I first read Ursula K. LeGuin as a child, when I discovered the Earthsea books, and I still have the same three paperbacks I read before the age of twelve, the Bantam editions with the mostly grey covers and the little woodcut drawings at the head of each chapter. I’ve been reading LeGuin for most of my reading life, and I just finished reading her latest novel, Lavinia.
Lavinia is a retelling of the last six books of Vergil’s Aeneid, from the point of view of Lavinia, daughter of Latinus, the destined bride of Aeneas. Lavinia has no words to say in Vergil’s poem; LeGuin allows her to speak for herself, to retell her part of Aeneas’ story and to go on beyond what Vergil had to say, to tell the whole story of her life.
I’m so excited by this novel that I hardly know what to say. It is simply brilliant, a story by a mature writer at the top of her game. I found it hard to put down–I could have stayed up half the night to finish it, even though it has no explicit sex and its battle scenes are narrated by someone who doesn’t fight but has to tend the wounded after. (Yes, I meant that sarcastically.) I recommend it to anyone who appreciates good prose, rich characterization, a story that creates a whole world you can walk into and lose yourself in.
But I recommend it in particular to anyone who identifies as a pagan, and especially as a reconstructionist pagan. LeGuin brilliantly, imaginatively re-creates an Italy before the Empire, before the Republic, before Rome as Rome, a Bronze Age world of kings ruling small townships surrounded by their pagus, the farmlands (source of our word “pagan”). This is a world where the numina of hearth and storehouse, field and boundary and forest are uninfluenced by the stories and the plastic arts of the Greeks, where Vesta is simply the fire, Venus the evening star, and a Vestal is an unmarried woman who tends her father’s hearth for life, as she did when she was a girl, as is the duty of the eldest daughter. All the fighting and the politicking of the story, all the hardships Aeneas and his Trojans endured, are for one purpose only: that the images of the gods he carried out from burning Troy should be enshrined with the Lares and Penates of Lavinia’s household, on Italian soil.
LeGuin creates a pagan domesticity that wakes in me a hunger to share it. I don’t want the near-ceaseless work and all too frequent warfare of ancient Italy, but I would love to have the sense–which comes through in another of her recent novels that I just re-read, Voices–that the housework and the fieldwork and even those clashes of arms are part of a ceaseless whole, and all of it sacred. Lavinia’s hard work of making the sacred salted meal, which starts with purifying the gritty salt clay from the river’s edge, is no less important in the realm of piety than the yearly dance of the Leapers at the Ambarvalia, who shake their spears and dance at the boundary stone and call on Mars and the Lares in a language that was old when Vergil wrote.
If you have any interest in Vergil, Roman culture, the Bronze Age, paganism, Mediterranean history, or just plain good writing, read Lavinia. It might change your life.
I’m glad to see someone else reviewing this wonderful, wonderful book – thank you. (You can see what I said about it here, if you’re interested…)
I have those same childhood copies of the Earthsea books! And in fact, I’m currently reading them to my daughter, who is enjoying them very much.
I pulled mine back out (after *far* too many years) after we finished reading – for the fourth time – a book that occupies the same place in her mental universe that Earthsea did in mine: Roderick Townley’s The Great Good Thing. Townley’s exploration of love, loss and the fate of the characters in forgotten stories is so compelling that it actually drove me back to reread some of my old favorites, starting with the books that most shaped my childhood. I highly recommend it – in fact, I think I need to post a full review some time soon. For the moment, suffice to say that this is a “juvenile” (in the same way that Earthsea was originally pigeonholed as a “juvenile”), but one that glances – lightly – into some of the same mythic territory that Robert Holdstock explored in “Mythago Wood”, or Cliff Simak in “Out of Their Minds”.
Erik,
How do you feel about the later Earthsea books, Tehanu and after? I just can’t enter into them the way I did the original trilogy.
Same here. I read them, but only once…
I felt like Tehanu et al was the work of a much more mature author (which obviously it was) and somehow that made it less enjoyable than the original Earthsea books. It’s not that I don’t appreciate Le Guin’s later work (especially Lavinia, on which I feel pretty much the same as you) but what she wrote when she was younger had a different kind of quality than the later stuff. I can’t imagine the author of Lavinia also writing Rocannon’s World – it seems so utterly different to me, though I love both stories. Tehanu felt like the author of Lavinia trying to write an Earthsea book, and it just didn’t fit right any more.
I have longer been a reader and admirer of Le Guin’s work, so I was glad to see your review. I have not read Lavinia but I plan to do so now. I also love the Earthsea books, although the last three are very different from the first three, and I did not enjoy them in the same way as the first three. I found it interesting how Le Guin revisited Earthsea so much longer after writing the first books. Also, I would like to recommend to anyone one of my favourites of Le Guin’s work, Always Coming Home.