Cecelia Holland reviews Lavinia
For many of us the great story of the Aeneid is part of our
childhood,
arma virumque cano and those shores of Italy, the gates of
horn and
ivory, beautiful Camilla and pious, heroic Aeneas. Too often in
struggling with the alien complexities of Latin syntax (ah
for the ease
of manibus date lilia plenis!) we lost the glory of the epic
itself. Yet
the story fascinates us still, and comes well into English.
Amazon.com
lists dozens of different copies, and brave novelists often
have tried
to retell the tale. No result, surely, is as wise and subtle, as
passionate, as Ursula K. Le Guin’s beautiful Lavinia.
The heroine of her splendid little novel is Lavinia, the
daughter of the
King of Latium whom Aeneas must win to found his city — the
city that
will become the Rome of Augustus Caesar, for whom Virgil
wrote the poem,
and whose family and state it was intended to glorify. The
story is told
in Lavinia’s voice, not always linearly, but as she comes to
understand
events and her place in them, and the character herself
grows from meek
girl-child to ruling Queen and fiercely nurturing mother in
the course
of the book. In Virgil’s poem Lavinia is a shadow, a pretty
girl with
downcast eyes who never speaks; the fiery warrior-princess
Camilla is a
brighter, more appealing character. But Lavinia, Le Guin
recognizes, is
at the core of the story, while Camilla is only a vivid
sideshow — so
unnecessary that Le Guin subsumes her cleverly into Lavinia
and we never
notice her absence. (Virgil himself, in the novel, says he
failed to see
Lavinia’s importance and character, part of Le Guin’s
amusing running
commentary on his text.)
Twists like this one with Camilla are possible because Le
Guin’s story
is not a literal rehash of Virgil’s. Like all great
historical fiction,
it’s a gloss on its sources, and Le Guin gives herself all
the room she
needs to explore this by bringing the great golden age poet
into the
poem, as a shade who visits Lavinia in dreams and oracular
moments. In
fact often Lavinia regards herself as only a character in a
book, which
is being written before us, but is it Le Guin’s book, or
Virgil’s?
Thus the reader travels up and down through the novel, as
well as from
beginning to end; the story of Aeneas layered on the poem of
Aeneas
layered on Virgil’s thinking about the poem about Aeneas and
about his
current all-powerful patron; there’s even a sneaky little
reference to
Dante. Much of the pleasure of reading Lavinia is this time
travel, this
exercise of memory, the loom of history.
Aeneas is in the book from the very first and although
Lavinia is a
beautiful, noble, intelligent woman he dominates the first
two-thirds of
the book. She adores him, anyway, from the very first, and
he is truly
adorable. Clearly to Le Guin as to Lavinia he is the Perfect
Man, strong
and decisive and yet humble and compassionate — a defender
of the weak,
a nemesis to the haughty, beautiful to look at, invincible
in fair
fight. The son of the Evening Star, he carries a fate far
bigger than a
human man, and Virgil, chronicling this, made him so real
that, in Le
Guin’s conceit, he is sealed to the book, and to his time,
and to his
fate, in a way that Lavinia, barely mentioned and never
plumbed, never
is.
And so Lavinia exists on, past the end of the book, to
complete the
story. To some extent the novel cools off with the death of
Aeneas. This
is Le Guin’s power, though — to make us see the whole story
of the
founding, and that the whole story is Lavinia’s. The end,
when Lavinia,
her tasks done, does not die, but fades away into a
nightbird crying in
a sacred grove, is as sweet as the end of the Aeneid is violent.
Because this is Le Guin’s book, not a mere cut and paste of
Virgil, but
an assimilation of him, plus several other Golden Age
writers. Her
immersion in the material is complete. The book is like
watching an
animation of an ancient mosaic or a figured urn. She can
report even the
sacrifice of a newborn baby lamb as an act of goodness and
mercy.
Although she knows the poem so well that lines from it (as
well as from
De Rerum Natura and the Georgics) seem to float behind the
lovely
English prose, she almost never allows the drumbeat war
cadences to
intrude — when they do it’s alarming, both to Lavinia and to us.
Most of the time, Le Guin is vivifying a seamless, sacred,
blessed time
which may never have existed, but which we all fervently
long to believe
in: the morning of the world, when the whole of nature was
suffused with
spirit, and people lived in reverence to it. The details of
sacrifice
and rite and oracle are lovingly described not for their own
sake but
because they reveal the deep sense of oneness with the world
that
supported and uplifted the ancients. It’s as if the world of
Hesiod rose
to counterbalance the fury of the wars of the so-called
Axial Age.
Lavinia is a magnificent book, an intellectual, moral and
emotional
achievement, and, like the Latin Queen in her guise as
nightbird, I want
to say, Go on. Go on.
Copyright © 2008 by Cecelia Holland
First published in Locus, March 2008
Reprinted with the kind permission of the publisher
|
