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The anthropologist Claude Levi-Strauss configured observations of non-Western cultures into dualistic abstractions. Le Guin removes that most basic dualism �� male/female �� and imagines “What if...?�� So much of her setting is familiar, the reader cannot help becoming immersed in the reality of her speculations. She provides a planet not dissimilar to an ice-age bound Earth. The inhabitants are technologically limited but certainly not primitive. The habitable contiguous land mass is divided between two politically sophisticated and ancient cultures. Most notably, all of the people are androgynous in the sense that they are neither and both male and female. Every 26 days the individual enters a sexually active phase called kemmer. A male or female potentiality is realized randomly, and for a period between two and twenty hours the desire for intercourse reaches peak strength. While the probability of pregnancy during kemmer is high, the odds are evenly spread across the population. Thus, the news that King Argaven XV is pregnant is shocking merely because of his advanced age. Le Guin alludes to this asexuality through the eyes of a visitor, Genly Ai, but fills in the explicit details in a cleverly conceived historical dispatch archived by the Ekumen (confederacy) Genly Ai represents. Even with his diplomatic corp training, Genly Ai cannot suppress a phobic reaction: ��...my efforts took the form of self consciously seeing a Gethenian first as a man, then as a woman, forcing him into those categories so irrelevant to his nature and so essential to my own.�� (p.12) It's a distrust that blinds his judgment. Perhaps the long yellow teeth and aggressive insinuations of the king's cousin, Pemmer Harge rem ir Tibe, strike Ai as more “masculine.�� To the reader, Le Guin's descriptions could not scream “smarmy�� more loudly. Despite being our initial narrator, the reader's view quickly diverges from that of Genly Ai.

Genly Ai's diplomatic mission begins in Karhide, a domain reminiscent of an oriental despotism. Its ceremonies re-enact a history measured in millennia and memorialized in towering stone structures and obscure myths. Le Guin captures that weight of time perfectly in describing the antechamber where Genly Ai waits: “Like all the King's House this room was high, red, old, bare, with a musty chill in the air as if the drafts blew in not from other rooms but from other centuries.�� (p.28)

Power is played out in a constant duel of double meanings, called shifgrethor. It's a precarious balance of face-saving and dominion. Obviously, success favors those best able to suppress their emotions. However, a despot, closeted from public observation and endowed with absolute power, need not submit to such restrictions. In King Argaven the reader sees a display of temper and obvious paranoia that leave no doubt that he is truly the “Mad King.��

A series of events takes Genly Ai to Karhide's rival power, Orgoreyn, governed by a commission of 33 representatives. In Orgoreyn, everyone carries identification papers; everyone either has or is assigned a job. A far-reaching bureaucracy works with brutal, invisible, mechanical efficiency. Estraven confides in his personal journal: “I wonder if Genly Ai sees that in Orgoreyn despite the vast visible apparatus of government, nothing is done visibly, nothing is said aloud.�� (p.152)

However, Le Guin's interests remain firmly fixed on the fate of her human characters at their most elemental level. Karhide lacks organization. Orgoreyn lacks imagination. Between these two poles, individuals must salvage their own understandings for loyalty, ethics, morality and compassion. These are the values Genley Ai struggles the hardest to interpret. In his own diplomatic curriculum that interpretative skill is called “Farfetching.�� “What one is after when farfetching might be described as the intuitive perception of a moral entirety; and thus it tends to find expression not in rational symbols, but in metaphor. I was never an outstanding farfetcher, and this night I distrusted my own intuitions, being very tired.�� (p.147) Le Guin keeps her readers' interest focused on how her two narrators: Genly Ai and Therem Harth rem ir Estraven will reveal to each other their intuitive selves, breaking through the barriers of translation and cultural preconceptions.

In one of the most riveting chapters of the book, Le Guin describes Genly Ai's stay in the Fastnesses of Karhide, Himalayan-like retreats in the remote mountains of the far east. Here reside the keepers of the Old Way of the Handdara, the religion that preceded the current state religion, Yomesh. The Handdara practice a discipline of self-abnegation in order to attain a spiritual trance called Presence, a closed channel of communication based solely on intuitive awareness. The most aberrant members of society form a conclave of Foretelling described by Le Guin with brilliant irresistible tension. The point of the discipline is a zen-like conundrum: “To exhibit the perfect uselessness of knowing the answer to the wrong question.�� (p.70) The demonstration connects with Ai's own suppressed intuitive power known as Mindspeech.

There is a connection between Handdara and Yomesh �� there are always connections, just as there are connections between past and present and present and future. At the center is Meshe's eye. On this planet, it is always Year One. For mere humans, living in the now, it is too easily a myopic viewpoint. Estraven observes: “The [the Foretellers] have tamed and trained the hunch, but not increased its certainty. In this matter the Yomeshta also have a point: the gift is perhaps not only or simply one of foretelling, but is rather the power of seeing (if only for a flash) everything at once: seeing whole."(p.204) It is in fact from Yomesh that the book derives its title:

Light is the left hand of darkness
and darkness the right hand of light.
Two are one, life and death, lying
together like lovers in kemmer,
like hands joined together,
like the end and the way.
(p. 233-234)