2014 read #114: City of Illusions by Ursula K. Le Guin.

City of Illusions by Ursula K. Le Guin
203 pages
Published 1967
Read from December 1 to December 2
Rating: ★★ out of 5

Not a good sign: Le Guin, in an introduction to a reprint edition ten years after the original publication, muses about the differences between "the book one imagines and the book one writes." "When the discrepancy is particularly huge," she elaborates, "it is comforting to think Platonically that that subjective or visionary book is itself a mere shadow of the ideal BOOK, which nobody can ever get to...." Le Guin doesn't come out and say it in as many words, but she's all but warning away any potential reader: This book stinks. Don't bother. Her opinion of City of Illusions is sufficiently low that she takes the time to list the handful of things in it she's grateful she got to write.

Two of those items were my favorite bits of City of Illusions: "The chance to imagine my country, America, without cities, almost without towns, as sparsely populated by our species as it was five hundred years ago," as well as "The chance to give the country between Wichita and Pueblo a ruler worthy of it." The Prince of Kansas was great. And Le Guin's depictions of depopulated and reclaimed-by-wilderness North America were seductive, flirting with that well-after-the-apocalypse esthetic so rarely done right. (Le Guin's depopulated America, to be exact, is far emptier than it was before the Great Columbian Exchange began, a haunting landscape of humans huddled in small family clusters, obliterated by their alien overlords should they grow too populous or try to resurrect lost technologies.) The first half of the book, really, is a harmless, diverting adventure, a fun romp populated by "Thurro-Dowists" (Thoreau-Taoists) quoting On Walden Pond to alien wanderers, pathways snaking along the lines of ancient highways, and the anthropological touches that almost always enliven Le Guin's work.

It's when our hero arrives at the titular city that the book falls apart. In the introduction, Le Guin notes, "This book has Villain trouble," referring to the nefarious Shing race; and again, "Herds of Bad Guys are the death of a novel." Le Guin, writing this out in 1978, realizes the central failing of much popular, morally binary fantasy literature decades before most of its fans (many of whom still snap up reheated claptrap about dark elves and whatnot to this day). Despite its post-civilization, post-alien-conquest setting, City of Illusions is a fantasy quest novel to its core, a lightweight effort whose structural weaknesses become evident as soon as Falk leaves the wilderness. Like Le Guin, though, I'm grateful for the good bits.