Not long after writing the blog post On when writers get it right, the sad and shocking news broke about the death of Alexei Navalny during his imprisonment in a remote Siberian penal camp.
What was an already extensive catalogue of grim reading has become even grimmer in the months since, with an outwardly spiralling saga of extremism charges against journalists, hammer attacks on Navalny’s allies, and demotion and penance for the priest who conducted Navalny’s memorial service.
With the date of the UK’s General Election still anyone’s guess, and with the US Election definitely looming in the autumn, Navalny’s example is worth taking time to reflect on — inviting us to think about how much (or how little) effort we’re prepared to put in (no hidden visual pun intended there) to change the society we live in and to fight to redress its injustices.
Anyone giving serious thought to those kinds of questions could do a lot worse than reading another of Ursula K Le Guin’s masterpieces, The Dispossessed which was published exactly 50 years ago this year. (The book has been the inspiration for my Autumn 2024 project, True Voyage Is Return.) It’s far more than a mere compare-and-contrast study of a capitalist society and an anarchist one. It cuts right to the heart of the conflict within each of us, the tension between recognising that something feels wrong in the world around us and making a commitment to changing things for the better.
There are no easy answers to resolving this tension, and not for one second does Le Guin attempt to fool us or herself that there ever can be. She focuses instead on an individual’s power to decide and to choose their own path, and acknowledges the vast spectrum of possible outcomes when your path converges with or diverges from those that others around you have chosen.
