When my book club put out its call a few months ago for book suggestions on the theme of gender, I felt that science fiction could be a good angle from which to explore this topic but I feared that might put off some of the group. I needn’t have feared. Not only was my suggestion of The Left Hand of Darkness by Ursula K Le Guin the vote winner for our March meeting, it was also a really well attended (virtual) meet-up and a very fruitful, lively discussion. I should never have doubted them.

This novel certainly provides a lot of fodder for discussion. It’s difficult to boil down the plot succinctly (which is perhaps why looking in different places you’ll see very different synopses that sound like entirely different books) but here is my attempt. Genly Ai is an envoy from the human interplanetary collaboration the Ekumen. He has been sent alone to the planet Gethen to see whether he can persuade the inhabitants to join the Ekumen. Between the planet’s perpetual wintry conditions and the Gethenians’ androgynous nature, Genly is struggling with his ambassadorial role. His primary contact is Estraven, who seems to want to help, but can they ever truly understand and trust one another?

For me – and most of the book group – this was a slow burner. There is a LOT of background to set up about Gethen’s people, politics and languages. On reflection there is also a lot of plot and character development from the start as well, but for me that got a bit buried under my trying to get to grips with the world building. And then around the halfway point I realised I was really enjoying the book and by the end I loved it.

As with every aspect of the novel, Le Guin goes into a lot of detail of the Gethenians’ androgyny. She has invented something called “kemmer”, a period of fertility akin to mammals in heat. During kemmer, Gethenians experience sexual urges that are overwhelming to the point that no-one is expected to work during that period. Though some Gethenians do have an equivalent of marriage, most are promiscuous and go to communal “kemmer houses” to have their sexual needs met. Genly finds this all a little strange, but what I really liked is that Le Guin has the Gethenians find Genly revolting because to them, he’s sexually aroused (or capable of it) all the time.

What Genly really struggles with, though, is the Gethenians’ androgyny. He cannot get his head around this concept and persists in thinking of them all as male, except when anyone acts in a way he dislikes, which he tends to then label as them acting female. Genly is pretty misogynistic. He’s also generally a bit slow on the uptake (some of my book club labelled him outright stupid), which means other characters have to explain stuff to him – and therefore to us readers.

“I thought…Estraven’s performance had been womanly, all charm and tact and lack of substance, specious and adroit. Was it in fact perhaps this soft supple femininity that I disliked and distrusted in him? For it was impossible to think of him as a woman, that dark, ironic, powerful presence near me in the firelit darkness, and yet whenever I thought of him as a man I felt a sense of falseness, of imposture.”

What detracts from the acceptance of androgyny being Genly’s problem rather than Le Guin’s is that all the Gethenians are given male pronouns throughout. Interestingly, in her introduction to the edition I read, Le Guin admits this was a mistake, because it not only colours how readers perceive the Gethenian characters, but it probably coloured how she wrote those characters too. It really is quite tough to think of Estraven as gender-neutral when not only are he/him pronouns used, but he is also called a man repeatedly. Perhaps, even though singular they has been used for centuries, it just wouldn’t have been accepted by a publisher in 1969, but surely “person”, “parent” and “sibling” are perfectly good words that Le Guin could have used?

As Genly sees more of the planet and gets to know Estraven, I warmed to the novel. A big chunk of the second half is made up of an epic journey that is by far the most memorable part of the novel. It shows clear inspiration by true tales of explorers such as The Worst Journey in the World by Apsley Cherry-Garrard (which I loved), but it also offers an opportunity to really show the Gethenian landscape and to develop the main characters beyond their initial failure to understand each other. This is where I really fell in love with the book.

“Genly Ai demands of us an inordinate trustfulness. To him evidently it is not inordinate…His obtuseness is ignorance. His arrogance is ignorance. He is ignorant of us; we of him. He is infinitely a stranger, and I a fool, to let my shadow cross the light of the hope he brings us.”

Genly’s report is interspersed with Gethenian folk tales. They add a lot of rich detail to Gethenian culture, but I will admit I found them disruptive to the flow of the main narrative. I was similarly ambivalent about Foreseeing, which is the closest thing Gethen seems to have to a religion. It gave Genly an opportunity to have some conversations that weren’t political, and gave Le Guin a chance to philosophise, but I found it all a bit bewildering and it didn’t advance the plot.

Overall, I think this novel would benefit from a second read. It’s part of a series of books called the Hainish Cycle, which I am curious about. Though they’re not direct sequels, as I understand it, but rather separate stories in the same universe.

First published 1969. This edition published 2018 by Gollancz.

Source: Storysmith