Lavinia Revisited

Here at the Strangelove for Science Fiction blog we reviewed Lavinia by Ursula K. LeGuin not too long ago and we found it to be particularly wonderful, a standout book from a distinguished author. As a resource, here is a roundup of interesting reviews and discussions regarding LeGuin's Lavinia (Harcourt, 2008):

Adam Roberts at Punkadiddle puts it succintly: "The single best SFF novel of the year, I'd say." (Roberts' short item.) At Strange Horizons Roberts wrote a full-length review: " ... there is a pervasively numinous quality to LeGuin's imagined world; finely rendered and completely believable, it makes for a brilliantly compelling textual universe." Yes, and yes again.


Roberts also participated in a discussion that spread across several blogs:
Introduction -- Torque Control
Lyric and Narrative -- Punkaddidle.
Fantasy -- Asking the Wrong Questions
History -- Eve's Alexandria


Laura Miller at Salon.com wrote:

Lavinia is an old writer's book -- Le Guin is 79 -- in the best sense of the word; it is ripe with that half-remembered virtue, wisdom. This, Le Guin seems to be saying, is what it feels like to be the personification of your land and your people, to speak the words and perform the rites of "the old, local, earth-deep religion," to be the sacred guardian of harmony and plenty for a handful of rustic villages and farms, and to carry their past and future in your body.

I could go on quoting other reviews, but I think the point has been made. This is a book worth your time.

In Great Waters by Kit Whitfield

In Great Waters (British edition: Jonathan Cape, 2009; U.S. edition: Del Rey, 2009) is an alternate history fantasy set in England in the equivalent of the Elizabethan era. In addition to standard-issue humans there are mer-people, presented in unsentimental, un-Disney-fied style. The two tribes of sentient beings are called landsmen and deepsmen. While there are a number of differences in physical characteristics -- deepsmen are larger, stronger, and have a single large tail instead of legs -- the key similarity is that the two tribes are cross-fertile.

History in the novel diverges from our own in the early 9th Century when the deepsmen announce themselves in the canals of Venice. Until this time deepsmen were assumed to be a sailor’s fantasy. Handily revealing the vulnerabilities of wood-hulled ships, Venice was the ideal city for them to demonstrate their power: the murky waters of the canals gave easy and undetectable access throughout the city. The deepsmen invasion precipitates a political crisis in Venice among the landsmen. The leaders of Venice send for help from the French to defeat the deepsmen. The people of Venice rebel, rejecting subjugation to the French as more objectionable than the trouble that the deepsmen present. At this critical juncture a half-breed woman, Angelica, emerges from the water and allies herself with the rebellious people. She directs the deepsmen to attack the approaching French navy and the French are soundly defeated. Angelica, with her unprecedented sea power becomes the ruler of Venice by popular acclaim. Her children and grandchildren are sought as spouses by every royal family whose nation has a navy. Angelica’s offspring are required in order for each nation with a coastline to ally with local deepsmen. All of this is backstory for the narrative at hand, which takes place about 800 years later.

The English royal family has no male heir. A half-deepsman boy, Henry, found tossed up on the shore, is being raised in secret as a possible usurper for the throne. Anne, granddaughter of the current king, realizes her family’s predicament and works toward a solution.

Henry and Anne are both troubled and dysfunctional, but they are troubled and dysfunctional in interesting ways. They both are starved for attention from their largely absent mothers. Henry’s mother shoves him out of the water at age five and he never sees her again. They both have entirely absent fathers. Deepsmen don’t pair-bond and fathers have no role in nurturing the young. Anne’s father was killed in a battle in Scotland when she was quite young. Henry makes do with a surrogate father, the emotionally aloof scholar Allard, who found Henry on the beach and attempts to raise him and civilize him. Anne’s surrogate father is Bishop Westlake, the moral and ethical center of the novel.

The stories of these two distressed childhoods are the best parts of the book. Henry, when he arrives on land is nearly feral, as if he has been raised by wolves, with nothing resembling an education and no social customs that the landsmen recognize. Deepsmen have no recorded history, relying solely on a rudimentary oral tradition to pass on information about hunting, tribal dominance behavior, and basic survival. Allard must teach Henry how to dress himself, the English language, history, and how to interact with others in something other than aggressive displays to establish dominance. Henry’s isolation is nearly complete. If word of his existence reached authorities, his execution would be certain.

Anne, by contrast, has been educated in English and Latin and church dogma. Her isolation is amid people. She has tutors and maids, where familiarity and friendship is dangerous to both parties. Family is estranged or largely absent. The predators at court are every bit as hungry and dangerous as those at sea. Anne’s strategy is to pretend stupidity, hoping to be non-threatening and invisible. As part of her deepsmen genetic heritage, she has a large patch of bioluminescent flesh on her face that glows whenever she is embarrassed.

Because of their partial deepsmen blood, Henry and Anne have physical differences from landsmen, making it difficult to walk upright, something they share with nearly all the royal families of Europe. They can manage to walk with crutches, if gracelessly.

After these two characters and their childhoods are presented, quite wonderfully, the story structure and plot lurches into action, rather awkwardly, with Anne chasing after a cure for Bishop Westlake, who has fallen ill. Henry, through a rather large coincidence, falls into the hands of Bishop Westlake and a plan is hatched to marry Henry to Anne and place them on the throne. The machinations at court are not entirely convincing and obstacles tend to fall away easily. As his coronation approaches, Henry causes a fuss by refusing to swear an oath to uphold the Church and keep the laws of God. He finds Christianity inscrutable and the more people attempt to explain it to him the more he rejects it. This threatens to alienate their key ally, the Bishop. The controversy is dropped without resolution.

There is a lot to like: the dysfunctional childhoods of Henry and Anne, the imagery of the royal families of Europe on crutches, and Anne’s delightful bioluminescent blushes. More importantly, Whitfield has done a service to the mythology of merfolk by providing this fresh and unsentimental variation.

Still, I can’t help thinking that the backstory about Angelica’s conquest of Venice 800 years earlier, leading to the introduction of deepsmen blood throughout the royal families of Europe, which is developed in considerably more detail in the book than the summary above suggests, might have made a superior novel to the one at hand.

Lavinia by Ursula K. LeGuin

Having read quite a few books by Ursula K. LeGuin, I thought I knew what to expect from a new LeGuin novel, but I did not. No. It seems odd to speak of a breakthrough book for an author who has recently turned 80 and has a long and accomplished career. If there were such a thing as a canon of science fiction and fantasy literature LeGuin already would have three books on the list, possibly four. This book, Lavinia (Harcourt, 2008), is among her best, if not the best, and it achieves success in interesting ways.

LeGuin has embraced, like never before, a story entwined with important and prickly topics: leadership, family, war, marriage, religion, poetry and prophecy. Parts of story may be familiar to some readers, based as it is on a minor character in Vergil’s Aeneid.

“Why must there be war?”
(Vergil replies:) “Oh, Lavinia, what a woman’s question that is! Because men are men.”
(p. 87)

The war between the Latins and Aeneas’s Trojans is unnecessary, springing from hubris. Turnus undercuts King Latinus’s leadership by finding a narrative for war that has popular appeal. If this sounds like an Iraq War reading of the story, with Turnus as a combination of Bush and Cheney and Rumsfeld and Blair, so be it. (Witness the spectacle of Tony Blair, only a few days ago, saying with a straight face that he doesn’t regret the decision to go to war and that he would do it again. Turnus is alive among us.) All unnecessary wars have similarities, among them the disingenuousness of the leaders who promote such wars.

Turnus is motivated by his wounded pride, his suit for Lavinia’s hand having been rejected by Latinus and Lavinia, and by his selfishness and lust for power. By expelling the Trojan foreigners, Turnus seeks to win Lavinia and secure the title of King of the Latins. By making Aeneas his enemy, Turnus wages a war that he will lose. It has, after all, already been written, as Lavinia learns.

Lavinia, daughter of King Latinus, is trained as a leader of the pagan religion of her people and more than this, both she and her father receive visions and are skilled in interpreting those visions.

“We who are called royal are those who speak for our people to the powers of the earth and sky, as those powers transmit their will through us to the people. We are go-betweens. The chief duty of a king is to perform the rites of praise and placation as they should be performed, to observe care and ceremony and so understand and make known the will of the powers that are greater than we are. It is the kings who tells the farmer when to plow, when to plant, when to harvest, when the cattle should go up to the hills and when they should return to the valleys, as he learns these things from his experience and his service at the altars of earth and sky. In the same way it is the mother of the family who tells her household when to rise, what work to do, what food to prepare and cook, and when to sit and eat it, having learned these things from her experience and her service at the altars of Lares and Penates. So peace is maintained and things go well, in the kingdom and in the house.” (pages 205-206)

When she is 12 years old, Latinus introduces Lavinia to the sacred forest and sulfur springs of Albunea and the visions to be had there. Her eyes are opened, metaphorically, on her first visit and on subsequent visits she meets the poet, Vergil, the creator of her world. The poet asks her if she has any suitors. She lists them and says that she favors none of them, which leads to this exchange (p. 42):

(Vergil, thinking of Aeneas:) “If a man came—if a man came to marry you who was a man in a thousand—a warrior, a hero, a handsome man—”
“Turnus is all that.”
“Has he piety?”
“No.”

Lavinia has already defined piety: “responsible, faithful to duty, open to awe” (p. 22), an interweaving of family, community, and religion, all in one not-so-simple word. Turnus’s hubris is in opposition to piety.

Over several vision-meetings the poet tells Lavinia some of what her future holds and some of the centuries-distant future of Rome as well.

Some of Turnus’s sense of entitlement comes from Lavinia’s unstable mother, Amata, who has encouraged his ambitions and his pursuit of Lavinia. Amata would like to have her daughter under her thumb, which Lavinia resists as best as she is able. As the story develops it becomes clear that Amata is mentally ill and she becomes more demanding and erratic in her behavior, kidnapping Lavinia in an effort to prevent her marriage to the foreigner, Aeneas, and plotting instead to unite her with Turnus.

Vergil, himself near death, enumerates the names of those who will be slaughtered, some of whom Lavinia knows well. “How do you like my poem now, Lavinia?” (p. 89).

The situation accelerates toward war, as foretold by Latinus, and resolves with the deaths of some important characters (who will remain unnamed on the chance that readers would prefer to discover for themselves) and Aeneas victorious. Vergil’s Aeneid stops there, LeGuin’s Lavinia continues. Vergil’s intent, in part, is to codify a heroic legend of the founding of Rome. LeGuin has a tighter focus: the life of Lavinia, and a large topic: womanhood and its interplay with family, war, marriage, and religion.

Lavinia’s difficult family life, living in the women’s side of the royal family home with a mentally unbalanced mother, is later echoed in her uneasy relationship with a willful stepson, Ascanius, who becomes her king. In his insecure competitiveness, fighting skirmishes with neighboring kingdoms and needlessly antagonizing them, Ascanius recalls the selfish Turnus.

The marriage of Aeneas and Lavinia is central, as it brings lasting peace between the Latins and the Trojans. Together these people, or their descendents, will found the Roman Empire, according to Vergil. Leading to “the great age ... maybe ... or so I once thought,” muses the poet. Aeneas proves to be a model husband and a wise peacetime ruler. He honors and performs the religious rites. His one fault as a father, if it is a fault, is his lack of success in helping Ascanius find the way to the measured exercise of power.

The narrative, while told in uncomplicated language, skips around in time, especially in the first half. It ranges from Lavinia’s girlhood, to her married life with Aeneas, forward to Vergil’s subjective time, and back again. It flows smoothly, but I wonder how readers unfamiliar with writers who take similar liberties would react. Then, there are the meta-realities of the story. It is LeGuin’s story overlayed on Vergil’s story, which is overlayed on legend. LeGuin gives credit to Vergil as the creator of this reality, honoring the creative force of his poetry.

I will stop here, though I feel that I have only scratched the surface of the many things this novel brings to mind.

Related post: Lavinia Revisited

Caught reading in public

Being a nosy sort of person, I like to check out what people are reading when they read in public. At lunchtime today at Chipotle a young woman was reading George R.R. Martin’s A Game of Thrones (1996). In terms of fantasy and science fiction, Martin is the clear leader in my unscientific observations of what people read. It used to be that Stephen King was the genre’s favorite read-in-public author, and maybe it will be King again with Under the Dome (2009).

Martin’s A Song of Ice and Fire epic, of which A Game of Thrones is the first volume of four extant, is a remarkable multithreaded novel, inspired by the Wars of the Roses, and it’s far from finished. The several thousand pages so far published read quickly and are dark, surprising, intricately plotted, and full of sex and violence. The story is told from a wide variety of well-drawn viewpoint characters.

I don’t, as a rule, read or recommend an unfinished work. I’ll make an exception and recommend this one.

Links
George R.R. Martin: Not a Blog
Soon to be an HBO series? Update

Listing the Best of Recent Fantasy Novels

Over at the Locus Roundtable, Graham Sleight has offered a list of the best, recent, adult, literary, fantasy novels:

Wise Children, Angela Carter
Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell, Susanna Clarke
Little, Big, John Crowley
Coraline, Neil Gaiman
Ash, Mary Gentle
Perdido Street Station, China Mieville
The Anubis Gates, Tim Powers

To winnow the list:
1. Wise Children -- I can't comment because I haven't read it.
2. Coraline -- I found this to be well-written, yet superficial. It hasn't made a lasting impression on me. Also, since Graham Sleight specifically describes his list as adult books rather than books for younger readers, this doesn't really fit.
3. Perdido Street Station -- This is uneven work. It seems to me to belong more to the horror genre.
4. The Anubis Gates -- A madcap, gonzo, roller-coaster of a book. It's quite good, however Powers has written better since this. I would substitute Declare, except it, too, belongs more in the horror genre.

That leaves:
Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell, Susanna Clarke
Little, Big, John Crowley
Ash, Mary Gentle

We are in agreement that these three are among the core works of fantasy in recent years. Each is an exemplar of fantasy world-building, and each creates worlds within worlds, or perhaps layers of worlds. Each is challenging and rewards re-reading.

I would add to this list Paul Park's Great Roumania quartet, a single novel published in four parts: A Princess of Roumania, The Tourmaline, The White Tyger, The Hidden World. (I suspect the total word count is similar to Ash or Perdido Street Station or Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell.) An argument could be made that Park's Great Roumania is a work for young readers -- it certainly starts in a YA mode. It quickly moves beyond that and adults will find it just as challenging and rewarding as the other three on the list.

The Graveyard Book

The Hugo Award for best novel was given out this past weekend to The Graveyard Book by Neil Gaiman (2008). I should say up front that it wasn’t my top choice. I was a voting member, even though I didn’t attend Anticipation in Montreal, and my top vote went to another novel. Still, The Graveyard Book is a fine book, and already the winner of the Newbery Medal.

It’s a variation on Rudyard Kipling’s The Jungle Book (1894), in which a boy, Mowgli, is raised by the animals of the jungle. In Gaiman’s book, a boy, Nobody Owens, is raised by the undead denizens of a graveyard.

Gaiman hits all the notes you might expect: the threat of death from both earthly and supernatural causes, an amusingly off-kilter education, a touch of childhood romance, an array of charming characters, growth and change, and a nudge out the door toward adulthood. It’s well done throughout.

For me it was spoiled a bit by Gaiman himself. The anthology Wizards edited by Jack Dann and Gardner Dozois (Berkley Books, 2007), led off with “The Witch’s Headstone” by Gaiman, which would later become a chapter in the novel. This was one of the strongest novelettes of the year and it won the Locus Award. It drops the reader immediately into the setting of The Graveyard Book and offers most of the pleasures of that novel in a more compact and intense experience. Next to “The Witch’s Headstone,” the novel’s many digressions and side-trips seem flabby and a bit hollow. The Graveyard Book is a short novel, but after “The Witch’s Headstone” it seems overlong.

The Graveyard Book is the sort of book that lends itself to visual interpretation. The edition in front of me has a generous number of excellent illustrations by Dave McKean. I am not surprised to learn that it’s been picked up for a film. In the fantasy and science fiction genre, Gaiman is on a pace to rival Philip K. Dick for the most film adaptations of his work.

I’ll discuss the novel I did vote for in another post (follow here).