Esperanza

Heather Lelache

I profess a stout love for Heather. Her initial characterisation is a “black widow” in the sense of having keen killing instincts (she’s a capable lawyer) and a hard shell of clacking jewellery. The latter seems as some sort of defensive armour, maybe? Heather thinks of herself in rather inhuman terms as a spider snaring its prey. It only comes home in retrospect that “black widow” also meant she was black (well, brown) and she was a widow. Heather is the love interest, the least crucial main character whose job is to witness the dualistic struggle between George and Haber. Le Guin does not, however, do her dirty. While it is quickly established that George likes Heather and vice versa, it does not immediately dominate Heather’s role in the narrative. She isn’t there as the love interest initially; she is there as a lawyer protecting her client, and doing it well.

Halfway through the story, Heather’s colour is removed, figuratively and literally. George dreams her back into the progressively utopian universe as a grey-skinned waifu whose sole narrative role is to comfort him. I was quite unhappy with this as it happened. The love interest character is reduced to providing pleasure to the male protagonist at last. However, at the end of the story George literally leaves the grey-skinned Heather behind. The reasons are unclear. He only says something in the vein of “you can’t follow me there”. In the new and final world spawned by Haber’s nightmare, George spends half a year searching for Heather in vain, only to bump into her by accident. She is brown again (in the sense of “right”), and though she has some recollection of him, she is hers only again and not his. Even if the narrative doesn’t explicitly confirm this, I decided to read the waifu as an imperfect fantasy which has to be discarded in the end in favour of the real woman. That’s encouraging.

Dr William Haber

I have a lot of sympathies for Dr Haber, too, even though he’s the villain of the story. He’s a doctor, I’m a doctor. He’s huge, I’m huge. He wants to make the world better, I want to make the world better. He won’t listen to anyone telling him he’s wrong, I’m also not great in that department. I can smell testosterone off the book pages he’s in and I bet his chest would feel great to lie on.

Dr Haber has a curious quirk for a psychiatrist who should probably let the patient talk: long monologues which completely take over the narrative. Sometimes you can reconstruct stuff happening in the background (“Will you lie down George? Very good.”) and sometimes characters interrupt the monologue with their own thoughts (mostly notes that the dear doctor sure is running his mouth). But usually these long paragraphs make the story grind to a halt as Haber talks and talks and talks. Now, it didn’t feel boring since “what the hell is Dr Haber thinking” is a pressing plot question and these monologues are an opportunity to try and read him. (Thank you, Le Guin, for giving us something to think about while reading the speeches.) But I think there’s a big reason for these monologues, other than showcasing one system of belief, to be pitted against George’s. It’s characterisation by showing, not telling.

Thing is, Haber is very masculine-coded. He’s all about progress and control and exploitation. Of course he loves hearing himself speak! He’s like everything male rolled into one character. His plot journey is linear and upward, promotion after promotion. He has boundless confidence. The first chapter is all him having quick judgements about George, which include “he’ll never amount to anything” and “he’s completely passive, like a woman or even a child, dear God”. He attempts to dominate George with threats, but he secures feeling good about himself while doing it, because he’s helping the world and benevolently letting George be a part of it. And ultimately… he’s wrong. He doesn’t “get it”. “It” being the main message of the novel, which is something like “just because you happen to have the power to change the world, doesn’t mean you should use it at will”. The book is a lovely critique of the masculine ideal, where power = good, more power = better, and power to change everything else to your image = best. There’s even some back-and-forth toward the end where Haber tries to blame the dystopian elements of his new utopia on George and George goes, rightfully: “Uh uh, doctor, you specifically designed your method so that I have no conscious control over it. The only one having intentions here is you, and so the bad stuff that happens without your intent is also your responsibility.” Haber sees himself unequivocally as good, as a paragon or bravery, as ushering humanity into a new, better era, as evolution on steroids. Man, he’s a manly man!

We don’t learn what exactly goes wrong when Haber tries to use his dreams to shape reality, but two reasons are implied. 1) Hubris. George talks twice about how self-hypnosis didn’t work for him; Haber boasts in reply that he can induce whatever dream he likes in himself. No no, with a few weeks of experience, he can control what a life-long haver of effective dreams grew to be terrified of. 2) He doesn’t ask for help. George goes out of his way to give the doctor advice. It’s not even fairytale advice in the vein of “yeah don’t look into any mirror but also I won’t explain why, because I want you to obey me blindly”. No, George lucidly explains that there are many aliens with effective dreams, and that they’ll help Haber to do it right. Haber even goes “yeah that sounds like a good idea, I might do that”. And then he doesn’t ask for help. Presumably because he wants the glory to be his alone. He isn’t punished by heroic tragic death. No no, that’s a male thing where wang bang, you’re dead, you don’t have to care anymore, now the survivors are legally obliged to honour your sacrifice. Haber is punished by forever looking into the chaos and void of what he created. You could say, in the same literal and figurative manner as that Heather loses her colour, that he’s condemned to looking into himself. I’m saving hopes for Haber to come out of his catatonic state one day, and through the humbling experience of utter dependence on others build a better model of “making good in the world”.

Even though Haber is a manly man, he does not partake in toxic masculinity. He’s even less sexist than Genly Ai, the manly man protagonist of Le Guin’s earlier novel The Left Hand of Darkness, who spent paragraphs on how repulsive and effeminate he found the genderless Gethanians. Haber is cordial, he laughs a lot, his aggression isn’t overt and he’s bisexual (though he is described as having encounters with “women” and “young men”, which makes me think he does not bottom, sadly). He’s a cool guy! And the narrative is very specific that he means well, that he wants to help, that he isn’t happy with the dystopic features of his utopia either. Haber’s hard to hate. He’s just wrong, and he doesn’t listen to anyone telling him so. Gosh I like Haber.

Final note: Being Czech and reading a Czech translation of the book, I pronounced his name in the German way, Haa-ber. It means the Haver. So cool.

George Orr

And finally, the protagonist. Cis male with stark feminine features, carrier of feminine energy (Wikipedia says daoistic philosophy, but I say no, we’re all heathens here in Czechia), the one who eventually comes out as “right” in the narrative. I have mixed feelings about him. He is described as slight, thin, with a light beard and light hair down to his shoulders, with captivating light blue eyes. Now I know that might evoke white Jesus to some, but I am cursed with an ex who looked just like this. With this mental image, I couldn’t help but take immediate dislike of George. Now that I write this, I realise it’s biased and unfair, but it is what it is. I cannot look at Jesus pictures and not remember my goddamn ex-boyfriend, who taught me that I am bad. George Orr ends up with baggage in my book. Sorry. Well, this delightfully Jesus-y protagonist is the carrier of the feminine energy and our foil to Dr Haber. He has no aims, his plot journey is cyclical, he has spent his life happy in the present moment, and he has supernatural powers that shape reality. The womanliest man to ever woman. When I give in to my internal feminine, I also gain supernatural powers. Mostly the power to withstand the first years of my kids’ lives and not go crazy with the longing to write gay fanfiction instead of pitting my cleaning rate against their dirtying rate.

I found it strange how George always insists that his dreams change reality. If I found myself in the morning with two conflicting histories of the universe in my head and everyone remembers only one of them, I’d conclude I must have had a real weird short circuit and fabricated the unreal one. Sure, it happens repeatedly, and it feels like the “fake” history was here first, but I’m a fallible human and I don’t trust my inner dating system that much. Maybe I’ve just read too many books on popular psychology. But maybe it would have added another feminine touch to George to have him doubt his perceptions at the beginning. “Obey authorities instead of your inner judgement” is a message women tend to hear all their lives. It would have complicated the plot by adding the intermediate goal “let George come to trust his hunch that he isn’t dreaming up alternate histories, he is actually changing the world”. Maybe Le Guin wasn’t up to that. Eh.

George spends most of the story in the way of the jellyfish described in the prologue, battered by the sea of his psychiatrist’s ambitions. Even when he makes his first Decision in the book (that he won’t help Haber anymore), it’s with the backup of an alien race and he ends up going back on it. Thankfully, his passivity doesn’t hinder the plot, since that is carried by the mighty thrusts of Haber’s ego and the reader’s along for the ride, just like George.

I like when George is described (on multiple occasions) to be at the centre of things. I dislike when he is described as the centre of all bell curves. I don’t like conflating “average” with “normal” with “good” with “centred”. George is described at the beginning (to be fair, in Haber’s POV) as a passive, moony person who never has interesting ideas. You won’t convince me that the personality tests he’s given at this time come out halfway between dominating and yielding, Le Guin. The movie Idiocracy did the same trick with the man in the middle of all bell curves. Its protagonist is literally the Everyman, and the movie uses this to demonstrate how much the population regresses. But George is not an everyman. Complete inner equanimity is not a trait most people have. I’d guess le Guin wanted him to oppose the male love for being special, to be on the tail of the bell curve. Average can be good, because your perspective represents a lot of people. But George is too much of a special snowflake even without his effective dreams. Sorry, but I do think this particular monologue of Haber’s should have been cut.

Other

Masterful writing was employed in the book. I was glad to be reading this one, not listening to an audiobook, because I had to return and reread on several occasions to make sure I hadn’t missed something. For example, when Haber links George up to the Augmentor while awake for the first time, from one paragraph to another, poof, the scene changes. George is now in the street bumping into an alien. In the opening scene, George is lying on concrete steps dying of radiation poisoning and then, in the middle of a sentence, he is in his 7-square-metre flat on his inflatable bed. These transitions are smooth. They seem to mirror dreams, which are the subject matter of the book. In a dream, the scene changes on a whim and you go along with it (like George does in the book). But when you wake up and think back on it (like the reader of this book does), you realise “wait that was weird, the content has just changed”. The whole book comes together remarkably well. The jellyfish at the beginning was like “huh I guess we’re doing marine life now”, but then you realise it’s a metaphor for the way the protagonist is written. Very cool.

Close ups 😋