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The Compass Rose

Ursula K. Le Guin

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Mar 22, 2008 Werner rated it liked it · review of another edition

Shelves: short-stories, science-fiction

I read both this and another Le Guin story collection, The Wind's Twelve Quarters, sometime in the late 80s or early 1990s; 1992 is a best guess. The author's death earlier this year gave me some impetus to finally review it now. Le Guin is an author I count as a favorite; but while I've enjoyed all of her novels that I've read, her short fiction is a more mixed bag. Some of her stories I really like; some I can't appreciate at all. They're also a mixture in terms of genre; many of the 20 storie I read both this and another Le Guin story collection, The Wind's Twelve Quarters, sometime in the late 80s or early 1990s; 1992 is a best guess. The author's death earlier this year gave me some impetus to finally review it now. Le Guin is an author I count as a favorite; but while I've enjoyed all of her novels that I've read, her short fiction is a more mixed bag. Some of her stories I really like; some I can't appreciate at all. They're also a mixture in terms of genre; many of the 20 stories here are science fiction (or exercises in surrealism, which since the 60s have sometimes been lumped in with SF), the field with which Le Guin was most often identified, but several, including some of the best, represent other genres entirely. As the author notes in the Preface, "the stories it contains tend to go off each in its own direction" (hence the title). They're grouped in six roughly equal sections each named after a compass point, including above and below (Zenith and Nadir); but the organizing principles governing the choice of what stories go where "are not very serious," and don't always reflect the similarities or differences I'd divide them by. (In all honesty, I should also state that a number of the stories didn't make much impression on my memory; though I have a copy of the book before me to refer to.)

The dates of composition for these selections range from 1974 to 1982; all of them but "The Water Is Wide" (which the author originally published as a chapbook) "The Phoenix" and "The Wife's Story" previously appeared in various magazines or anthologies. The latter is very difficult to discuss, or even to identify by genre, without a spoiler; but it's one of the best in the book, and a masterpiece of its type. My favorite is "Sur," one of the most original pieces of historical fiction ever written, set in the early 1900s, before the discovery of the South Pole, and featuring a small group of upper class South American women who are quite fascinated by the idea of Antarctic exploration. Of course society, and their husbands, would never allow them to do anything so far-fetched as to take part in it; but.... :-) Like much of Le Guin's fiction, this is a story that invites us to see people as individuals, not as walking gender stereotypes, and to think outside of gender role boxes. "Gwilan's Harp" is also historical fiction (the setting isn't explicitly given, but is in the Celtic lands in pre-technological times); it's an excellent story, which compares and contrasts thematically with "Malheur County," one of the author's rare forays into contemporary general fiction, to the disadvantage of the latter. (Both feature older female protagonists who have experienced loss, but their different attitudes determine the tone of the stories, and whether the message is optimistic or defeated and downbeat.) Another strong story here is "The Diary of the Rose," a very powerful and poignant dystopian vision, which of course (like all literary dystopias) is meant to motivate us to think and act in ways that aren't dystopian, so as to prevent real-life dystopias from coming to being.

Most of the rest of the stories are surrealist, and/or influenced by the "New Wave" school, which in the 70s was still considered "in" and trendy. There's also a noticeable tendency in several of them to be self-consciously "literary," in the sense that the postmodernist academic/critical establishment uses (or perverts) the term. The earlier collection, which has slightly fewer stories but a much higher proportion of memorable and good quality ones, has much less of this tendency. It's not hard to guess that as Le Guin's standing with the latter establishment rose in the 70s, so did the inclination to write for that milieu. ("Malheur County," for instance, was actually first published in the very prestigious Kenyon Review --and probably wouldn't have been if it was as positive and life-affirming as "Gwilan's Harp" is.) It's not irrelevant to note that this is the milieu she grew up in and probably always found most psychologically congenial. (Her father Alfred Kroeber was a Univ. of California anthropologist with a worldwide reputation --which likely also influenced the interest in social science that's notable in her SF). My rating splits the difference between the outstanding stories and those I didn't care for (and sometimes didn't finish). ...more

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