![]() Margaret Thatcher’s famous phrase, “There Is No Alternative”, just brought home to many of us that there just had to be a different way. The 1984 Miner’s Strike the Falklands War the Greenham Common peace camp the film, Where The Wind Blows - all these and others just highlighted the divisions that were growing in our communities and there was a slowly emerging awareness that the direction of travel of carbon-fuelled, military obsessed Western capitalism was the wrong one - a truth only accentuated further in retrospect by the desperate death-throes of the ruthlessly targeted mining communities. In the mid-80s, in the UK, the post war consensus was falling apart. I’d read the first couple of LeGuin’s Earthsea books and many of her Haimish sci fi novels as well - they were strange, sat-apart books, with a different sensibility from those hard-man sci-fi tales of planetary conquest and fantasies set in warlike ancient lands. It is a story (or stories) a poem (or poems) an anthropological study of a people, the Kesh, who have never existed, but might one day- a gentle, shining book of hope for what the human race might be capable of becoming.īack then, I had read the sci-fi standards and the Tolkeinesque fantasies and these were my escape - a way for an insecure and serious young man to burrow back into childhood, where reading had been the most magical experience I could have. One day, back in the midst of my early, sometimes confused, adulthood, a book came into my life, that became the book of my life.Īlways Coming Home is an extraordinary piece of work. ![]()
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