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Lavinia By Tony Keen [The following is based on a review written for Vector (Vector: The Critical Journal of the British Science Fiction Association 262 (Winter 2010), pp. 33-4), and a subsequent blog post (http://tonykeen.blogspot.com/2009/09/lavinia.html)] Ursula K. Le Guin – Lavinia Gollancz, 2009, 432pp. £14.99, h/b ISBN 978 0 575 08458 2; £12.99, t/p ISBN 978 0 575 08459 9. Review Ursula Le Guin’s novel Lavinia, positively reviewed when it appeared in 2008 in the United States, takes as its starting point the Latin poet Virgil’s epic, the Aeneid. Most summaries of the voyage of the Roman hero Aeneas, as described in the Aeneid, pay more attention to the journey than to the arrival. The escape from Troy, the encounter with Dido in Carthage, the visit to the Underworld, these are what people remember. Aeneas’ war in Latium against Turnus and the Latins is usually given a swift mention at the end, obscuring the fact that this war occupies six of the poem’s twelve books. So, by taking this second half of the Aeneid as her core text, Le Guin is already doing something out of the ordinary. Not that retellings of the Aeneas legend are particularly uncommon of late. Combined with another Trojan warrior, Helikaon, he is a major protagonist of David Gemmell’s Troy trilogy, and Jo Graham’s Black Ships is a retelling of the voyage from Troy to Italy. However, Graham and Gemmell are both writing historical novels, postulating events that might eventually have inspired the mythological accounts. As a result, each feels free to depart from Roman accounts where they wish (more so in Gemmell’s case than in Graham’s). At the same time, they are in other respects bound by historical plausibility (so, for instance, the four centuries’ difference between the traditional dates of the Trojan War and of the foundation of Carthage means that Dido cannot, for Graham, be a Carthaginian queen, and so becomes an Egyptian princess instead). Lavinia is doing something very different; it is a novel in direct dialogue with Virgil’s Aeneid. There may be differences in detail – in the novel Lavinia’s hair is dark, not fair, as Virgil states. The cities of Latium may be rather more humble than Virgil implies. But each time there is a change, it is a reaction to the Latin text, and is often highlighted as such. Le Guin even engages with one of the major scholarly debates on the poem; why does Virgil end the poem so abruptly with Aeneas killing the defenceless Turnus, as the latter begs for mercy, and is the reader meant to admire or despise that act? In this relation to an ancient text, Lavinia resembles Margaret Atwood’s novel The Penelopiad, a novel that takes a different look at the material of Homer’s Odyssey. Like Atwood, Le Guin chooses to concentrate on the woman who is the hero’s prize for the completion of his adventures. Lavinia is the daughter of King Latinus, and the woman who will become Aeneas’ wife. She is also, as Le Guin notes, the casus belli, the reason war breaks out when her father breaks her engagement with Turnus to give her to Aeneas. But where Homer’s Penelope at least has some agency, and a personality that comes through, Virgil’s Lavinia is almost a complete cipher, wholly deprived of agency, and with barely a line to utter. Her role is to be the hero’s prize, and nothing more. Le Guin takes a feminist approach to this material. Lavinia narrates the novel, and it is her decision to reject Turnus for Aeneas. She is her own woman, as much as anyone can be in the Late Bronze Age. But her actions are not truly free. It is, however, not patriarchy that dictates Lavinia’s actions, but story. In its best moments, Lavinia is an interrogation of the nature of fiction. Lavinia encounters the dying Virgil, in one of the novel’s most fantastical moments (though Le Guin follows the modern trend for excluding direct participation by the gods). Virgil lays out her future to her, as he has written it (and also apologises for the small role he has allotted her). This leaves Lavinia unclear as to whether she is a real person, or the poet’s creation. The novel raises (but of course does not answer) questions about the relationship between ‘real’ historical figures, and the person they become the moment someone writes down their story. Had the entire book been like this, then Lavinia would be an extraordinary novel. Some critics clearly believe that it is anyway. If I cannot go along fully with that judgement, it is because Le Guin is unable to keep up the brilliance of the earlier sections. In the early portions of the novel, the narrative is not arranged according to linear chronology – instead it skips from time to time, much as human memory does. But as the novel goes on, linear chronology reasserts itself. Moreover, something is lost once the story no longer has the Aeneid to react against. Le Guin does a fair job trying to pick a route through the mixed legends of Aeneas’ later life and that of his son Ascanius (choosing a narrative that would deny literal truth to Julius Caesar’s claims to be descended from Ascanius). But it lacks the shine of the earlier parts of the novel. Nevertheless, this is a good book, which can certainly be recommended. demonstrates that Le Guin remains a significant literary force. It Further discussion ... Almost immediately after I had submitted the above review to Vector, a large online roundtable discussion of the novel, conducted by Niall Harrison, Adam Roberts, Abigail Nussbaum, Nic Clarke and Jo Coleman, appeared, in four parts spread across four separate blogs: Part 1: http://vectoreditors.wordpress.com/2009/09/09/a-discussion-about-lavinia/ Part 2: http://punkadiddle.blogspot.com/2009/09/lavinia-discussion.html Part 3: http://wrongquestions.blogspot.com/2009/09/discussion-about-lavinia-part3.html Part 4: http://evesalexandria.typepad.com/eves_alexandria/2009/09/lavinia.html There are a couple of other links that are relevant and worth consulting: Adam Roberts’ original review on Strange Horizons (http://www.strangehorizons.com/reviews/2009/01/lavinia_by_ursucomments.shtml), and another interesting discussion of the book (http://asubtleknife.wordpress.com/2009/08/01/lavinias-voice-or-the-critique-ofrome/) by Andries du Toit. Inevitably my response to the discussion ends up covering some of the same ground. (But in what follows I leave aside, largely, my comments about Lavinia being a feminist novel, in giving a voice to a character pretty much treated in Virgil – if not so much in Livy – as a piece of meat.) The problem with coming late to a book that has garnered almost universal praise is that one’s expectations are set very high, so high, in fact, that usually the actuality cannot possibly meet them. As with Geoff Ryman’s Air, I was prepared for a transformative book, and as with Air, I was slightly disappointed when it turned out merely to be very good. (And that then leaves me wondering if the problem isn’t simply that I’m too dumb to pick up on why the novel is so great ...) Lavinia has moments of brilliance. I love the function of the shield (something taken directly out of Virgil), and the way different people see different things in this, frankly impossible, object. I like the way Le Guin creates a Bronze Age Latium that has yet to fully anthropomorphize its gods, and how that interacts with the arrival of a Trojan culture that does (whether this actually represents how people in the Bronze Age thought about their gods is, I suspect, unknowable). But I agree with Abigail Nussbaum that the last third of the book isn’t anything like as effective as the earlier bit. The earlier sections have a complex structure, akin to what Adam Roberts identifies as one of the strengths of the Aeneid. But then it becomes, as Nussbaum says, rather a straight narrative: ‘this happened, then this happened ...’ There’s some discussion about whether one needs to have read the Aeneid to appreciate Lavinia, and what the effect is if you haven’t. Certainly, it’s inescapable that this is a novel in dialogue with the Aeneid (or as Cheryl Morgan puts it [http://www.cheryl-morgan.com/?p=2850], it’s ‘Virgil fanfic’), just as much as (so John Clute tells us) Greg Bear’s City at the End of Time is in dialogue with William Hope Hodgson’s The Night Land, or Stephen Baxter’s The Time Ships is with Wells’ The Time Machine. So yes, if one is not familiar with the Aeneid, part of the conversation will be missed. What interests me is that, where the source text lies within the sf canon, this is seen as less problematic than when the book lies outside science fiction. (Also, everybody should read the Aeneid anyway.) And one of the things I like about Lavinia is that Le Guin chooses to have that dialogue with the second part of the epic, rather than the better-known first half (escape from Troy, Dido, etc.). Nussbaum comments that she finds the existential moments a bit heavy-handed. For me, those moments are one of the points of the novel. At its best, when Lavinia meets the spirit of Virgil in some timeless zone, this work seems to me to be a musing on the nature of fiction. Once our lives are written about, are they any longer our own? What is the nature of the relationship between the ‘real person’ and the person that exists in stories? Le Guin raises these questions, but doesn’t answer them. Can anyone? It’s this postmodernist metafiction that intrigues me most about the book. This doesn’t get much coverage in the roundtable discussion, with Niall Harrison even suggesting that he thought Virgil could be removed. I think Virgil is what the novel is about (and du Toit seems to follow this line of thinking as well). Is Lavinia a fantasy novel? This is perhaps another question that can’t be answered. What I note, however, is that it does not read like a typical heroic fantasy novel, translated into a Graeco-Roman (semi-)mythological context. There have been quite a few of these recently, such as David Gemmell’s Troy trilogy, or Jo Graham’s Black Ships. These are both, for the most part, historical novels, yet written in the idiom familiar from the quasi-mediaeval fantasy. This is not necessarily to knock these books - Gemmell’s is quite an interesting treatment, Graham’s less so. But Lavinia doesn’t follow that road - in this it is perhaps more like Gene Wolfe’s Soldier series, which works in a fantasy mode that owes little to the traditions of north-west Europe. Morgan makes an interesting comment about the gender roles portrayed, and the apparent hostility to gay men. There are several points to be made here: (1) To think of things in terms of ‘gay men’ is probably to impose twenty-first century categories on Bronze Age sexual behaviour; (2) a writer should never be held to the opinions of their characters; (3) Lavinia comes from a time when gender roles were different from how they are now, and in some ways quite rigid, and one shouldn’t expect Le Guin to write her with more modern attitudes. That said, Le Guin’s portrayal of Ascanius as a man who behaves in an unseemly fashion with his male lover, and grieves excessively after his death, whilst reflecting Roman attitudes to this sort of behaviour, does seem oddly hostile, and doesn’t seem to be based on anything drawn from ancient sources (though I’m prepared to be proved wrong on this). I think Le Guin is turning on its head Roman legend that portrayed Lavinia as, in her later years, an evil crone that worked against her stepson, and is seeking a motivation for Ascanius. All this discussion made me think again about this novel, and want to reread it. Sadly, there are other things I must do.