Powers (review)

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Honor can exist anywhere, love can exist anywhere, but justice can only exist among people who found their relationships upon it.

• Title: Powers
• Author: Ursula K. Le Guin
• Genre: Fantasy
• Year:2007

As with Voices, the second book in Ursula K. Le Guin’s Annals of the Western Shore series, knowledge of previous books in the series is not necessary for the enjoyment of Powers. Despite that, these books should still be properly  considered a trilogy, and not merely because they share the same setting and some of the same characters. Each book builds thematically upon the last to create, not an extended exploration of any one overarching plot, but a meditation on maturation, on society, and on the themes of fantasy fiction itself seen first-hand through a progression of narrators.

These books have been classed as Young Adult fiction — and the best reason for that classification is that they deal with themes of growing up, and all three books are first person narratives of the coming-of-age struggles of the protagonist. As I’ve said before, though, don’t let the YA designation fool you for a second, because you’ll be hard-pressed to find smarter fantasies on the shelves. It is true that the books are straight-forward, and perhaps it’s this and their accessible nature that also marks them as YA, but Le Guin writes with a careful intelligence that never once slips into the sins associated with YA fiction such as didacticism or dumbing-down.

Powers is the story of Gavir, a slave in the household of a powerful noble in the City State of Etra. Gavir and his sister, Sallo, are different in appearance to the rest of the population of Etra, being Marsh People taken captive in a raid. As a boy, Gavir has a relatively privileged life for a slave, receiving a fine education, playing with the free children of the master of the house, and enjoying a life of basic ease. He also has the power, unpredictable and not fully explored, to ‘remember’ the future in visions.

Le Guin constructs a canvas of Gavir’s early life with the sort of quiet confidence she excels at as a storyteller. Gradually he learns of the injustice of his condition, from his first inkling of his second-class status in an incident involving a game among children, to a final tragic abuse of power that forces him to break forever with the way of life he has grown into. Le Guin’s world is palapabley real, and Gavir’s hardships have a reality about them that a more melodramatic and less careful book could never achieve, and the whole effect of his growing dissatisfaction with a life that is not a cartoon version of slavery, but a nuanced portrait of an unjust society, makes for absorbing reading.

Gavir leaves Etra and travels the world of the Western Shore looking for a new home. He finds solace of a kind alongside a mad hermit. He discovers a new, free society of bandits and outlaws in the heart of a deep forest. He even finds the village of his birth. But in every instance he detects the underlying unsuitability of these places, whether it be the hypocrisy of the bandit leader Torm jealousy guarding his harem of stolen girls, or the incurious and stultified culture of the Marsh People with whom he tries to reconnect himself, Gavir continues to pick up and move on — each time getting closer to a better understanding of his place in the world.

Powers is an appropriate name for the book. Here we see power wielded in the maintenance of an unjust social order — and also the inherent power in such an arrangement, as we see in the attitudes of the enslaved and victimized who tolerate or even abet the injustices of their world. Even those who appear as champions of freedom are not all that they seem, for Torm uses his power to satisfy his flesh, and is reveled as not only a fraud, but a self-absorbed madman. But Gavir himself is not without his own power, possessing, as he sees it, two such gifts. There is the power of his visions of the future, part of his Marsh People heritage, but also the power of his mind. Raised as an educated house slave, it was to be his lot to teach future generations in his masters household. Gavir posses an extraordinary ability to memorize poetry and literature, and it is this power, the power of education, that ultimately proves itself capable of liberating him.

And Le Guin, too, shows her extraordinary powers of creation, subtlety, and genuine human understanding in these books. It would be a shame to overlook them as slight because of the YA label — but on the other hand these are exactly the kinds of books I think kids should pick up. Very few authors can skewer genre tropes and make their feelings known on a range of subjects with the kind of craft Le Guin exhibits in this series, all while telling a compelling story. Fans of Earthsea take note, this is Le Guin at her wiser and more seasoned and, in my opinion, in weighing these two fantasy series, Annals of the Western Shore comes out on top.

• Powers at Amazon
• My Review of Gifts
• My Review of Voices
• Ursula K. Le Guin’s website