Myth interpreting

Ursula K. LE GUIN can’t easily be pegged. Her ample body of work includes science fiction novels and stories, poems, essays, books for children and much else beside; yet it’s difficult to know who or what she is. Perhaps her latest novel makes all of this plain: She creates other worlds that seem uncannily like our own. This is certainly true of “Lavinia,” which is historical fiction of a kind, a spinoff from Virgil’s “Aeneid.”

I’ve always had a soft spot for this genre and have long admired the novels of Robert Graves. But he had a great deal of source material to ransack, including the works of Tacitus, Plutarch and Suetonius -- as well as endless classical historians. “The Aeneid” lies behind Le Guin’s novel, and it’s not history but myth. In a straightforward way, “Lavinia” is an adjunct to the great Roman epic, an attempt to fill in gaps, to amplify Virgil’s myth in modern ways.

Le Guin has given voice to the daughter of King Latinus of Latium. In Virgil’s story, Lavinia merits only the briefest mention: She is the second wife of Aeneas, the epic’s hero. Her mother wants her to marry her relative, the hard-driving and impossible Turnus, who reigns over Rutuli, a nearby kingdom. He’s a good-looking, charismatic figure, but Lavinia seems to have her doubts. An omen has appeared that naturally unsettles her: The day before Aeneas arrives by ship, Lavinia’s hair swirls in a ghostly fire. This apparently augurs war, and war is what we get, as Lavinia’s parents disagree about the future spouse of their daughter, and a family dispute becomes, as it would, a larger dispute.

Amata, the queen of Latium, has suffered the loss of her sons -- “little Latinus and baby Laurens” -- and has lost some of her rational faculties as well. Her powerful husband prefers Aeneas for a son-in-law, and a king’s will is a king’s will. Meanwhile, Turnus will not easily be spurned and begins a civil war in protest. Even the peasants get into the mix. But where is Lavinia? At the outset of the story, she goes to the mouth of the Tiber to get salt, in spring. She is 19 and innocent of adult predations, warlike thoughts or social turmoil. She has known nothing but ease of living. Then an ominous vision greets her: “a line of great, black ships, coming up from the south and wheeling and heading into the river mouth. On each side of each ship a long rank of oars lifted and beat like the beat of wings in the twilight.”

This beautiful, simple style of writing continues through the novel, making it a pleasure to read. A work of fantasy, the story takes place soon after the mythical Trojan War. One cannot really know what life was like among the various people who inhabited what is now Italy in that period, but Le Guin supplies vivid details drawn from archeological research and her own rich imagination. In any case, Lavinia recognizes herself as a meta-fictional creature, a figment of Virgil’s imagination. “As far as I know, it was my poet who gave me any reality at all,” she confesses.

Lavinia admits to being who she is, “a king’s daughter, a marriageable virgin, chaste, silent, obedient, ready to a man’s will as a field in spring is ready for the plow.” This is the sexist stereotype, seen through the lens of many centuries. And Lavinia has the good luck to have a best friend among the local farmers. Her name is Sylvia, “the youngest child of the cattleman Tyrrhus,” who takes care of the king’s herds. The association with such a person upsets Amata greatly, but the king is happy to have his daughter run wild, and she does. Indeed, the origins of her sharp sense of independence come from these early associations. “Let the child run about and get strong,” the king says. “They’re good people.”

Virgil himself appears in the novel, a kind of alternate voice to that of the speaker, as when they talk about Dido, the African queen, and her relationship with Aeneas. “He fell in love with Queen Dido,” says Lavinia. The poet counters: “She fell in love with him.” This dialectic moves through Le Guin’s tale, which is really a counter-story, or a parallel universe beside the last six books of “The Aeneid,” which are of course their own parallel universe. Everywhere Le Guin catches the rhythms of the great epic, echoes them, riffs. In a way, this is a jazzy book, playing in odd syncopation with a massive canonical work.

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CERTAINLY young Lavinia is sharply drawn, full of opinions. Showing good sense of a kind, she consults an oracle and ultimately judges Turnus to be a naive young man: “My judgment of Turnus is that he could not look farther than the moment,” she reflects. Aeneas will not even admit this tempered judgment and will say only of the warring Turnus: “He was young.” And so the battles rage, mostly offstage. In all of this, I found myself delighted, even stunned, by the freshness of Le Guin’s prose. She has taken the music of Virgil’s “Aeneid” and recalibrated it, making a new thing of these ancient melodies in modern English. And “Lavinia” herself has a freshness and independence that seem appropriate for a 21st century retake on the myth. The novel proceeds, almost ceremoniously, to its inevitable end: “I thought it was an earthquake, the sound earthquake makes as it comes. But it was the sound of the end. The war was over. Turnus was dead. The poem was finished.”

Anyone who comes to “Lavinia” seeking a conventional realistic fiction will feel disappointed, however. This is a poem in the form of a novel, an elegant echo chamber for a canonical work, a reading of an epic poem, and a rewriting of that poem. Toward the end, Lavinia says: “We who are called royal are those who speak for our people to the powers of the earth and sky, as those powers transmit their will through us to the people. We are go-betweens.” In a real way, the writer is also royalty, one who speaks to the powers of the earth and sky. The powers of the earth and sky speak through them, to the people. And this is what Le Guin accomplishes here. She addresses the primitive world, summons a vision and declares it pure. She has heard voices and channeled them in the language of Lavinia herself. And this voice has something wonderful and strange to tell us.