The Eye of the Heron by Ursula K Le Guin
Cover design by Jamie Stafford-Hill
Cover photo by Mark Newman/ Lonely Planet
Published by Tor Books
Reviewed by Leigh Kimmel
I originally came across this short novel many years ago, in an anthology that has otherwise slipped my mind. I'm not even sure whether I was still in high school when I read it, or if I came across it later, when I was in college. When I was younger, there were so few speculative fiction books in the tiny public library or school library that I would scour the shelves for anything I was interested in reading, so I read a lot of stuff I might've passed by otherwise, including some anthologies that were a mix of good and mediocre stuff. So it's probably not surprising that I can't recall the name of the anthology, a although I might be able to recognize it if I were to come across a copy.
However, the Eye of the Heron was sufficiently striking that it's stuck with me all these years, at least partly because it was so different from most of the sf available to me in that small town. It was the story of Luz, a young woman of Latin American descent, steeped in a culture very different from the one in which I'd grown up. One I knew a little bit about from the Spanish teacher's accounts of visits to Mexico, enough to recognize the emphasis on male honor as reflected through female reputation, and thus the critical importance of chaperones and duennas to shepherd young unmarried women of wealthy families whenever they left the family compound.
In fact, Luz made such an impression on me that I was surprised upon re-reading to discover that she doesn't even appear until the second chapter. In fact, the entire first chapter deals with Lev and the other people of Shantih, a nearby community that is despised by Luz's people. The Shantih folk are pacifists reminiscent of the hippies of the 1960's, while it's strongly suggested that Luz's ancestors were either crime bosses or the losing faction in a civil war in one or another Latin American country -- they refer to BrasilAmerica, as if all of South America has united under Brazilian leadership. The descendants of the people of the first ship are quite proud that their ancestors were men, and say the exiles on the second ship were rabble, and the Shantih folk who arrived on the third ship are nothing but vermin.
They live on a world called Victoria, which is very different from the typical space colonization story setting I was used to reading. Although it's a world with a shirtsleeve environment and an ecology, it is one neither friendly nor hostile toward humanity. There are no large animals, and while some of the small animals will tolerate the presence of humans or even live as a commensal within one's home, not a one of them will endure captivity. The sole predator will tear itself to pieces in a fit of self-destruction if caged, and the other animals will simply lie down and die.
Although at least some of these animals, particularly the rabbit-like creature called a coney, are edible, the impossibility of domesticating them means that all meat must come from hunting or trapping. As a result, meat is very much a rare treat, and a mark of wealth and status. However, the fascinating ecology of Victoria is not the focus of the story. This is not a novel of exobiology, but of human political struggles between the descendants of the first two waves of settlement and the people of the third wave of settlement.
The people of Shantih are becoming weary of being peasants and feeding the people of the City. Freedom is a core value to the Shantih-folk, and so long as they must live as peasants, under the thumb of the leaders of the City, they cannot be free. However, non-violence is also one of their core values -- and they define it so strictly that the creation of any form of contention is just as violent as striking a blow. So they try to reason with the Bosses, and to engage in passive resistance, hoping to shame the Counselors into letting them go -- even as some of their own number argue that it might well be better if they just depart, rather than try to obtain permission.
However, when it gets out that they're planning to leave and just want the Council to rubber-stamp their departure, the Counselors decide that this constitutes rebellion and must be punished. Off to jail the representatives of Shantih shall go -- but the jail is far too rough a place for the women among their number. When Counselor Falco agrees to put them up, it puts Luz and her frustrations straight into a collision course with the Town's determination to find their own way, independent of the City.
The real turning point comes when Luz decides to leave her father's compound in favor of her friends in the Town, leaving behind a letter in which she explains that she has not been kidnapped, but has left of her own volition, and the people of Shantih should not be retaliated against. At that point, her father comes, alone and in secret, to a meeting in which he warns that his fellow Counselors are determined to make a violent confrontation out of this. And when the confrontation does occur, he even acts to strike down the one who is most determined to crush the Town with violence.
When I first read it, I was entranced by the image of people winning their freedom through nonviolent resistance in the tradition of Gandhi and Martin Luther King. However, on re-reading it becomes clear that their tactics work only because a significant number of the leaders of the City have a deep-seated need to be seen as paternalistic, as beneficent leaders rather than tyrants, unabashed thugs who break kneecaps to break wills. Had enough of the Council been the sort of temperament for which winning is more important than being right, and had felt it critically important to impose their wills at all cost, the ending would likely be far more akin to Harry Turtledove's "The Last Article," in which Gandhi confronts not the British Raj, with typical British devotion to propriety, but Nazi Germany and its doctrine of the Master Race.
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Review posted January 1, 2021
