Gifts, Voices, and Powers; The Western Annals

Gifts, Voices, and Powers by Ursula K. Le Guin

Normally, I start these reviews with where and when I got the book. I can’t do that this time, at least not with Gifts or Voices. I pulled Voices off a shelf of books I hadn’t read in years, and Gifts off a shelf of mystery books. A mystery book is one I’ve had for years, but for the life of me cannot remember where or why I got it. Like any mystery, we’ll solve it by first reviewing the clues:

1. They’re clearly different editions

2. They were shelved separately, across the room from each other.

3. I didn’t know who Ursula Le Guin was until fall of 2018

4. I haven’t reorganized my bookshelves since 2017

5. They were on shelves

If I bought them at the same sale, I would have tried to buy the same editions, and they definitely would have been shelved together. Taking the first two clues together, I know that I bought them separately. I only discovered Ursula Le Guin in college, so it makes sense that I did not take note of her name on the covers and buy them together. This is consistent with the final clues, which tell us that I bought it before 2017, because I put them on shelves and not just on the floor. So, I must have bought Gifts and Voices separately, some time before 2017.

As I said, I already had some idea of who Le Guin was before reading these books. I took an Exploring Fiction class my sophomore year of college. In it, we read the “Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas” and it blew me away. Just thinking about it makes me feel like I’m losing my mind. I soon felt like I saw her name everywhere. I listened to “The Fliers of Gy” on the podcast Levar Burton Reads, and I found a book by her on my bookshelf, titled Gifts. When I found that I just happened to have the sequel as well, I put them both on my reading list, and started hunting for a copy of Powers- no easy task, as it’s been out of print for a while. And yes, it annoys me that the middle one is a different edition and size as the other two, but life is full of tiny disappointments.

First published in the 2000s, these feel like novels that could have only been written by a master of fantasy writing. Though set in a world rife with unexplained forces, Le Guin keeps the stories centered on the characters and the world built around them. The stakes of the stories are sometimes tied up with a magical force, but a character is as much affected by the world around them as by their ability or inability to wield that magic. These books examine how people interact with each other, and the dynamics of many kinds of power, not just magic. In each book in the collection (and it is more like a collection than a series), there is a new main character in a different place in a fictional land. They occupy different stations in society- the future ruler of a land, a girl living in a fallen household, and a slave, taken from his home as an infant. Their stories overlap, and sometimes characters from one book will show up in another, but they are still about different people at different times.

Map by Ursula K. Le Guin

Gifts, the first and shortest in the collection, takes place entirely in the uplands, a barren, mountainous place where people struggle to coax crops from the ground. The region is divided into domains, with each domain ruled by a brantor, and with each brantor, and their family, possessing the strongest gifts. The “gifts” is one of those mysterious forces I mentioned. Just by looking at someone, a gifted person could cut them, blind them, or unmake them. Unmaking is the gift of Orrec Caspro’s domain, the ability to separate something into its separate parts. The ones with a weaker gift can untie knots with a look, those with a strong power can crumble a tree into dust or a dog into mush. As the future brantor, Orrec’s power should be stronger than most, but it is deemed too uncontrollable, and he is blindfolded. The brantor and his family are meant to protect the domain with their gift; if Orrec can’t control his power, then he can’t do the duty assigned to him at birth. Both an outcast and central to the household, Orrec occupies an ambiguous place in his society, through which Le Guin explores how the threat of power exerts influence just as much as a display of it.

Voices takes place further south, in the city of Ansul, a city ruled by the Alds. 17 years before the start of Voices, the Alds seized Ansul, claiming to be on a holy mission. They consider books and writing sacrilege, so they have taken Ansul to destroy its universities and libraries and find the center of evil in the world. Now, the people of Ansul live in a ruined city, unable to openly practice their religion or pass down their traditions. Memer, a 17 year old living in the house of the Galva, does not remember these times of prosperity and learning. Yet, living in an old house once filled with scholars and leaders, she is entombed in the loss of something she never knew.

Like Orrec, she lives in an in-between place. She is raised by people loyal to Ansul traditions, but she is also the product of an Ald soldier raping her mother. He heart lies with Ansul, but she looks like an Ald and only know her city under Ald rule. How can she claim Ansul traditions she's never known? This book is about revolution, not the glorious kind with one person saving the city, but the messy kind, where no one is of their fate or the fate of the city.

Powers is a difficult book to describe. It begins with Gavir as a young boy, living with the social realities of being a slave, yet still believing what he’s been told about the kindness of his masters. After all, he and the other slave children are taught in the same classroom as the children of the family, and he is being trained to be a teacher of the next generation. As he grows up, he struggles to reconcile the genuine affection he feels from members of the family and the injustice inherent in owning people the way the family owns him and his sister. He sees the treatment of slaves in other families, and begins to grasp how little autonomy he will have over his life. He eventually reaches a breaking point, and leaves the city. He spends the rest of the book wandering between groups of people, each living in different forms of society. Through Gavir, Le Guin again explores dynamics of power among people, and the gaps between their ideals and their reality. All of the societies feel viscerally real though not because the characters are realistic or that every location is familiar. Rather, they feel real because Le Guin has clearly explored the ramifications of each aspect of society. How the claim of benevolence, freedom, or belonging affect society, even when it’s not actually practiced.

There's many reasons I enjoyed these books, some of which I could not explain without spoiling them. I can say that they are each unpredictable, that reading one book will not help you to predict how the next book will end. In many ways, the shapes of these stories reflect the meaning of this quote in Gifts:

“To see that your life is a story while you’re in the middle of it may be a help to living it well. It is unwise, though, to think that 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.” Gifts. p.15.

Gifts is narrated by Orrec, but that sentiment radiates through the collection. You, the reader, have no more idea where the books are headed than the characters themselves.

These are books for appreciators of N.K. Jemisin-style world building, and those who know that even fantasy has a mark of truth.

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Le Guin, Ursula K. Gifts. Harcourt, 2006. Get it Here!

---. Voices. Orion Children's Books (an Imprint of The Orion Publishing Group Ltd), 2007. Get it Here!

---. Powers. Harcourt, 2009. Get it Here!