The Dispossessed

I'm a little ambivalent about this book. Years ago I read The Left Hand of Darkness by Le Guin. It has long since been one of my favorite books. But then I read some other of her books and just didn't like them. Because of that, I eschewed The Dispossessed for years. It isn't an action story, but rather a book of ideas, a story of the incompatibilities of different cultures and customs, of different political systems. Ultimately these differences are not resolved, but our protagonist is resigned to live with them. So the climax is not a victory of good over evil, right over wrong, or even us and them, but an acceptance of living in a culture that isn't always the way we'd like it to be, that the grass on the other side of the fence has thorns, too.

Each chapter is an episode in the life of Shevek, a physicist working on his general theory of simultaneity. For some strange reason, Le Guin chose to put the chapters out of sequence. It isn't as if they were flashbacks, they just weren't told in the same order in which they occurred. Perhaps the disjointed timing of the story was to illustrate that happenings, theoretically, don't need to be thought of as occurring in sequence. For those of us without a solid grasp on Shevek's arcane theory, having the chapters in a book out of sequence can be mildly confusing.