I've heard of Ursula Le Guin but never read any of her novels before. I know that some of my family really rate her so, despite this book having one of the most uninspiring covers I've ever seen, I was hopeful for this one.
The only thing I had ever actually read by Le Guin was a review she wrote of Toby Litt's Journey into Space, his generation starship novel. In that review she seemed to constantly compare his book to her own generation starship novel and find his wanting in comparison to hers. By the end of the review you probably knew slightly more about her book than his. However as I disagreed with every negative point she made in her review, and at least one point she raised was directly dealt with in the narrative of his book, and so wasn't the plot ho;e she claimed, and almost demonstrated that she hadn't read his book properly in the first place, I was never inspired to track down her generation starship novel, or even to take note of its name.
So, after reading this, am I any more inclined to chase down her self praised novel?
This book tells of Lavinia, a minor, though crucial character from Virgil's epic poem the Aeneid. Lavinia was the inal bride of the central character of Aeneas. When Aeneas arrives on the shores of Italy, she is fighting off the attentions of other suitors and when she is betrothed to the newcomer instead, a war breaks out.
Lavinia is given only a few stanzas of the poem and not fleshed out in any way. Ursula here tries to remedy that and gives us her full story from childhood until turning into an owl randomly on the final page.
The prose is workmanlike at best with no real passages that ever stand out. Virgil apparrently would switch around in his timelines, so Ursula chooses to do this as well. The book opens when she's 19 and sees the ships sailing in that carry her husband to be. It then jumps back to her childhood and it's page 90 something before the ships reappear. In the preceding seven dozen pages we are treated to her meetings at a local shrine with the poet Virgil himself from the future, tellinig her that he created her and detailing her future up until the end of the war - all very meta.
Once she's met Aeneas formally, but before the war, we get a flash forward to her married life with him, discussing points of what happened in the war. It then goes back to her regular timeline and tells us of the same events but spread over lots more pages. It does this two or three times and completely robs the narrative of any form of tension.
The main issue I have with this book is that Lavinia does very very little, especially in the first three quarters of the book up until the end of the war. She tells her dad to wait for a few days to allow her to choose her husband.... and that's it. Everything just happens around her after that and she plays no active part in the story until the final quarter - where the war is over and it's now Ursula's imagination at work and not Virgil's. Sadly, once let off the leash to do her own thing with the characters we get some very par for the course politics with no real oomph.
In any book where the characters are fated to do certain things, it's really pretty disappointing if, after being told that their fate involves a war in which thousands will die because of you, the character then sits back and does nothing about it, makes no effort to change the written course. And this is Lavinia's biggest fault. She just kind of says "yeah whatever, that sounds cool" and lets all her friends and neighbours go out and die rather than just trying for a peaceful solution over the minor misunderstanding that started the fighting. If she'd tried to do something but in vain, it would have added so much more to her character.
Life in pre Rome Italy is fairly well drawn but not amazing. This particular sub-genre of historical fantasy mixed with myth is a well ploughed furrow. Guy Kay is a particular proponent of this sub-genre and this effort from Ursula pales in comparisoin to even his weakest book.
There's nothing spectacularly wrong with this, it's just a bit meh in comparison to my other reading in this field. No wow factor in the slightest.
I'll be generous and award it a six out of ten.
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