The Eye of the Heron

The late Ursula K. Le Guin out to be a Nobel nominee in my opinion. I've never read a book of hers that didn't speak to me of profound and important things. In this novel, she imagines a confrontation between violence and nonviolence and she is realistic about the outcome but as the story proceeds, so do her explorations of what those terms mean and how they might apply to human behavior and relationships.

In The Eye of the Heron Ursula Le Guin addresses the question of non-violent resistance. Is it reasonable, can it be successful in the face of ruthless power, is the refusal to respond to violence with violence even possible? The setting is interesting - we are on a newly colonized planet with two communities, one industrial and hoarding, the other agricultural and sharing. There is a nuanced symbolism of the local flora and fauna. There are compelling characters. Clearly this was supposed to be the first book of a series…
The author made one mistake that doomed the book - as far as I remember, this is the only novel where she made such a blunder. She decided to tie the origin of the communities on her planet to specific countries and show more policies of the the third planet from the Sun. The industrial thugs come from Brazil(?), while the peaceful march of future agricultural settlers originates in Moscow.
Really - Moscow!?! How pathetic this assumption seems in the face of recent history! How little Le Guin understood about the unknowable people behind the Iron Curtain if she assumed them to be some potential followers of non-violent resistance like Tolstoy and Gandhi! show less

Note: This review contains mild spoilers.

The Eye of the Heron is a short novel that was originally published in the collection Millennial Women, edited by Virginia Kidd. A straightforward story that reads like a fable, The Eye of the Heron is set on the alien planet of Victoria, where there are two groups of settlers: the farmers of the village of Shantih and the wealthier City inhabitants. The rest of the planet is uninhabited except by strange animals, including the long-legged, elegant, gray creatures called “herons” because of their resemblance to the bird, who gaze on the humans’ activities impassively; and the small, funny shape shifters called “wotsits,” who die in captivity but will sometimes alight on a person’s show more hand.

The book opens and closes with a person watching a wotsit change shape and color in his palm before flying away. These two framing incidents are both hopeful, representing a brief communion between the human and his new world. In fact, The Eye of the Heron could be classified as fantasy, if we did not know that both groups of settlers came to the planet on spaceships, exiles from a future Earth. The City dwellers were descended from prisoners, while the people of Shantih were leaders of a movement called the People of the Peace, a nonviolence movement that had gained too many adherents back on Earth. The brief glimpses of Earth’s future history, as related in the tales of the exiles’ descendants, add some layers of complexity to this otherwise straightforward tale.

Lev, the young leader of the Villagers, is returning home with a scouting party when the story opens. The Villagers have found a location for a new settlement, but the City Council won’t let them go, not wanting to lose their supply of low-paid workers and farmers. The People of the Peace respond with nonviolent civil disobedience, and several of them are arrested. One of the older leaders, Vera, is imprisoned in a Councilor’s house, where she begins to influence the Councilor’s daughter, Luz.

Luz, learning that her father has recruited an army of brutish young men to enslave the Villagers, flees her home to warn Lev and the others. Once there, she chooses to stay, a decision that drives her father and her suitor back in the City to irrational action. Luz tries to talk Lev into simply leaving Shantih, but he insists on following his people’s nonviolent ideals, which leads to tragedy. After things return to normal, though, Luz’s arguments eventually win over some of the Villagers, and she takes a group on an expedition to found a new home as the story ends.

Though unambiguous and very short, The Eye of the Heron explores many interesting ideas. The People of the Peace believe strongly that each individual makes his or her own choices, and the choices that the settlers make after being stranded on an alien planet — after being given a clean slate, in effect — are of interest to Le Guin. Do they wall themselves off in the City and attempt to control the uncontrollable? Do they hold on to the ways of Earth and refuse to adapt, even when it might mean their deaths? Or do they embrace their circumstances and make this planet their new home, adapting to it? Le Guin explores all of these choices, but clearly, it is the last one that holds the most promise at the end. I wouldn’t say that this is Le Guin’s best work, but it is certainly enjoyable and thought-provoking. show less

This was my first time reading Le Guin’s work. I choose this one at random from a stack I was given by a friend.

I enjoyed it, but it wasn’t my favorite. It took me a little bit to get into it. I usually connect best with very character driven stories, and for me, the characters were a bit flat and one dimensional.

It got better for me once I realized that the “characters” in this story were actually the two opposing societies. It was an interesting look at social class struggles and the efficacy of pacifism and civil disobedience.

The world was interesting, I wish she had explored it a little more. My favorite parts were the brief sections of exploration into the wild, untamed planet, which were really not the focus of the book at show more all. show less

Powerful, and a bit sad, as are all tales pitting arrogant men with guns against peaceful people with peaceful ideas; in the end, absent combat, only flight will do, and one cannot know for how long that will suffice.

This was a short, timely read, a novel of ideas that had as much in common with late 19th and early 20th-century literature as it did with science fiction.

As a novel, The Eye of the Heron isn't as nuanced as Le Guin's best SF fiction; it's a bit self-consciously political in a way that reminded me of The Word for World Is Forest, and some of the characters felt like platforms for philosophical musings that would be better explored in an essay or short story.

But I still found it memorable and compelling. Le Guin plays with the setting of a young colony world struggling to define its own political process. The text poses urgent questions about our political and moral obligations to one another, giving tentative answers through images and show more story.

A worthwhile book for the end of 2016. show less

This book was published almost ten years after "The Left Hand of Darkness" and considerably after "The Dispossessed" and yet it seems much less mature than either. It is quite short, almost a novella, and that may contribute to this impression.

It is interesting because it is a story of the failure of ideals. A culture which defines itself by its non-violence comes into violent conflict with its adversary culture. In her earlier books the good usually triumphs over the bad but here the end result seems closer to defeat than to victory.

As usual with LeGuin there are a few excellent feminist observations, typically brief and integral to the plot.