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Posted January 5, 2004
It's been decades since I've read The Lathe of Heaven, Ursula K. Le Guin's tale of a dreamer and his dream, the world. And yet I remember it better than any other of her science fiction novels.
Now, I've read the first three Earthsea books several times, and regard the second, The Tombs of Atuan, as her best book (at least of those that I've read), and one of the great fantasy classics, right up there with The Last Unicorn and The Music from Behind the Moon and a half dozen other works not written by Tolkien. But The Lathe of Heaven lingers in memory not because I've read it recently (I just said I haven't) but because the story unfolds in an astounding manner.
It is the story of George Orr, a young man whose dreams become reality. And it is the story of his oneirologist, Dr. William Haber, who decides to use poor Orr to remake the world, to make the world a better place. He does not succeed.
The Lathe of Heaven may not be Le Guin's best book. But it is one of her best. It is also one of Philip K. Dick's best — though he did not happen to write it. In another reality, perhaps, he did.
It is very good Dickian fare: what does it mean to be human? what is reality? must the human distort reality, or create reality — or bend to reality?
It is also rather funny, with aliens selling hot dogs at the end. Rather like a Philip K. Dick novel, really. Pity he didn't write it.
Or perhaps it's not such a pity. Of the two, Le Guin is the better writer, at least at the sentence level. Dick too readily embraces dreck, and his stories are often steeped in the detritus of the wrecked civilizations he writes about, his prose echoing his obsession with the decaying, the petty, and the sick, with clunky phrasing and banal dialogue. He never mastered the subjunctive, for example, and if ever there existed a writer who required the subjunctive, it was Dick. Many of his realities were provisional, crying out for a grammatical expression, as it were.
Philip K. Dick is dead, alas; Le Guin isn't. But I stopped queuing up to buy her novels several decades ago, for no better reason than that I could never detect any attempt at wit or humor since The Lathe of Heaven. Nearly everything I've read of hers is somber, earnest, romantic. I tired of the relentless seriousness. And yet she managed to write one rather funny and very Dickian book, one that as homages go nearly transcends the work of the master to whom homage was paid. I will no doubt try to read her more recent stuff in the near future. But I confess: I read PKD with more delight, because even at his darkest there's an echo of a jest. Le Guin is no jester.
And yet she wrote The Lathe of Heaven, a serious book that is occasionally funny, as well as just plain weird and wondrous.
So goes my memory. I could be wrong. I could, indeed, be way off. I don't even own a copy of the book, now, so I cannot readily check my judgments, which long ago calcified into little dogmas that another, innocent reading may shake off like yesterday's brittle dreams.
But I have just rewatched the made-for-PBS movie, on DVD. A few years ago I was flipping through the channels and saw a few seconds of something, a psychiatrist interviewing a patient. immediately I remembered: this is The Lathe of Heaven! Now it has hit the DVD format, and as soon as I saw it, I had to watch it entire.
Unfortunately, as movies go, it is not very good. Terrible, even. When I first viewed it, over 20 years ago, I held the incidental music as mostly responsible for the movie's failure. The synthesizer constricts the story to a closet drama; too many of the musical gestures and feints are missteps, clichéd, almost embarrassing, and the lack of musical space seems as though it were composed only with an old TV's tinny, mono speaker in mind. And since the movie was shot on a low budget, and without a cast of millions (we see dozens, at most scores, of extras, while the drama proper has, really, four players at most), it would have helped to have a wider feel
to the music, to suggest vast landscapes and empty corridors, to frame the story in a wider reality than actually present to our eyes. The effect, alas, is precisely the opposite. Everything feels enclosed, claustrophobic. Not, I think, the proper emotional context for the story.
Upon rewatching, I note that Bruce Davison's performance as poor George Orr is pretty clumsy. Davison, so early in his career, here — 1979! — had not yet mastered his art. And many of the secondary characters are played pretty badly, too. Only Kevin Conway as Dr. Haber really shines.
In a sense, this is not a film as such: it was shot on videotape. And it shows, 23 years later. The DVD restoration was by no means wholly successful. It is a good thing that there is very little physical motion going on in the story, since many scenes (especially early on) show tracing effects. Perhaps this helps make it seem more of a period piece, an LSD-induced dream from an LSD-drenched era. Perhaps this is one of the film's few charms.
The videotaping does become explicitly psychedelic, towards the very end, after the almost inexplicable volcanic activity (unlike in the book, in the film Mt. Hood does not erupt; the magma appears in downtown Portland, no explanation given, though perhaps none necessary: it's all a dream). And the psychedelics are really about the only effective and impressive set of effects in the whole film. The use of light — obviously having learnt something from the greatest science fiction film ever made, 2001: A Space Odyssey — is kinda cool, as we used to say in the '70s — and quite impressive for late-'70s video. Technology aside, the peculiarities of the story justify this nicely: reality has broken down.
The movie could have gone into just a bit more explanation; it leaves several plot points unaccounted for, and sticklers for such things will be disappointed, perhaps vexed. It could also have used more of Le Guin's deliberately psychedelic references to A Little Help from My Friends,
etc. But there are some nice touches. As the turtle-alien towers at the hotdog stand, or over poor Orr at the Junque shop, I thought, how Dick!
It was as if Dick himself were presiding over the whole affair, dresed up as a turtle. (Had he lived to 2000, he might have treked up to Seattle for the WTO affair, and donned an even more earnest turtle suit; that too might have suited him, if not as well.)
Many people consider The Lathe of Heaven, both movie and book, lesser, hackier, crappier science fiction — not masterworks. The made-for-PBS movie, it seems to me, is indeed too schlocky to be a classic. It was an earnest effort, though, and something of a milestone for PBS. Appropriately, Bill Moyers interviews Le Guin on a special segment on the disc. This feature is very interesting, and Le Guin comes off as a fairly intelligent person, though the elementary nature of the discussion and the self-congratulatory mood is just a bit hard to take. She also waffles: is there one message, or many? Should we even trust her at all on the work's meaning, and if not, why is she talking about it at such length? Worse yet, neither she nor Moyers mentions Dick. And certainly Dick deserved some mention, no?
There has been a remake of the movie, another made-for-TV job. I've not seen it. I don't have high hopes. I'll hunt up the book and give that another try, instead.
Until then, the story lingers in my memory, and in my dreams. And who knows of what may come from the latter, after all?
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