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

What peace I had, what understanding I had, came from my love for the Waylord and his kindness to me, and from books. Books are at the heart of this book I’m writing. Books caused the danger we were in, the risks we ran, and books gave us our power. The Alds are right to fear them. If there’s a god of books it’s Sampa the Maker and Destroyer.

• Title: Voices
• Author: Ursula K. Le Guin
• Genre: Fantasy
• Year: 2006

Voices is the second book in the Annals of the Western Shore trilogy — but not to worry, knowledge of the first installment, Gifts, isn’t necessary for enjoyment of this book. While the central character and narrator of Gifts, Orrec, and his wife Gry are an important part of the story, Voices is narrated by a young woman named Memer, and takes place in Ansul, a city far from the Uplands in which Gifts was set.

Ansul is an occupied city, having been conquered by a force hostile to the local culture, and Memer has never known a life without her overlords. Indeed, Memer is a child of the war that took her city, a ‘siege-brat’ born of rape, and she resembles the conquering Alds more than she does her mother’s people. The Alds are a ruthless, theocratic people of the desert that despise learning and literacy as ungodly — with the consequence that Ansul, once famed for its libraries, is a city in which books are outlawed and destroyed.

Memer, however, is a child in the household of the Waylord, the deposed and crippled one-time trade representative of the city and head of a family with a secret. In the Waylord’s house is a secret room, a room Memer discovered as a little girl, a room full of books and other surprises. Under the the tutelage of the Waylord, she becomes one of the only people her age able to read.

Into this world Orrec and Gry step, after decades of travel throughout the kingdoms of the Western Shore. Orrec has become a famous storyteller, a ‘maker,’ and he has arrived in Ansul at the ruler’s request — and also because he hopes to learn from the fabulous books the city was famed for possessing. Instead he becomes the focal point of a rebellion. Le Guin builds her narrative with a stately precision, but events soon attain a more breathless pace.

As in Gifts, with Voices Le Guin gives us a mature fantasy that puts the lie to the idea that, though classed as YA, these book are somehow unworthy of adult attention. If anything it takes a more adult view than most fantasy, showing us a world in which magic and oaths are put in proper perspective with human foibles and the need to compromise, politics are preferable to bloodshed, and even the hated enemy presents a nuanced and human face. The depth of wisdom displayed in Voices, along with the well-shaped cultural setting and the appealing characters, proves once again that Ursula K. Le Guin is one of the real giants of speculative fiction.

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

To see that your life is a story while you’re in the middle of living it may be a help to living it well. It’s unwise, though, to think you know how it’s going to go, or how it’s going to end. That’s to be known only when it’s over.

• Title: Gifts
• Author: Ursula K. Le Guin
• Genre: Fantasy
• Year: 2004

It’s easy to take a figure like Ursula K. Le Guin for granted and, even though she’s been producing consistently brilliant fiction for over forty years (she is a Nebula Grandmaster after all), it seems the genre buzz always follows the latest craze or new writer making a big splash. Well, Le Guin isn’t about buzz and hype, and she’s a better, wiser writer by miles than most of what you’ll see on the fantasy shelves of today. And it would be a mistake for fans of fantastic fiction to overlook her recent series entitled Annals of the Western Shore, of which Gifts is the first volume, just because these books are marketed as Young Adult novels.

Let me say right now I don’t understand the whole YA thing; when I was a ‘young adult’ (large child more like) the distinction did not exist: there were kid’s books about farm animals wearing hats and licorice houses, and there was the rest of the library. So whether Gifts makes sense as a YA or not I don’t rightly know — but I do know it’s written with a rare kind of intelligence and insight that characterizes the best fiction. I suppose the young protagonist and his difficulties in coming to terms with his gift, in coming of age, is a natural fit for the YA audience; but regardless of marketing distinctions this is a book anyone should enjoy.

Gifts is told by Orrec, a boy that grows into manhood over the course of the novel. His father is a brantor, the head of an Upland clan, in a rural world of small farms and pasturage and cattle raiding reminiscent of the medieval Scottish Highlands. The Uplands are dominated by various clans, and each possess a gift, an innate magical power. Some gifts are beneficent, such as the power to heal; and some can be used for good or ill, as Gry, Orrec’s best friend, is able to use her gift of knowing animals to train them or summon them for a hunt. But many gifts, such as the power to twist a man’s limbs or inflict a slow, wasting illness, are destructive — Orrec’s family gift is such a power.

As a child, Orrec eagerly looks forward to using his power, which manifests itself in early adolescence, around the age of puberty. His family gift is that of unmaking, literally turning order into chaos; at a glance dissolving a tree into a mound of blackened fiber, or turning a beast — or man — into a sack of deliquescent flesh. Orrec delights in the tales of his ancestors who used the power to protect their clan, even the dark tale of one who went mad and had to blind himself to protect those around him. But Orrec’s development of the gift does not go smoothly, and it is thought he may be a danger to others, and himself must wear a blindfold to ensure his family and friends do not come to harm — as well as to protect himself from the demands that would be placed upon him. The hint of such a ‘wild gift’ is enough to intimidate the enemies of his father, for a time, but things begin to develop differently than expected as Orrec learns just what his blindness may truly mean.

Le Guin writes with an amazing eye for the mundane details of life, and her sparse, earthy prose conveys Orrec’s world with authenticity and simple beauty. Her characters, too, are smartly realized and completely natural; and one thing she’s done especially well is realistically convey how the possession of a gift affects the personality of the gifted. Combine this with a world rich in folklore and family history, and compelling conflicts at every level of the story and you have a novel from a master storyteller at the height of her powers, and one that has me eagerly looking forward to the remainder of this series.

• Gifts at Amazon
• Ursula K. Le Guin’s website