Elisabeth Vonarburg's books and the lament of the monolingual reader

There are many times when I deeply regret that my ability to read in French is not strong enough to handle the complexities of fiction - most recently, because it means that I must wait and wait and hope that all the volumes of Elisabeth Vonarburg's amazing and mesmerising Tyranaël cycle are translated into English (hopefully, with Vonarburg herself collaborating on the translation, as she has done in the translations of the first two volumes).

The five volumes are:

Les Rêves de la mer, trans. Dreams of the Sea
Le Jeu de la perfection, trans. A Game of Perfection
Mon frère l'ombre
L'Autre Rivage
La Mer allée avec le soleil

Vonarburg is a multi-award winning author (both in French and in English translation) - her best-known work (at least in English) is probably Chroniques du Pays des Mères (published in English in the US as In the Mothers' Land and in Canada as The Maërlande Chronicles), a rich and multi-layered examination of a matriarchal society in a future/alternate history of Earth.

The Tyranaël cycle is, on the surface, a story of human colonisation of a new planet - but one on which at least one previous civilisation has originated, evolved, and then disappeared - apparently. The first two volumes deal, in part, with the early disasters and eventual successes of the early colonisers as they learn to live with some very unique circumstances and build a functioning society. At the same time, we see parts of this through the eyes of the Dreamers - precognitively gifted members of the previous civilisation on the planet - and we watch as some humans seek to find traces of, and understand something of, those who were there before them.

Threading through everything is the presence, puzzle and threat of the Sea - a strange fluid body/energy field/mystery that rises and falls hundreds of feet as the seasons turn, destroying life, interrupting electromagnetic currents and changing the shorelines of continents as it rises.

A blurb posted on the SFWA website from the publisher of the French editions says:

As the twin planets of Altaïr eclipse each other, a dangerous and mysterious blue Sea rises, killing most of the explorers from Earth. The survivors must make a new life amid the abandoned cities of the long-vanished native population, curiously intact. Or are the colonists just a nightmare of the aälmâdzi, the native Dreamers ?

So begins the epic of the planet Tyranaël : an adventure, a lyric journey through time, and a search for answers, each of which is more strange and wonderful than the last.

But the Tyranaël cycle is so much more than just another colonisation of space novel, with strange and mysterious aliens and inexplicable dangers. It is deeply philosophical, exploring the nature of perception, of truth, of time, of reality, but in a way that evolves naturally out of the events and characters portrayed.

And it is also, as all of Vonarburg's books (at least the ones I've read, the ones in English that have had her hand in the translation), a tour de force of language - lyrical, fluid, evocative, suggestive. Vonarburg's writing has always, to me, had the same kind of otherworldliness that I find in Borges, or Calvino, or in the deserted cities of Bradbury's Mars. It must be read to be understood, because the feeling of it is beyond description - or at least beyond my feeble powers to describe.

But it is a most welcome addiction, and I'm not-so-patiently waiting for more.

Lessons from The Lathe of Heaven

The other day, I was watching the news - something not done lightly these days - and started thinking what the world would be like if, instead of all these various shades of skin pigmentation that have meant so much and been used to justify such callousness and hatred and bloodshed and injustice over the centuries, we were all the same shade of brown. A silly, rather superficial thought, because I know that the drive to identify a group as Other has much deeper roots than a difference in skin tone - that's the excuse, not the reason for hatred, xenophobia, slavery, and other delightful inventions of human society.

But my partner glaurung reminded me that this was, in fact, one of the shifts in reality that is forced to happen in Ursula K. LeGuin's The Lathe of Heaven, so then I had to go find the book on our shelves and re-read it.

Rather co-incidentally, while I was re-reading it, we also watched V for Vendetta, and the juxtaposition of the two in my mind led me to greatly ponder the nature of terrorism and the desire to solve the (perceived) problems of the world.

In both cases, we have a situation where the current situation is clearly wrong. It deserves to be, needs to be, should be changed. But how? In The Lathe of Heaven, the problems are too big, too vast, too well-entrenched, for any ordinary mortal, or group of mortals, to change - LeGuin was writing of a world in which climate change had already done a great deal of harm, for example. And in V for Vendetta, the hold of a fascist police state combined with the power of a complicit media has made it very difficult for more than small, individual acts of resistance (the preserving of a Koran, for example) to be envisioned.

And into both worlds, there comes a person who has the desire to change the world for the better, and who acquires the means to do so.

In The Lathe of Heaven, George Orr, the man whose dreams can change everything - past, present and future, falls into the power of the mostly altruistic Dr. Huber, who only wants to make the world better - for himself, and for everybody - but operates without humility, without the wisdom to see that he cannot know what will be better and what will be worse, and what will be the effects of forcing such dramatic, repeated shifts in reality on the minds of people and the fabric of time and space. And in the process, he violates the person he is using to make all this happen. The Lathe of Heaven looks at two very key questions for the one who would change the world: does any one person have the right to decide what is best - or even better - for all, and do the means justify the ends?

V for Vendetta focuses more on the second question, although its answer to the first is implicit - perhaps, if the people join and consent, if they all become the revolution. V reminds me of Moses - a flawed leader, allowed to bring his people to the edge of the promised land, but not worthy to cross over with them, because of the weight of his mistakes. Or perhaps an active variant of the sacrificial lamb, the scapegoat, who takes upon himself to do the things that should not be done, but must be done, and accepts his exile from the new world his acts have created.

It is interesting that both works leave the second question - that of means and ends - open. Because that's always been the kicker.

In The Lathe of Heaven, we learn that the world would already have been destroyed had George Orr not changed the continuum as he lay dying from radiation poisoning some years before the opening events of the book. But the crisis brought on by Huber's use of Orr's gift would not have been survived without Orr's dreaming creation - or is it a creation? - of the Aliens who are gifted with the same abilities he is, but who have learned how to use them wisely, if at all, and, it seems, in some kind of communal state which at the very least allows for the possibility of consent among the changed.

In V for Vendetta, could the revolution have a chance of happening without the murders of those who build the fascist state in the first place? Would it have been more ethical if V had killed the leaders and creators out of pure revolutionary fervour rather than for revenge? Are the means justified if the one who does them takes the blame and the punishment, but leave a legacy for others to continue with cleaner hands?

I like reading - and watching - things that make me think, even if I'm not really sure of my answers either.