The Eye of the Heron
Author — Ursula Le GuinFinished — 2025-06-22
My read-through of the five novels in this Library of America volume continues. A few images and moments certainly grabbed hold of me and put me in a pretty particular 1978 SF state of mind. Other moments felt like too bare an exposure of the author’s own opinions about how societies ought to work; Always Coming Home seemed to me to be a more thorough and nuanced realization of a similar aim.
Luz Marina Falco Cooper sat in the deep window seat, her knees drawn up to her chin. Sometimes she gazed out through the thick, greenish glass of the window at the sea and the rain and the clouds. Sometimes she looked down at the book that lay open beside her, and read a few lines. Then she sighed and looked out the window again. The book was not interesting. It was too bad. She had had high hopes of it. She had never read a book before. She had learned to read and write, of course, being the daughter of a Boss. Besides memorizing lessons aloud, she had copied out moral precepts, and could write a letter offering or declining an invitation, with a fancy scrollwork frame, and the salutation and signature written particularly large and stiff. But at school they used slates and the copybooks which the schoolmistresses wrote out by hand. She had never touched a book. Books were too precious to be used in school; there were only a few dozen of them in the world. They were kept in the Archives. But, coming into the hall this afternoon, she had seen lying on the low table a little brown box; she had lifted the lid to see what was in it, and it was full of words. Neat, tiny words, all the letters alike, what patience to make them all the same size like that! A book—a real book, from Earth. Her father must have left it there.
“Sasha’s house is down there,” said the variegated child, pointing down a muddy, overgrown lane, and sidled away so effectively that he seemed simply to become part of the general mist and mud.
I imagined The Eye of the Heron as a Falcom PC-98 JRPG and something clicked:
- I was disappointed in the stories of actual JRPGs in comparison
- I liked the book a lot more
It’s so vivid in my mind how memorable a well-executed game, in that style, of this exact story, could be. The wistful aesthetics of a Legend of Heroes III or a Princess Maker 2, but the narrative and poetic weight of Le Guin.