suddenly became a gripping exploration of his character. It was a great moment of narrative timing.



The remainder of the book enthralled me and I finished it very quickly. It might be easy to see Jim as a patsy because he is the only one who stays behind for the trial. But, in another sense, he is the only member of the crew who displays any sense of decency or bravery because he stays. While he couldn’t live up to his ideals on the ship and jumped, he doesn’t run away from whatever may be handed down from the court. Marlow sometimes seems to think this is a foolish and pointless exercise but is Jim perhaps trying to reestablish his own self-esteem? Or to make the kind of romantic, self-sacrificial act he abjectly failed to do on the boat?



Marlow’s motivation to help Jim and his powers to do so remain murky as Jim seems to largely escape punishment and goes on to fill a succession of jobs ably before being forced to leave when his connection to the ‘Patna’ emerges. Eventually installed in his final position as a trade representative in a remote village on a remote island, he flourishes before his catastrophic encounter with Gentleman Brown and a death almost as romantic as one Jim might have imagined for himself.



Is Lord Jim a failure to Conrad and an example of something pathetic? Or is he like that to me as a reader? Personally, I felt eerily close to Lord Jim; a person living out their life motivated by half-baked or unrealistic principles, moved by currents outside their control, dogged by past trauma but often wildly narcissistic and romantic in self-conception. Perhaps Stein, Marlow’s lepidopterist friend who organises Jim’s employment, describes the condition best when he says:


‘“We want in so many different ways to be,” he began again. “This magnificent butterfly finds a little heap of dirt and sits still on it; but man he will never on his heap of mud keep still. He wants to be so, and again he wants to be so….” He moved his hand up, then down…. “He wants to be a saint, and he wants to be a devil - and every time he shuts his eyes he sees himself as a very fine fellow - so fine as he can never be…. In a dream….” p199


Jim is someone who has failed and cannot live it down. How could he when the facts of his actions seem to jar so violently with his ideas? Is the island he retreats to a kind of dream-like state, in which Jim can continue to see himself as a fine fellow? Is this pitiable, admirable or simply a matter of psychological survival? In the passages Marlow describes in conversation with him, Jim seems shell-shocked and barely able to process what has happened. He wants to escape the confusion and fear the memory of his failure provokes and, however far he goes, he cannot do that because his reputation follows him. He seems to be tossed about between his romantic ideals and the facts of his life. Conrad captures the atmosphere of this inner conflict superbly, “an air of indomitable resolution came and went upon his face like a vain passing shadow.” (p175).



Finally safe from recognition in Patusan, he seems to do a good job of improving the economic and political conditions of the island. Although, this interpretation could clearly be debated given its colonial characteristics! But if his reign can be seen in a positive light, is Conrad actually writing a book about Jim’s redemption from his miserable cowardice? He gains the respect in Patusan he can never have in the wider world because of his history. He is successful and happy there, behaves as a just leader and is betrayed by the cowardly actions of his predecessor in the job of agent rather than his own. He feels valiant and respectable sorrow at the death of his close friend Dain Waris, the Malay leader's son, and goes without hesitation or weakness to be shot in the chest by the aggrieved father. Here we can see Jim sacrificing himself for his romantic ideals in the way he couldn’t on the ‘Patna’ and finally laying to rest the demons that arose as a consequence of that failure. Even Marlow, who generally seems sceptical if sympathetic, sometimes seems to describe Jim in extraordinary, almost heroic, terms:


“Nevertheless, there can be but few of us who had never known one of these rare moments of awakening when we see, hear, understand ever so much - everything - in a flash - before we fall back again into our agreeable somnolence.” p148



In other passages, the way Marlow describes Jim's success on Patusan it makes it sound like a lonely and pathetic existence. Even superficial and false. I couldn’t work out if Jim was a strange type of hero or the exact opposite. In the end, I think he’s everyone - battling the facts of their cowardice as best they can to maintain their delusional self-esteem and survive. It’s well captured in the following quote:


“I didn’t know what he was playing up to - if he was playing up to anything at all - and I suspect he did not know either; for it is my belief no man ever understands quite his own artful dodges to escape from the grim shadow of self-knowledge.” p102


Jim’s case is an extreme one, and dramatised as well, but I felt there was something universal in the comment Conrad is making about life through the themes of ‘Lord Jim’. What are any of us playing up to? Probably just a ramshackle collection of dreams and ill-considered principles like Jim. I certainly felt empathy with him as someone who is romantic and delusional and thinks better of themselves than they really are. In some ways this aspect of humanity may be essential to its survival. Perhaps to see ourselves as we really are, or be forced to by our history like Jim, would be too much for anyone to bear. This seemed to me one of the better passages to help make sense of the person and story of Jim:


“But we can see him, an obscure conqueror of fame, tearing himself out of the arms of a jealous love at the sign, at the call of his exalted egoism. He goes away from a living woman to celebrate his pitiless wedding with a shadowy ideal of conduct. Is he satisfied - quite, now, I wonder? We ought to know. He is one of us - and have I not stood up once, like an evoked ghost, to answer for his eternal constancy? Was I so very wrong after all?” p351


By this reckoning, Jim conquers the romantic fame he has coveted and ruined himself pursuing but, in the end, it’s an empty and senseless victory. Everything seems to reflect back on itself so, after a sudden flash of understanding, we return to finding Jim enigmatic. In the same way, we cannot understand ourselves and don’t really know the ultimate meaning of our sacred ideals of ‘conduct’ and ‘constancy’. It’s all an unanswerable riddle like life itself and that’s what I began to love about Conrad’s story and, to a lesser extent, his style. The two seem to go hand in hand, like this mysterious passage spoken by Marlow:


““But as to me, left alone with the solitary candle, I remained strangely enlightened. I was no longer young enough to behold at every turn the magnificence that besets our insignificant footsteps in good and evil. I smiled to think that, after all, it was yet he, of us two, who had the light. And I felt sad. A clean slate, did he say? As if the initial word of each our destiny were not graven in imperishable characters upon the face of a rock.” p179


Here, it seems that Marlow sees Jim as, in some way, a genuine victor against the vicissitudes of life but in precisely what way is hard to say. I liked the character of Marlow a lot, his mysterious motivations and testimony are perfect for a complex, murky tale like this; about what it means to live, if it means anything at all. The way Marlow presents this story and his relationship with Jim adds another layer of intrigue. I was reminded of books like ‘The Confessions of A Justified Sinner’ and ‘The Real Life Of Sebastian Knight’ where the reader is presented with a ‘case’ made by a more or less credible narrator. Marlow’s is credible enough, but I was left with the feeling that he barely understands the story he is telling himself. As he cryptically says himself, “it was as though I had been shown the working of the implacable destiny of which we are the victims - and the tools” p280



Jim’s life of half-baked ideals and half-compromised principles forces him to run from the society that constantly reminds him of his cowardice to a place where he can rebuild himself and his damaged self esteem. This exercise seems to raise him in Marlow’s estimation but, finally, both Marlow and the reader are plunged back into confusion by Jim’s romantic death. He has restored the myth of his principles and his pride but abandoned the woman who loves him and the life he built for himself in Patusan. Marlow compares his death to how he left him on the beach of Patusan and concludes he is, “greater and more pitiful in the loneliness of his soul, that remains even for her who loved him best a cruel and insoluble mystery.” (p334). This was a great book and, after a slow start, captured something essential for me about what it means to be a human however cruel and insoluble that can be sometimes!

Truman Capote - In Cold Blood

When this kicked off I thought it was way too glossy, All-American and colour-supplement feature essay-esque.  It seemed like every page was overfilled with Americana.  I thought it would be too saccharine to tolerate for long and stylistically too insubstantial to carry hundreds of pages.  Everything feels like a slightly overworked scene from a cliched movie.  In the end, even though neither the prose or the dialogue grew on me much, I enjoyed the book and read it quickly after starting.

Two things stood out to me as important.  First, the pace and construction of the narrative.  Secondly, the depth and breadth of the research carried out to place the crime in its context.  Capote is an expert sketcher of characters and scenes and piqued my interest in the idyllic family, the pair of crims and how the horrific murders were eventually traced back to them.  It’s true that by the end, I had had about enough of these sketches when he began to profile the various members of death row in Kansas in exactly the same manner.  At that stage it felt like watching too many episodes of a TV show about murderers.  However, rather than the quality of the individual pieces of prose, none of which were especially memorable to me, it was how they were assembled and the diversity of their perspectives that made the book good. Capote clearly did his research, or made up a lot of stuff, but the end effect is the same, he builds interest in the characters and how things happened the way they did.  Inevitably, the brutal murderers are somewhat humanised by their hardscrabble backgrounds.  Capote also seems to surmise that jail was more of a hindrance than a help to both men.  Nonetheless, they seem so ordinary, and the crime is so pointless, it’s almost impossible to believe things like this can happen regardless of the mitigating circumstances.  But in a world of billions of people, or about 2.5bn in 1950, all sorts of highly improbable things ended up happening.  I was left thinking that problems of inequality, both financial and emotional, can end in violent outcomes in a society that values money above everything else.  But when much of a person’s actions depend on their individual childhood experiences and relationships, as Capote strongly suggests, the problem seems gargantuan and almost impossible to influence in all but the most meagre ways.  

A question that played on my mind after reading the book was why people, myself included, enjoy this genre?  Do I want to learn about the killers so I can dismiss them as a deranged aberration?  Do I want to rationalise them and their actions so the crimes seem less inexplicable?  There’s a contradictory pull of familiarity and differentiation - ‘they’re just like me’ and ‘they’re nothing like me / how could they do that?’.  At some level, murders are interesting to humans because they’re reasonably rare and deal in stakes of life or death.  As with all disasters, there is a fascination with how things can go so badly wrong. Perhaps, we imagine we have known a rage that could be murderous or can imagine some provocation that might drive us there.  Even if that is the case, which is debatable, I feel very few people consider shooting people ‘in cold blood’.  Smith, who does the actual killing, knows it is wrong but seems incapable of feeling anything about it.  Seen from this angle, being a murderer seems like a rare medical condition.  An absence of empathy so gaping that you can’t feel anything about cutting a man’s throat or shooting a defenceless teenager in the face.  Capote explores how responsible the perpetrators should be held for their crimes and the morality of capital punishment in a precursory way.  It’s not the highlight of the book but it is an interesting subject worth introducing and considering beside the specific case of the murders.  The book does this often and well.  It asks a lot of questions without adopting a strong moral stance of its own.  In this sense, the book is bleak.  The book’s highlight for me was the pacing of the narrative and the mastery of the subject Capote has acquired.  Regardless of whether the story is true to life or embellished, Capote knows every aspect of it and in that way has created a little world in which he is an excellent master and guide.  It doesn’t matter much to me if some of the characters turn out to be actors.

I would definitely recommend this book even though the prose wasn’t that great.  The narrative is adroitly spun and I did care about some of the characters, especially the crims, even though Capote hams them all up quite heavily.  It pushes a lot of the right buttons in terms of intrigue.  In a way that makes you feel a bit guilty about it afterwards. 

 

Cathy Park Hong - Minor Feelings

I loved how acerbic the author was in describing her experiences and so-called ‘minor feelings’ about her racial identity. As a white reader, it can be easy to say, ‘oh, that’s no big deal’ or ‘you can’t get worked up about that’ and Hong does an excellent job of explaining how useless that approach is. A bit like telling a depressed person to cheer up. One thing was very clear from the book, Hong didn’t gain anything from ignoring these feelings and could only understand herself and her life by accepting their existence and validity. The book has the feeling of someone getting a lot off their chest.



Hong introduces the concept of ‘speaking nearby’ a subject in the book and it's a fitting description of this patchwork of reflections with no real narrative. Hong touches on her family history, her childhood, her reading, her writing or failure to write, speaking broken English and the art and biographies of her heroines in the process of speaking nearby the subject of race. Some of these passages were really brilliant and moving. For example, I loved her writing about the gruesome death of one of her favourite artists (Theresa Hak Kyung Cha) and whether the silence surrounding it was respectful or disrespectful. She handles the moral and philosophical niceties with delicacy and speaks with the authority of someone who has researched and considered the subject extensively and carefully. At the other end of the spectrum, adolescent tales about her psychotic friend stealing her poems at college don’t feel very nearby at all. Plus it feels kind of shitty to drag her mentally unstable former friend in public via her book; a fact she even acknowledges. Maybe it’s supposed to be warts and all but I still thought it was the worst part of the book.



I enjoyed Hong’s prose. It is pithy and easy to read while still being inventive and maintaining a distinctive voice. Of course, being the pedant that I am, there were some upsetting moments. I have no idea what a ‘pooched stomach’ is, a tummy that looks like a dog? The dictionary didn’t know either. I also couldn’t understand why the word ‘molecule’ is used about a sweet her father is eating - how could anyone eat anything in such invisible, microscopic quantities and why use such a technical term? She also used two of my least favourite phrases: 1) ‘thought experiment’ - it’s not an experiment because there’s no control and it means exactly the same as ‘think about’ but is pretentious and inaccurate 2) ‘late capitalism’ - should be ‘recent capitalism’ unless the date for the death of capitalism has been set and only Hong’s been told about it - sigh!



Hong is great at highlighting the white bias in media that I ordinarily wouldn’t be at all aware of. Why is everyone in a film like the remake of ‘Bladerunner’ white, including the enslaved children? However, when she started shredding ‘Moonrise Kingdom’ I did wonder if it was possible to be nostalgic about certain aspects of the more racist past without it being an overt endorsement of racism itself? A film about white kids at camp in New England during the 60s doesn’t seem racist to me just because it doesn’t have any people of colour in it. But maybe that’s just because I’m white and I like Wes Anderson. I was more interested when Hong notes that there are hardly any people of colour in any Wes Anderson films except for subservient subcontinental Indians. Her characterisation of him as a collector and the idea that collections are defined by what they leave out also fascinated me. But the specific criticism of ‘Moonrise Kingdom’ struck me as unfair.



Much as I love Hong’s anger and brutal critique of anyone and everything, sometimes I wondered if she’s at risk of fetishing her indignation. Sometimes I would read passages littered with the accusatory ‘you’ while thinking, ‘who is ‘you’ in this context?’. Probably, it’s the white man and I’m willfully misunderstanding it. But sometimes it feels like Hong likes nothing better than to get indignant with rage at a certain individual, situation, novel or film. Then again, sometimes her anger itself was revelatory. Like when her white friend starts crying after Hong gets racially abused on the subway. My natural reaction is to explain it away like it was a bad experience for everyone or perhaps her white friend is a sensitive and emotional person, who may have experienced traumas of their own that are being triggered by the violent shouting match. Either of those things could be true. But Hong’s anger makes her description lucid and conveys the visceral nature of her feelings. This was really helpful to me and taught me a lot. All told, there’s more good in Hong’s anger than bad. Her idea of refusing to be indebted really struck a chord with me. For all the talk of being grateful for life, it could also be said that life is rudely thrust upon a person and the idea of choosing to be born makes little sense to me as I am now. Childhood certainly mainly seems to be following orders for most of us. Who knows? In any case, Hong’s anger was a roaring furnace that powered the book and lit it up but sometimes it felt a bit out of control and threatened to consume everything else.



This was a well written book and taught me a lot about a subject I’m naturally ill-informed about. Parts of it were really wonderful but other bits felt boring and narcissistic.

Gino Segre - A Matter Of Degrees

 This was a lovely, engaging wee book that manages to make some arcane topics interesting and accessible to the lay reader.  It also gave me a fresh perspective on the world because I’ve never thought about it through such a rigidly temperature focussed lens and it was rewarding! Alongside distance and time, Segre sets up temperature as one of the fundamental modes of human measurement and gives the reader a whirlwind tour of a universe viewed through temperature.

This takes us all around and covers a fairly overwhelming list of topics and subjects including quantum physics, mammalian biology, the steam engine, deep sea diving and everything in between.  The author usually tries to focus on a personality and a discovery in order to break up the technical explanations and give some human interest to the text. But it is the ideas that he covers and the way he links them to philosophical questions about the history and future of humanity and the earth that made the book so interesting for me.  Indeed, even though some of the character sketches and potted histories are really good, there are too many of them and the format is too familiar for one to really stand out.  There is even the odd dud like the story about Einstein’s fridge design, which was curious, but felt off topic.  There were other sections where I wanted a stronger connection to the central theme and a couple where he lost me completely!  But, on the whole, the author’s passion for the subject and his gift for explaining its intricacies make it an enjoyable read.  The sections about photons, neutrinos, thermal vents on the ocean floor, the impact of asteroids, planetary movement, the earth’s temperature history and climate change were all very memorable and excellently explained.  Probably my favourite was a section on how life might have survived a global ice age deep under the sea where life exists using sulphides from thermal vents.

The book is very broad and introductory and sometimes it felt like the scope had been stretched too far or the material was too varied.  On the other hand, it introduced a lot of very interesting topics to me and gave plenty of ideas for further reading so it’s easy to forgive the odd section that rambles or tends towards the tangential.

This was a thoroughly enjoyable read, similar to ‘Stuff Matters’ by Mark Miodownik but replacing material science with temperature focussed physics!  Both gave me lots of new perspectives, probably partly because my scientific knowledge is shockingly poor, and had the feel of a specialist obsessive assessing a huge breadth of subjects through the narrower lens of their expertise.  Also ordered ‘The First Three Minutes’ by Steven Weinberg because of this book.

Robert Louis Stevenson - Master Of Ballantrae

 This was a shoddy book that didn’t have much to recommend it to me.  Much of it gave the impression that RLS was making it up as he went along or, at least, changing his mind about what kind of novel it was during its composition.  The book starts out with the premise that its contents represent a collection of found documents. However, in the end it only seemed to consist of the reflections of ‘Mackellar’ - the exasperating narrator - and an excerpt from an Irish General.  I wondered why RLS would bother setting up this ‘found documents’ situation when it brings nothing to the plot and the story is effectively told as a plain narrative.  It also made me compare it very unfavourably with ‘The Confessions Of A Justified Sinner’ By James Hogg, which uses the same device a lot better.  Perhaps RLS was going to invent a greater diversity of documents but changed his mind!

The story itself is facile, long winded and supposes the credulity of a children’s adventure book or a James Bond film.  It’s all told in a loquacious and high falutin style, which is entirely appropriate to the character of Mackellar but was still annoying and boring to read.  Mackellar is forever protesting his lowly nature but then recounts how his wise counsel solves all the family problems.  This simultaneous grovelling and boasting made me detest the character and treat his testimony with a good deal of suspicion.  Apart from his eternal devotion to his masters we learn very little about his history or personal life.

This question of who Mackellar is and for whom he is producing these documents was the most interesting part of the book.  However, the question is never really fleshed out or thrown into relief because there aren’t any other perspectives to contrast with his.  Someone suggested to me that the Master of Ballantrae and Mackellar are the same person and this made me more excited about the book than at any point during reading it.  Sadly, looking back on it, I don’t think there’s enough evidence to support this.  I also don’t believe RLS was doing anything as clever in this mish mash of a book.

When the book starts it feels like it will be a historical novel because there is a lot of context about The Jacobite Rising and Bonnie Prince Charlie but this ultimately proves to be of minor importance.  All of a sudden it is a species of pirate story, seemingly one of RLS’s favourite themes, then in exile, then back in Scotland for some duelling, then off to India, then back to Scotland again, then to NY, then off into the wilderness for a prospectors vs. natives treasure hunt.   Most of the major narrative events consist of a change of place for the master and/or the rest of the cast or the master dying and then turning out not to have been dead after all.  None of the scenes are especially well drawn and none of the characters are developed very deeply.  It all had the feel of a confused and overly complex children’s adventure.

I wouldn’t recommend this book and thought it was worse than ‘Kidnapped’ but I’m hopeful that ‘Treasure Island’ or ‘The Strange Case Of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde’ will be better!

Robert Louis Stevenson - Kidnapped

 I can’t say if it was the content of the book itself, a change in my mindset while reading it or a combination of the two but I felt a real difference between the first and second half of the book.  I would’ve been much happier if the book finished after David Balfour’s eventual return to the mainland from Erraid.  

I think it is fair to say that both halves are action packed, both contain caricatures more than characters and both, at times, stretch the reader’s credulity.  All of this seems appropriate for a children’s adventure novel.  However, for whatever reason, I found the first half to be engaging and the second to be sloppily constructed and overwrought.  The tale of David’s journey to Cramond and his subsequent dealings with his curmudgeonly uncle were great and I found the young nephew’s suspicions to be an excellent starting point for the plot.  Of course, things take a turn for the more fanciful once the adventure begins in earnest and David is kidnapped.  That said, the ignoble crew and the inevitable mishaps were well drawn and of a piece.  The appearance of Alan Breck Stewart provides a good catalyst for David’s eventual escape and the fight scene would have made for a perfect, action packed crescendo - or so I thought at least!  I didn’t have much objection to the self-imposed stranding on Erraid either.  It provided a good foil of ignorance and incapacity to the all too capable performance of Alan and David during the fight!

After that, I felt like the book took a turn for the worse.  Perhaps I thought that after such an ordeal, David would stop at nothing to get back to his uncle as quickly as possible.  Perhaps the somewhat ridiculous Alan Breck began to wear a bit thin as he took up more narrative and dialogue.  I’m not usually a fan of historical characters appearing in novels.  I feel it’s a bit uninventive and usually results in the repetition of a few hackneyed character traits.  This was certainly the case for the highly romanticized chieftain in hiding, Cluny, and Alan Breck Stewart. 

The second half of the book also struck me as far more haphazard and unnecessarily flamboyant.  While the incidents of the first half hung together nicely, I felt the author was scrambling for material in the second.  David meets extraordinary guides, unwittingly becomes an accessory to the murder of the king’s agent, embarks on lengthy clandestine journey through Scotland, which is made to sound more like Hollywood Lord of the Rings set than anything like the real Highlands, without shelter and witnesses a farcical piping competition between ABS and another legendary clansman.  The tone and quality of the dialogue also seemed to deteriorate until I had the sensation that one cliche was being piled on top of another until the whole edifice keeled over.  

The denouement was reasonably satisfactory, with the exception of some highly floral and badly drawn interactions between David Balfour and his uncle’s lawyer back in Cramond but I felt like the book had already been spoiled by the journey from Erraid.  I would recommend this book because, at its best, it’s highly enjoyable but I would have preferred a shorter, edited version.   

Ursula K Le Guin - Earthsea

He stood tall and proud as the mighty oak whilst the wind whipped his mysterious and scarred visage and lightning broke the dark, stormy sky behind him.  He wore simple tweed britches, hand sewn leathern booties and the shaggy fleece of the flippitytoot, from his native lands of Giveashit, for warmth against the harsh winter.  He carried a staff of Baobab, palladian shod.  They called him Pidge but his true name, in the ancient, primordial tongue of the Snifftyflob, was MageLord 3000. 

I should preface these ramshackle reflections by saying I am not usually a reader of the ‘fantasy genre’, depending on how it’s defined.  First, it strikes me that a lot of fantasy books are about a fairly narrow cast of wizards, dragons, witches and ogres.  That’s not to say there is anything wrong with those types of characters.  They don’t pique my interest much.  On the whole, I tend to think to myself, rightly or wrongly, ‘humanity is interesting and varied enough for me I’ll probably leave the fantasy for another day’.  

The prose in the book wasn’t much to my liking and I found it meandering, facil and cliched.  It was never pithy or concise and was often confusing and verbose.  I found a lot of the characters and scenes to be overwritten and full of romantic nostalgia for the world she’s created for them.  ‘What do you expect from a fantasy novel?’, you might ask.  

I got more enjoyment out of the themes in the book, for example, the idea in the first book of Ged battling against the darkness, which he has created, to save his life and identity.  At other points, I felt like it was too much of a mish mash of borrowed ideas, for example, light and darkness (Bible), a young man going on a journey to establish his own identity (Greek epic, Jung).  One theme I thought a bit ridiculous was the desperate attempt to establish a positive female perspective in the fourth book.  In the preceding three books women are depicted as crafty seductresses (Ged in garden, Book 1) or evil devil worshippers and child sacrificers (Order of Preistesses, Book 2).  However, in the fourth book there is an abrupt change from men, mage lords and mighty staff wielding wizardry to a focus on mothering, nurture and the importance of domesticity and anything relating to women while men are scolded instead.  

Book 2 was an impressive piece of writing and struck me as the most creative perhaps because it wasn’t full of ‘fantasy’ characters from central casting.  In fairness to Le Guin, it’s possible that I find some of her characters and style hackneyed because so many people have copied it.  I have read that some people consider her incredibly influential and innovative but I am not really in a position to comment.  

This wasn’t a book that I enjoyed or would recommend because it is too long, the prose is bad and there aren’t enough good themes or characters to make it worthwhile.  Books 1 & 2 are certainly better than 3 & 4 and would be enough to get a taste of her style.  That said my favourite character was from Book 3, so there you go.  It was Sopli.