The Compass Rose

Ursula Le Guin’s short story collection The Compass Rose was a surprising book. It was not surprising in quality or voice, but rather in its diversity. As the title may suggest, the stories contained between its covers scatter in all directions. There is a coherency in this, however, as the stories are grouped into six sets, Nadir, North, East, West, South and Zenith.
Each of the stories were memorable and well crafted, but some held special significance to me during this reading. I found Mrs. Le Guin’s stories touched on other stories and experiences that have been on my mind lately, from my reading of Natural Man to a song from my favourite album, “Whaling Tale” by Valley of the Giants. I always try to notice such parallels.
“The Author of the Acacia Seeds” began the book with a humourous work detailing the emergence of a future science of Throlinguistics, the study of animal communication, language and art. It was a novel idea that we might someday find conscious art in the actions of animals. Penguin poetry was especially interesting, and long with the last story of the book, led to the link to “Whaling Tale”.

“The New Atlantis”, which followed, was a 1984-like story of facism combined with a sinking sense of doom as North America is flooded by rising waters. Despite this, the enthusasm of invention in the midst of such cultural and natural disasters was highlighted in a striking way. Even so, the continent would sink, perhaps an inevidible reclaimation by the earth.
The intervening stories held much of interest as well, though, as I said before, some hold on more strongly to my memory. “Two Delays on the North Line” was a look at death. “SQ” was a look at the complicated issue of sanity and its enforcement. “The Diary of the Rose” again looked at both sanity and facism as they disturbingly wove together. “The Pathways of Desire” looked at the notion of human-created worlds with the world of natural humans on another planet being learned of by Earthlings.
“Sur”, the final story of the collection chronicles an expedition to the Antarctic in 1909 that served both to spotlight human drive to achieve and test ourselves and as a feminist revision (or perhaps uncovering) of history. Le Guin told of a group of women who sailed to the Antarctic from South America and succeded in reaching its highest peak years before the first men would do so. At the end, the story climaxed with one woman giving birth to a child, placing emphasis on the point that women can be strong, independant and all things feminism promotes, but also hold high the positive natural and traditional aspects such as bearing children without compromising either.
The Compass Rose introduced me to a different sides of Ursula K. Le Guin’s writing than did Planet of Exile. I was quite impressed by her use of political allegories, realism and surrealism in addition to the fantasy and science fiction that I had come to expect from her after reading one novel and learning of her works from others. Certainly, her excellence multi-genre execution and voice are things I aspire for in my own writings, and show her mastery of her craft.