Powers (but not Tim)
Apr. 25th, 2009 11:42 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
calimacI've seen very little discussion of the YA trilogy that's been Ursula K. Le Guin's major work of the last few years: Gifts, Voices, and Powers. But as I've read all three, and enjoyed them greatly, and reviewed them for Mythprint, and as Powers has just won the Nebula Award (which should bug the heck out of the people who think that YA SF is sapping our precious bodily fluids), I might as well reprint my review of it right here, to introduce you to the book and encourage you to read it:
Ursula K. Le Guin, Powers. Orlando: Harcourt, 2007. ISBN 0-15-205770-6, hc, 512 pp., $17.00. (Mythprint, Jan/Feb 2008, p. 4)
This is not a novel about Tim Powers, though it’d be interesting if it were. It’s the third and longest novel so far in a sequence that Le Guin has been writing for ages 14 and up set in a large, wide-ranging imaginary country where supernatural talents exist, but are only held by some people, are often flickery and unreliable in practice, and are mistrusted by the bulk of the populace.
Each novel is the narrative of late childhood and adolescence of a person facing these talents. Like the girl who was the subject of the previous book, Voices, Gavir, the boy who narrates Powers, is the house slave of a wealthy and cultured city family. He has two talents that he calls his powers: one, the ability to see in memory events that have not yet happened, is definitely supernatural; the other, the ability to remember anything he has read and recite the story well, is arguably not. Both powers give him guidance and sometimes save his life, but are also disturbing to him.
The first section of the book, with Gavir in the city among his masters and his fellow slaves, is somewhat clotted with briefly-appearing characters who are a bit hard to remember and distinguish. But a sudden shocking event causes Gavir to flee his masters and go into hiding in the countryside, and here the narrative suddenly leaps to compelling life and stays riveting to the end of the long tale. Gavir hides out among two different groups of forest fugitives, then finds his way back to his birth-people from whom he was stolen when still a baby. In all these places his powers make him stand out, but in none does he feel fully at home – most heartbreakingly among the tribe of his birth, in whose complex customs he is untutored.
Eventually, burdened but enriched by the company of a small girl whom he has taken under his care, he finds home in a place and society totally unfamiliar to him, but where his powers are welcomed.
Early in his education, Gavir is given a book of poems by Orrec, the now-famous writer and tale-teller whose childhood had been the subject of the first book in this sequence, Gifts, and who had been a significant character in Voices as well. Orrec’s poems, derided as dangerously modern by some of Gavir’s teachers, become for Gavir a kind of lodestone, something to cherish and hold on to during his long journey. And thus (and with a brief appearance also by Memer from Voices) the three books are tied together. But they also share a theme, and the 78-year-old author’s remarkable ability to remember and depict the crises and concerns of adolescence, particularly adolescence marked by external turmoil.
Ursula K. Le Guin, Powers. Orlando: Harcourt, 2007. ISBN 0-15-205770-6, hc, 512 pp., $17.00. (Mythprint, Jan/Feb 2008, p. 4)
This is not a novel about Tim Powers, though it’d be interesting if it were. It’s the third and longest novel so far in a sequence that Le Guin has been writing for ages 14 and up set in a large, wide-ranging imaginary country where supernatural talents exist, but are only held by some people, are often flickery and unreliable in practice, and are mistrusted by the bulk of the populace.
Each novel is the narrative of late childhood and adolescence of a person facing these talents. Like the girl who was the subject of the previous book, Voices, Gavir, the boy who narrates Powers, is the house slave of a wealthy and cultured city family. He has two talents that he calls his powers: one, the ability to see in memory events that have not yet happened, is definitely supernatural; the other, the ability to remember anything he has read and recite the story well, is arguably not. Both powers give him guidance and sometimes save his life, but are also disturbing to him.
The first section of the book, with Gavir in the city among his masters and his fellow slaves, is somewhat clotted with briefly-appearing characters who are a bit hard to remember and distinguish. But a sudden shocking event causes Gavir to flee his masters and go into hiding in the countryside, and here the narrative suddenly leaps to compelling life and stays riveting to the end of the long tale. Gavir hides out among two different groups of forest fugitives, then finds his way back to his birth-people from whom he was stolen when still a baby. In all these places his powers make him stand out, but in none does he feel fully at home – most heartbreakingly among the tribe of his birth, in whose complex customs he is untutored.
Eventually, burdened but enriched by the company of a small girl whom he has taken under his care, he finds home in a place and society totally unfamiliar to him, but where his powers are welcomed.
Early in his education, Gavir is given a book of poems by Orrec, the now-famous writer and tale-teller whose childhood had been the subject of the first book in this sequence, Gifts, and who had been a significant character in Voices as well. Orrec’s poems, derided as dangerously modern by some of Gavir’s teachers, become for Gavir a kind of lodestone, something to cherish and hold on to during his long journey. And thus (and with a brief appearance also by Memer from Voices) the three books are tied together. But they also share a theme, and the 78-year-old author’s remarkable ability to remember and depict the crises and concerns of adolescence, particularly adolescence marked by external turmoil.
