Lavinia

By Ursula LeGuin

Lavinia by Ursula LeGuinI’ve had this book sitting on my pile for a while now and I while I thought I ought to read it – it’s had rave reviews everywhere – it really didn’t grab me. Now that I’ve read it I have to say my first impressions were right but I seem to be in a minority of one.

In Virgil’s The Aeneid, the Trojan prince Aeneas, flees Troy, trolls around the Mediterranean searching for somewhere his people can call home, kills Turnus, marries Lavinia founds Rome and rules the world. Sort of. My memory of it is hazy at best. What LeGuin has done is taken the character of Lavinia – at best a sidenote in the original text – and brought her centre stage in order not just to tell a story but to reflect on the master work from which it springs.

The problem is that while the book is undoubtedly filled with elegant prose, reflecting in places the rhythms and cadence of the epic poem, and it is a superior literary work, it is, frankly, quite dull. There are some interesting if odd devices, placing Virgil himself in the book as a character – albeit a ghost – to converse with Lavinia is one of them, also the POV changes often and we jump about in time which threw me out of the book a couple of times, but Le Guin does stay fairly true to to the personalities of the original characters (as I remember them) showing that she undoubtedly knows her stuff.

But while it is an impressive piece of writing that has its moments I can’t get past the fact that it is pretty tedious, like a 6th form text or a thesis piece or an elegant piece of fan fiction, Lavinia is well presented, smart, knowledgeable but ultimately of little interest beyond the academic.

Lavinia is published by Gollancz and is available from Play.com, Blackwell and all good book stores.