The Telling by Ursula K. Le Guin

This slim 2003 novel is part of Le Guin's Hainish cycle. Sutty, a young Earth woman who has studied with the Ekumen, is sent on her first mission to a planet called Aka. First contact reports described this planet as peaceful and static, but when she arrives 60 years later, it's changed.

Now it's controlled by a soulless, communist-like political structure that has banned the Telling, the planet's traditional Taoist-like philosophy/art/literature. It's all very much like China's Cultural Revolution, only planet-wide. Sutty must seek out remaining traces of the traditional culture and help to preserve and record it, a dangerous task not just for her but for the natives.

I enjoyed reading it; as always, Le Guin writes with simple and vivid elegance. Sutty is likeable, brave, conscientious. The actual tales told in the Telling aren't that memorable, I'm afraid, but there are some interesting themes like the importance of twins/couples/doubles, and flying. Le Guin is in trouble when she tries to make the case that stories can be a culture's entire history, science, and so on. At the end she questions this, but it feels perfunctory to me.

Le Guin isn't breaking any new ground here, however. Themes and images are deeply familiar from earlier books—the Taoist philosophy, the politics, the thinly disguised critique of our own culture. (Like how the government/corporation's ubiquitous bitter, hot drink is called Starbrew.) She has a tendency to moralize. Yes, she tries to be fair, not black and white, but the problem is you can see her trying.

I don't like Le Guin's affectation for employing British spelling and usage. Other than that, Le Guin remains one of my greatest pleasures to read, especially on the sentence level, so vivid and beautifully paced. For example, this description of a river ferry trip:

And Ferry Eight, now full of blatting and squawking and the quiet, intermittent voices of country people, and smelling of manure, fried bread, and sweet melons, moved slowly, her silent engines working hard against the drastic current, between wide rocky shores and treeless plains of thin, pale, plumy grass.

"Drastic" is the striking, perfect centerpiece of this beautifully composed scene. That's the sort of thing that keeps me coming back, decade after decade, to Ursula Le Guin.