ORP: LeGuin: The Dispossessed, part n+1 & final.

In this novel, even when the writer describes the main character’s self-doubt, the words become almost poetic:

He had no answer. He had no right to all the grace and bounty of this world, earned and maintained by the work, the devotion, the faithfulness of its people. Paradise is for those who make Paradise. He did not belong. He was a frontiersman, one of a breed who had denied their past, their history. The settlers of Anarres had turned their backs on the Old World and its past, opted for the future only. But as surely as the future becomes the past, the past becomes the future. To deny is not to achieve. The Odonians who left Urras had been wrong, wrong in their desperate courage, to deny their history, to forgo the possibility of return. The explorer who will not come back or send back his ships to tell his tale is not an explorer, only an adventurer; and his sons are born to exile.
He had come to love Urras, but what good was his yearning love? He was not part of it. Nor was he part of the world of his birth.

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Here is a political thought from the book which could be applied to our culture:

…to subjects of governments founded on the inequity of power, to individuals who were inevitably exploited by and exploiters of others, because they had consented to be elements in the State-Machine.

And here is another political thought from later in the book which rings true:

The individual cannot bargain with the State. The State recognizes no coinage but power: and it issues the coins itself.

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At the end of the novel, Shevek escapes the university and seeks the underground and then participates in a peaceful rally against the warmongering establishment of the nation A-Io. The rally is gunned down by helicopter gunships; Shevek escapes with his life and is smuggled to the Terran Embassy. He finishes his Grand Unified Field Theory and publishes to all the nations of Urras, to Anarres, and to the Hainish and Terrans. He returns to Anarres aboard the ship from Earth (Terra) and this is where the novel ends. It ends with the hope of the Idea.

Just before Shevek boards the landing ship (and accompanied by a Hainish human), he makes a visit to the main ship’s garden deck. Here is an interesting description (I especially like the last sentence in this passage I am quoting.):

Very late on the following ship night, Shevek was in the *Davenant’s garden. The lights were out, there, and it was illuminated only by starlight. The air was quite cold. A night-blooming flower from some unimaginable world had opened among the dark leaves and was sending out its perfume with patient, unavailing sweetness to attract some unimaginable moth trillions of miles away, in a garden on a world circling another star. The sunlights differ, but there is only one darkness.

All good things must come to an end, so with this novel. Here are the last few lines of the book; I think the writer does a good job evoking the spirit of homecoming:

Alone, Shevek turned back to the observation port, and saw the blinding curve of sunrise over the Temae, just coming into sight.
“I will lie down to sleep on Anarres tonight,” he thought. “I will lie down beside **Takver. I wish I’d brought the picture, the baby sheep, to give to †Pilun.”
But he had not brought anything. His hands were empty, as they had always been.

*The ship from Earth.
**Shevek’s partner (wife).
†Shevek’s youngest daughter.