This was actually my third attempt to read The Left Hand of Darkness. I don't know what stopped me the other two times. Once was in high school when I saw that Michael Moorcock, who's work had a major influence on me at the time, was a huge fan of it. I checked it out from my school library and for some reason never got around to reading it. Years later in a college course for science fiction it popped up once again, but by that point in college my ability to focus on books was in the garbage and it once again never got read. This time I read it as part of the Library of America collection of Ursula K. Le Guin's Hainish cycle, and once I got into it it turns out that it's the best book of the collection so far.

I think that this is the book that really allows the anthropological angle in Le Guin's writing shine through. Along with her lyrical prose, I think this book benefits from the fact that there's no real deadline bearing down on the protagonist throughout most of the book. Genly Ai has a mission, but it's simply to try and get the people of Gethen to join the Ekumen (which has replaced the League of All Worlds from the previous Hainish novels), a job he states he is willing to spend the rest of his life doing. Because of the lack of a firm deadline, the story is allowed to follow Ai as he traverses the continent and explore the various aspects of the local cultures, giving a real sense of depth to the societies of the planet.

There's also Le Guin's genius use of encyclopedia entries of local culture and legends, which work to both fill out the setting and it's cultures but also to effectively foreshadow future events and the motivations of the Gethen characters.

As a personal note, one thing that I did find weird was the fact that Genly Ai was a bit of an unreconstructed man. He's possessed of a strong sense of his own sexuality, and finds that he struggles to accept the ambigendered nature of the native Gethens, thinking of them in his own thoughts as being men especially when he trusts them and disparaging the aspects of personalities that he doesn't like as being the womanly parts of them. He also tends to slot them into genders based on their jobs or roles in society. A major part of the novel is him dealing with this and gradually growing to understand them both personally and culturally, but I guess part of me is an optimist and found it weird to have someone so far in the future as part of a radically progressive organization as the Ekumen. Not to say this is a flaw or a mark against the book, but it stuck out to me at times more than I think was intentional.

However, I do think that the above point plays into a major theme of the novel of dual ignorances. Genly Ai is unable to truly understand who on Gethen has his best interests at heart and which are just using him, as well as the fact that he doesn't fully understand how much of a political bombshell he is wherever he goes and how his mere presence is warping the cultural landscape around him. As well, the Gethen's can't understand what Genly offers them, misunderstand his motivations, and can only see his presence on a purely local political basis. Most of the novel is driven by these dual ignorances colliding and gradually evolving as the book progresses.

As a slight spoiler, this is best embodied by the relationship between Genly and Estraven, a local politician. The novel follows the two of them as their paths keep crossing, neither of them able to fully convince or understand the other person as Genly's presence on Gethen continues to influence the two major powers of the continent they're on. The growth of their relationship and the ambiguities of it gradually giving away to a deep understand of one another is one of the highlights of the book.

There's a lot going on in this novel, and I think so far at least its the best work by Le Guin that I've read. The leap in quality between this book and the last three is astounding given there are only two years between this one and the last. I have to say that, unless you want to see where an author starts from or care to catch the little references to previous books in the setting, I'd probably start with this one.

8 out of 10.