In the Aeneid, the only notable lines Virgil devotes to Aeneas' second wife, Lavinia, concern an omen: the day before Aeneus lands in Latinum, Lavinia's hair is veiled by a ghost fire, presaging war. Le Guin's masterful novel gives a voice to Lavinia, the daughter of King Latinus and Queen Amata, who rule Latinum in the era before the founding of Rome. Amata lost her sons to a childhood sickness and has since become slightly mad. She is fixated on marrying Lavinia to Amata's nephew, Turnus, the king of neighboring Rutuli. It's a good match, and Turnus is handsome, but Lavinia is reluctant. Following the words of an oracle, King Latinus announces that Lavinia will marry Aeneas, a newly landed stranger from Troy; the news provokes Amata, the farmers of Latinum, and Turnus, who starts a civil war. Le Guin is famous for creating alternative worlds (as in Left Hand of Darkness), and she approaches Lavinia's world, from which Western civilization took its course, as unique and strange as any fantasy. It's a novel that deserves to be ranked with Robert Graves's I, Claudius. (Apr.)
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Adult/High School- This novel takes a minor character from Vergil's Aeneid and creates a thoughtful, moving tale of prophecy, myth, and self-fulfillment. Lavinia is the teen princess of Latium, a small but important kingdom in pre-Roman Italy. As she moves into womanhood, she feels pressure from her parents to choose one of her many suitors as both her husband and the future ruler of the kingdom. But the oracles of the sacred springs say she will marry an unknown foreigner. This stranger is none other than Vergil's Aeneus, proud hero, king without a country, and the man who will lay down the foundations of the Roman Empire. Their marriage sparks a war to control the region; while readers don't see the glorious battles, they do get the surprisingly moving perspective of the home front through Lavinia's eyes. Best known for her works of fantasy, Le Guin takes a more historical approach here by toning down the magical elements; gods and prophecies have a vital role in the protagonist's life, but they are presented as concepts and rituals, not as deities playing petty games with the lives of mortals. This shifts the focus of Vergil's plot from action to character, allowing Le Guin to breathe life into a character who never utters a word in the original story. Lavinia is quite compelling as she transforms from a spirited princess into a queen full of wisdom who makes a profound impact on her people. The author's language and style are complex, making this a title for sophisticated teens.-Matthew L. Moffett, Pohick Regional Library, Burke, VA
Le Guin (Powers, 2007, etc.) departs from her award-winning fantasy and science-fiction novels to amplify a story told only glancingly in Virgil's epic The Aeneid. The story is that of the eponymous princess of Latium (a royal city before Rome existed), promised by her parents, King Latinus and Queen Amata, to neighboring Rutilian king Turnus (who is Amata's nephew). But omens decree otherwise, and Lavinia weds Trojan warrior-adventurer Aeneas, a bereaved and conflicted husband, son and father who will, over the years, earn the initially reluctant Lavinia's undying respect and love. Though this unlikely heroine receives only token mention in Virgil's original, Le Guin brings her to vibrant life as a dutiful virgin whose world is circumscribed by daily routines; who is the uncooperative cynosure of several suitors' eyes; and who eventually distances herself from the misrule of her stepson Ascanius (Aeneas's successor), biding her time until the new metropolis of Rome is made worthy of its intrepid founder. Lavinia's inner strength emerges in dreamlike "conversations" with the poet who created her, and in her intuitive understanding of her father's just rule, her husband's justifiable ambitions and her own unending obligations. Le Guin has researched this ancient world assiduously, and her measured, understated prose captures with equal skill the permutations of established ritual and ceremony and the sensations of the battlefield ("The snarling trumpets rang out again. A group of horsemen far out in the fields moved forward in a solid mass like a shadow across the ripening crops . . . through the hot slanting light full of dust"). Arguably her best novel, and an altogether worthy companionvolume to one of the Western world's greatest stories.
Ursula K. Le Guin channeling Frank Miller? The poet of the bucolic utopia portrayed in Always Coming Home echoing the macho war cries of 300? The sensitive chronicler of the hermaphroditic culture of The Left Hand of Darkness engaging in the rough-and-tumble brawling characteristic of Sin City? Well, yes and no, but perhaps more yes than no.
Despite any clichéd misperceptions about her feminism and pacifism, Le Guin has always been a remarkably tough-minded writer, fully cognizant of the misunderstanding, contention, and violence that ineluctably characterize human interactions. Although much of her work argues for and postulates alternate and saner modalities of person-to-person and government-to-person relations, she has never been blind to the realities of power, nor hesitant to depict warfare and its consequences. For instance, her latest young-adult trilogy, Annals of the Western Shore, resounds with the impact of strife. Where she and a writer like Miller differ, of course, is on the necessity, glory, utility, and ultimately the morality of organized combat.
But the setting and characters of Le Guin's Lavinia dictate that she deal with warfare in her most concentrated and vivid manner to date. And while her ultimate stance on violence remains basically and explicitly unchanged from her career-long conclusions on the subject, she nonetheless inhabits the martial milieu of her novel so wholeheartedly that she is swept up in the bloody colors of its spectacle and carries the reader headlong with her.
It was very beautiful, the bristling glitter of lance heads far off there, moving quickly and nearer. The air was shaken with the thrilling drum of the feet of horses at the gallop. All along the lines of men drawn up in front of the city, spears and lances reared up into the sunlight, and horses began to whinny and shift and fight the reins. Then the Etruscan horns and trumpets sounded their battle signals, some deep and hoarse, some silvery sweet.
Lavinia takes up the matter of Vergil's Aeneid, the final six books of that epic anyway, and its quintessential Bronze Age heroics. In Vergil's masterpiece, the character of Lavinia -- young Italian wife to the displaced Trojan Aeneas, a hardened warrior twice her age -- receives the sketchiest of treatments, despite being central to the events surrounding Aeneas' attempt to found his new home in a strange land that greets him with resistance. Intrigued by this pivotal cipher, Le Guin embarks on her holistic portrait, worked out through three separated but carefully linked sections. The first 100 pages or so follow Lavinia from childhood until her 18th year, when Aeneas lands on the shores of her father's kingdom. With both her gender and her royal status acting as psychic fetters, Lavinia receives little guidance from her crazed mother, Amata, while her loving and regal father, Latinus, proves surprisingly ineffectual. Both education and pleasure come largely through woodland frolics with a friend, the daughter of a herder. It is in this section that Le Guin introduces and makes real the main conceit of her narrative. At a sacred site, Lavinia undergoes a set of mystic conversations with the shade, or shade-to-come, of Vergil himself. He instructs her in her mythic status and the course of her future, leaving her with a feeling of "contingency," a sense that she is to some degree a fictional personage rather than a flesh-and-blood woman. She becomes the essence of poetry -- or a poet's vision -- much in the manner that the protagonist of John Crowley's Engine Summer became literally the telling of his own story. Despite this heavy knowledge, Lavinia manages eventually to feel a personal immediacy and spontaneity to her life.
It takes roughly the next 100 pages to cover the short-term tumult surrounding the intrusion of Aeneas and his people into the lives of the Latins, especially regarding his desire to marry Lavinia in the face of her local princely swain, Turnus. Much detailed plotting and conspiring result in open warfare, which ends with Aeneas triumphant and wedded to Lavinia. And there the tale as we have it from Vergil concludes.
Le Guin continues beyond that climax for the final third of her book, painting the married life of Aeneas and Lavinia, her widowhood and dissension with her stepson Ascanius, and her eventual old age unto her very deathbed. And it's through this extension of the story that Le Guin succeeds in fleshing out a mythic icon and those around her in fully human dimensions. Lavinia is revealed as neither an Amazon warrior nor a timorous naif, but rather as a thoughtful woman of above-average character who has to urge and push herself to respond to crises and generally ends up doing the wisest and kindest thing. Aeneas, by contrast, gets less of a rounding-out (of course, he's already had his own book). Lavinia's hapless parents are drawn memorably, echoing at points Lord Sepulchrave and Countess Gertrude from Mervyn Peake's Titus Groan.
With its counter-epic focus, it's no surprise that Lavinia recreates a vanished historical period with a meticulous, novelistic emphasis on quotidian details. The reader gets an intimate sense of the daily life of the era, from its superstitions to its domestic comforts. Explaining her sources and methods in an Afterword, Le Guin describes how she abandoned the "Augustan magnificence" of Vergil for "a more plausible poverty." As in Richard Adams's Watership Down, a compact geographical canvas is made to play host to enormous doings out of all proportion to the tiny landscape. And it's equally satisfying to dive into the spooky non-modern mentality conjured up by Robert Graves in The White Goddess.
Perhaps the most immediately resonant aspect of the novel, however, is the author's meditation on warfare and power, the virtues and defects of leaders, which, just like Miller's 300, cannot help but be interpreted as an allegory on modern politics. We inevitably ponder current wars when we encounter a passage like this one:
Almost every household in Latium grieved for a father or brother or son killed or crippled. I think one cannot be left alive among so many deaths without feeling unendurable shame. They say Mars absolves the warrior from the crimes of war, but those who were not the warriors, those for whom the war was said to be fought, even though they never wanted it to be fought, who absolves them?
Le Guin's tale suffers from a few innate stumbling blocks. Because Lavinia is not present at important battles and meetings, crucial action is sometimes recounted secondhand and after the fact. And cramming some 50 years of living into the compass of 300 pages necessitates a few rushed, compressed sections where Lavinia is made to dump a mass of condensed information on the reader. But these minor infelicities fade away like the wraith of Vergil when one considers how much sheer poetry and empathetic insight Le Guin has packed into this book. At the end of her life, Lavinia becomes aware of her own immortality -- a moment that feels no less moving even if her legacy is contained by the boundaries of this stirring novel. --Paul DiFilippo
Author of several acclaimed novels and story collections, including Fractal Paisleys, Little Doors, and Neutrino Drag, Paul DiFilippo was nominated for a Sturgeon Award, a Hugo Award, and a World Fantasy Award -- all in a single year. William Gibson has called his work "spooky, haunting, and hilarious." His reviews have appeared in The Washington Post, Science Fiction Weekly, Asimov's Magazine, and The San Francisco Chronicle.
