Tehanu by Ursula K. Le Guin
My rating: 4 of 5 stars The events of the fourth book in Ursula K. Le Guin's classic Earthsea series, Tehanu (1990), overlap with and progress from those of the third, The Farthest Shore (1972), in which the Archmage Ged and the young prince Arren/Lebannen go on an epic quest to try to stop the magic and vitality from draining out of the world. Far from powerful male heroes attempting to save the world, in Tehanu the middle-aged Gontish farmer's widow Goha (Tenar of the Ring, though her identity is not confirmed till Ogion says, “Come in, Tenar” at the end of Chapter 2) heals and adopts a little girl whose parents have participated in raping, beating, and tossing her in a fire that burned out one eye and left one hand a claw, while Ged returns home to Gont no longer Archmage, emptied of all his magical power. The "quests" in the novel concern Tenar finding a way to raise her physically and psychologically scarred daughter Therru (trying to cross the void between them on a spiderweb’s bridge of love), and Ged finding a way to live as a normal middle-aged man. Needless to say, this is not the Earthsea of the first trilogy. As Le Guin says in the afterword to Tehanu, "By the time I wrote this book I needed to look at heroics from outside and underneath, from the point of view of the people who are not included. The ones who can't do magic. The ones who don't have shining staffs or swords. Women, kids, the poor, the old, the powerless. Unheroes, ordinary people--my people." As she also explains in her essay "Earthsea Revisioned" (1993), after having become more awakened to feminism in the 1970s she wanted to rectify the default male-centered approach to heroic fantasy with which she'd unconsciously written the first three books. And Tehanu sure features a misogynistic villain, the corrupt wizard Aspen, who embodies the long tradition of viewing women as noisy, troublesome, ignorant, dirty, weak, supporting creatures better off keeping silent before their male betters. From his gendered moral corruption, Aspen sees Tenar as a witch and Therru as her misbegotten familiar, both of whom should be exterminated. There are also the men who use Therru's mother for sex and beat her to make the villagers give her food which she has to give the men, as well as Handy, who has raped Therru and is still drawn to his victim. Less malignant male chauvinists appear, too, men like, disappointingly, Tenar’s own son Spark who view food preparation and dish cleaning as women's work or are unable to hear a woman when she says something that varies from the obedient words they're expecting. Tehanu, however, is no anti-male screed or pro-female polemic. Le Guin depicts sympathetic men who are respectful of women, like the young King Lebannen, who tenderly touches Therru and heals a red hand print left on her flesh by Handy; a grizzled sailor who shyly gives the girl a hand-carved dolphin; Ged and Tenar's teacher and father figure Ogion, who is open to the potential power of Therru ("teach her all"); the sympathetic sorcerer Beech; and, of course, Ged, who may become a good husband and father--and even a hero to Therru when he tells her where to find a wayward goat. (There are other kinds of heroism than those requiring a warrior's sword or a wizard's staff!) Le Guin's characters engage in conversations about gender, many of which, lacking easy conclusions or answers, make us question our assumptions. Once, the earthy and pungent witch Moss tells Tenar that male magic is like a fir tree, grand but easily blown down in a storm, while female magic goes deep down into the earth like a blackberry thicket, and the dissatisfied Tenar says, "It seems to me we make up most of the differences, and then complain about 'em." Another time Ged tells Tenar that a queen is only a she-king, receiving her position and power by men, but Tenar is unconvinced. Despite not much happening in an epic fantasy action way, Tehanu is compelling because of how movingly Le Guin depicts the relationship between Tenar and Therru. Tenar desperately wants her to be safe and happy and healthy and to know that what happened to her wasn't her fault and that her scars are not her and that she's beautiful and loved, but she also fears that nothing she can say or do can repair the girl’s trauma (“What cannot be mended must be transcended”). The moments when Tenar puts her hand on the sleeping Therru’s face to hide the scar and pretend it's not there, or sleeps with her and dreams of flying like a dragon, or gives her a handmade red dress, or watches her watching Ged watching a kestrel watching some prey, are all terribly poignant. The relationship between middle-aged Tenar and middle-aged Ged is also moving and fulfilling. Finally! And Le Guin does write some suspenseful action scenes, as when Aspen tries to curse Tenar or some men invade her farm one cold night to teach her a lesson. And she also writes some sublime fantasy scenes, like those featuring Therru (who holds a mysterious, terrifying power inchoate inside her and can see the world with her whole eye and Something Else with her scarred eye socket) and the androgynous dragon Kalessin: "Straight to Gont it flew, straight to the Overfell, straight to her. She saw the glitter of rust-black scales and the gleam of the long eye. She saw the red tongue that was a tongue of flame. The stink of burning filled the wind, as with a hissing roar the dragon, turning to land on the shelf of rock, breathed out a sigh of fire. Its feet clashed on the rock. The thorny tail, writhing, rattled, and the wings, scarlet where the sun shone through them, stormed and rustled as they folded down to the mailed flanks. The head turned slowly. The dragon looked at the woman who stood there within reach of its scythe-blade talons. The woman looked at the dragon. She felt the heat of its body." Le Guin not only re-imagines gender in Earthsea here but also its dragons. Dragons and human beings were once one species, but some wanted to be free and wild, and some wanted to be stable and accumulate things, so they grew apart, only now, still, some atavistic types are immanent beings neither dragon nor human, but potentially either. To find out what Therru will become, we'll need to read the sixth book of Earthsea… Anyway, Tehanu is a beautiful, moving, terrible, funny, and human novel, and the audiobook reader Jenny Sterlin enhances all its best qualities with her savory voice and intelligence and empathy. View all my reviews
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Time and Again by Jack Finney
My rating: 3 of 5 stars A Stereoscopic Time Travel Manhattan Romance On a November Friday in 1970 just before lunch, twenty-eight-year-old commercial artist Simon Morley is sketching a bar of soap from various angles to find the best way to depict it while counting the hours till the weekend, the days till his vacation, and the years till his retirement, when he receives a visitor who changes his life: U.S. Army Major Ruben Prien. He wants to recruit Si for a secret government project, “the damnedest experience a human being has ever had,” way bigger than the space program: time travel. Why Si? He has the perfect mix of physical, psychological, and temperamental qualities required for the project’s time travelers, being able “to see things as they are and at the same time as they might have been” with “the eye of an artist.” It also helps that Si’s unmarried (though he has a great girlfriend, Katherine Mancuso), and especially that old photographs make him feel a “sense of wonder, staring at the strange clothes and vanished backgrounds, at knowing that what you’re seeing was once real” and that “You could have walked into the scene then, touched those people, and spoken to them. You could actually have gone into that strange outmoded old building and seen what now you never can—what was just inside the door.” Finally, Si is just a uniquely sensitive guy. As a young lady of 1882 tells him, “You’re the most understanding man I've ever known.” (Are we indulging in the creative artistic type’s fantasy of being appealing to women?) Time travel in Jack Finney's Time and Again (1970) is perceptual rather than technological. No fancy time machines! You just listen to a spiel on Einstein’s ideas on time, research the target time and place, prepare yourself to fit into them, unplug your TV and read a vintage novel, cut as many of the myriad “invisible threads” tying you to the present as you can, engage in a little self-hypnosis, and then… step out of the present and back into the past of, say, 1850 Montana or 1432 Paris. In Si’s case, he trains to walk out the door of the well-preserved Dakota apartment building of 1970 NYC into the Central Park of 1882 NYC. Why January 1882 NYC? Kate’s adoptive father’s father killed himself while leaving behind a cryptic and partially burned letter postmarked then and referring to the destruction by fire of the world, after which his wife buried him under a tombstone featuring the symbol of a nine-pointed star inside a circle comprised of tiny dots but no name, and Si wants to solve that mystery. To investigate it, Si rents a room in the same Grammercy Park boarding house where Jake Pickering, the man who sent the letter, lives. To avoid changing the present in some unforeseen way, Si is supposed to observe without intervening, but will that be possible in a boarding house with several boarders and two landladies, one of whom is a beautiful young woman named Julia Charbonneau?! Without departing from his role as non-interfering observer, how can Si prevent Julia from disastrously marrying the older macho domineering Jake, who sure doesn’t appreciate Si hanging around Julia and drawing her portrait?! Rather than using scientific and technological details to convince us that time travel is possible, then, Finney uses minute observational and sensual details as to what New York City in 1882 January looks like, sounds like, smells like, and feels like. Thus, the story is a paean to NYC (especially Manhattan), as Si relates its different and similar wonders and horrors in both 1970 and 1882. Indeed, the novel is stereoscopic, with vivid descriptions of contemporary and old NYC combining to give a three-dimensional picture of the city, similar in effect to that Si says occurs when gazing at stereoscopic photographs: “the almost, but not quite, identical pair of photographs mounted side by side on stiff cardboard, that, looked at through the viewer, give a miraculous effect of depth.... Because the good ones, the really clear sharp photographs, are so real.” Finney’s novel prefigures something like Connie Willis’ Doomsday Book (1992) more than recalls HG Wells’ The Time Machine. Depending on your tastes, the novel may take too long to get Si time traveling. Finney’s meticulous attention to detail (faces and clothes, facades and interiors, offices and saloons, streets and parks, and so on) at times becomes too much of a good thing. And the prolonged climax featuring a harrowing fire scene and an excessive chase scene could be shortened without harming the impact of the novel. Also, Finney may fudge the differences between English spoken in 1882 and in 1970. When Si gets excited, he sounds too much like a man of 1970 (e.g., “We need money, damn it”). Some of that is intentional, for humor, as when he forgets himself and asks Julia, “Suppose we telephoned your aunt.” But after drawing attention to how melodramatically and ornately people in 1882 talk and write, Finney writes conversations between its people and Si that don’t sound much different than any we might expect to hear in 1970. At the same time, the novel is dated to 1970 in some of its language, for example, Si referring to young women as “girls” and to African Americans as “negroes.” The novel’s political heart is in the right place. It is a Vietnam War era book. Despite Si rarely mentioning that war (he references the atomic bombing of Japan more often), his anti-authoritarian ethical/moral center derives from his disillusionment at learning that the people at the top making the decisions for the country are no better informed or well-intentioned or more intelligent than anyone else and have no idea of the ramifications of their decisions. The novel takes an interesting turn when the military starts wanting to nudge the time travel project into more active interference in the past so as to benefit the USA in the present. It also features some pointed lines like this one about police: “Why, why do cops habitually and meaninglessly act nastily as if it were a kind of instinct?” And some moments really give a time traveling frisson, as when Si observes a belled sleigh gliding through central park or finds himself at a busy intersection in which all the trams, buses, taxis, etc. are horse-drawn or sees the arm of the statue of liberty holding the torch in Madison Park or stands outside the house of Herman Melville or plays games with the people of the boarding house or sketches Trinity Church (whose steeple was the tallest point in NYC), etc. Fans of thoughtful time travel fiction should like the novel. Audiobook reader Paul Hecht is fine; nothing fancy; straightforward and competent; easy to listen to. View all my reviews |
Jefferson Peters
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