“We’ll be making love on a world nobody even knows the name of now, a thousand years from now!”
If this book was written by anybody else, it would likely be considered pretty good or at least promising. Compared though to the Earthsea cycle or, say, The Dispossessed, The Telling comes out as weak and, worse, unnecessary.
I liked the story. This is what it really should have been: a short story. As a novel, it doesn’t work for me. The characters are two-dimensional at best and one can see how it’s gonna end miles ahead. Cut, cut, cut. And yet... I feel that the subplot of Pao and Sutty could have been developed (was developing?) into something interesting. Something truly big. Alas, Ursula Le Guin is no longer with us so we’ll probably never know.
Pao had tried on Sutty’s old grey-and-silver saree once, to entertain Sutty while she was convalescing, but she said it felt too much like skirts, which of course she had been forced to wear in public all her life because of the Unist clothing laws, and she couldn’t get the trick of securing the top. “My tits are going to pop out!” she cried, and then, encouraging them to do so, had performed a remarkable version of what she called Indian classical dance all over the futons.
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