Always Coming Home
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Always Coming Home is a novel by Ursula K. Le Guin published in 1985. This novel is about a cultural group of humans -- the Kesh -- who "might be going to have lived a long, long time from now in Northern California." (p. i) Part novel, part textbook, part anthropologist's record, Always Coming Home explains the life and culture of the Kesh people, anarchistic, introspective and bound to their land by ritual.
The book weaves around the story of a Kesh woman called Stone Telling, who lived for years with her father's people—the Dayao or Condor people, whose society is rigid, patriarchal, hierarchical and militarily expansionist. The story fills less than a third of the book, though; the rest is a mixture of Kesh cultural lore (including poetry, prose of various kinds, mythos, rituals, and recipes), essays on Kesh culture, and the author's own musings under the pseudonym "Pandora". The book is accompanied by a tape of Kesh music and poetry (often not found with used copies of the book, but available on order from the publisher).
Unlike most books based on a future earth, but like much of Le Guin's work, Always Coming Home follows Native American and Taoist themes. It is set in a time so post-apocalyptic that no cultural source can remember the apocalypse, though a few folk tales refer to our time. The only signs of our civilisation that have lasted into their time are indestructible artifacts such as styrofoam and a self-manufacturing, self-maintaining, solar-system-wide computer network.
Pandora describes the book as a protest against contemporary civilization, which the Kesh call "the Sickness of Man". Pandora muses that one key diffence is that the Kesh have solved the problem of overpopulation -- there are many fewer of them than there are of us. They use such inventions of civilization as writing, steel, guns, electricity, trains, and the above-mentioned computer network. However, unlike most neighboring societies, they reject government, a non-laboring caste, expansion of population or territory, disbelief in what we consider supernatural, and human domination of the natural environment. They blend millenia of human economic culture by combining aspects of hunter-gatherer, agriculture, and industry, but reject cities; indeed, what they call towns would count as villages now.
Stone Telling's narrative may be seen as a return to the theme of The Dispossessed and The Eye of the Heron, in which a person from an anarchistic society visits an acquisitive government-ruled society and returns. The Kesh are much less rationalistic and more colorful than the anarchies in the other two books.
[edit] Box set and soundtrack
A box set edition of the book (ISBN 0-06-015456-X), comes with an audiocasette entitled Music and Poetry of the Kesh, featuring 10 musical pieces and 3 poetry performances by Todd Barton. The book contains 100 original illustrations by Margaret Chodos.
[edit] Stage performance
The only known stage version of Always Coming Home was mounted at Naropa University in 1993 (with Le Guin's approval) by Ruth Davis-Fyer. Music for the production was composed and directed by Brian Mac Ian, although it was original music and not directly influenced by Todd Barton's work.
[edit] Publication history
- Original hardback release 1985
- Mass-market Bantam Spectra paperback 1986 or 1987 ISBN 0553262807
- Trade paperback from the University of California press 2001 ISBN 0520227352 (as part of a series of literature pieces set in California) - the book had been out of print for many years when this was released.
