Le Guin, Ursula K. - Gifts
Orrec and Gry live in the Uplands, where every clan has a gift. Gry's gift is calling animals, while Orrec's is to wreak havoc on anything he lays his eyes on. But even though the power balance of their society centers around the gifts, which keeps various clans in check, neither Orrec nor Gry really want to use their gifts the way everyone else
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I've re-read Gifts four or five times now, and it's slowly growing on me. I always admired what it did, but, like you say, I didn't really connect to it emotionally. Having read Voices, I'm finding a new appreciation for Gifts, because I can now compare child!Gry and child!Orrec to their adult versions, and see how those early experiences shaped them.
Gifts is, in my opinion, an intensely claustrophobic book. The characters are tightly constrained by their society and circumstances - they slowly become aware of other choices, other possibilities, but the reader is aware of the constraints from the start. In fact, it seems to me that the reader is very much like Orrec himself, sitting in the dark, but aware that outside there must be a world of light and life...
I get a very similar feeling from Gifts as I do from Le Guin's short story "Solitude" (in The Birthday of the World). In both there's a sense of a cultural poverty. "Solitude" goes on to open out and show that the apparent desolation/isolation is not what it seems - that it's a matter of perception - but I think the uplands culture in Gifts is genuinely intended by Le Guin to be barren and sterile.
The Tombs of Atuan is another Le Guin novel with an arguably similar setting - a constrained society that is different from the surrounding cultures - but to me that book has a completely different feel to Gifts, much less claustrophobic book. The culture of the temple is rich in history, story and intrigue, while Arha has a hidden world to explore.
Voices, the sequel to Gifts, is very different in tone. The protagonist there is very much a part of her society, not isolated, and there's a very rich background of implied myths and traditions (in Gifts, I thought that the uplands society was portrayed as lacking in their own traditions/stories - the tales that Orrec loves, with the exception of Blind Caddoc, all come from his mother's lowlands tradition). The focus is on defending a beneficial culture, rather than finding the boundaries of a sterile one.
Hmmm. If Gifts is about walking away from a harmful culture, and Voices is about rebuilding a working one... I'll be very interested to see what Le Guin does in the next book. The founding of a culture? The series is, to me, very Taoist in theme - doing through nondoing - and I think that there would be a logical progression in that mode of thought from "recognise the harmful" (Gifts) to "recognise the good" (Voices) on to "with this knowledge, walk a new path". I wonder if Orrec and Gry will return to the uplands in the next book...
Another possible evolution of theme could be about the demands of culture. Orrec and Gry refuse to be used by their culture; the protagonist of Voices accepts the requirements, seeing them as worth preserving even at great personal risk. A third book might show how to balance these two aspects.
One more contrast between the two books - Voices protagonist's relationship with the authority/father-figure in that novel, and Orrec/Gry's relationships with their respective parents. But I can't really talk about that without spoilers for Voices. Suffice it to say that there is a considerable contrast!
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So thank you for the notes! And now, I find I'm probably going to pick up Voices and read it, just because I love reading stories of people growing up together and how that works.
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