Worlds Enough and Time

By Paul Gray

THE BEGINNING PLACE by Ursula K. Le Guin; Harper & Row; 183 pages; $8.95

The story of Adam and Eve should have made the point once and for all: no matter how blissful the garden, there is always a snake in the grass somewhere. Yet the green enticements of Eden die hard, especially among city folk who would not know a primrose from a petunia. The more man-made their environment, the more likely they are to dream of running for shade. In The Beginning Place, her 13th novel, Ursula Le Guin retells this story, one of the oldest in Western literature, in modern dress. She creates two postadolescents who are drowning in personal uncertainties and suburban sprawl and then gives them a place to hide. If this were all, her novel would stand as an uncommonly graceful fantasy-romance. But it is not; Le Guin does not forget to put in the snake.

Hugh Rogers, 20, lives with his divorced mother on the flat fringes of a city that is never named, perhaps because he cannot distinguish it from "all the suburbs, the duplex development motorhome supermarket parking lot used cars carport swingset white rocks juniper imitation bacon bits special gum wrappers where in five different states he had lived the last seven years." His astronomical address, 14067 1/2-C Oak Valley Road, mocks the idea of a coherent community. His job as a checker in a nearby supermarket by the freeway leads nowhere, and neither, as far as he can tell, does his life. One night, appalled at the prospect of another TV dinner and more wasted hours sitting in front of the tube, he runs blindly away and somehow finds himself in a verdant spot, drinking water from a storybook stream.

Return visits convince Hugh that there is something strange about this place. Hours spent there amount only to minutes in the world to which he returns. "He would live two lives," he thinks in the first flush of discovery. "In fact he would live two lives in the space of one, twice as long in the same amount of time." He is intrigued but not discomfited to learn that his spot exists always in twilight. His pleasure is threatened only by Irene, a woman his age and equally rootless, who discovered this world years earlier and tries to bar him from it. She has already been living a double life, has explored the mysterious domain called Tembreabrezi and knows that the residents of Mountain Town are threatened by an evil force that they will not name.

Of course, Hugh is the champion that they are waiting for, but this certainty is a tribute to Le Guin's narrative savvy. Because she moves briskly without ever seeming to hurry, she makes Hugh's transformation from supermarket clerk to Arthurian knight-errant whisk by as inevitably as a theorem, as acceptably as a rabbit coming out of a hat. The author brandishes her magic instead of concealing it; when Hugh accepts his mission on behalf of the people of Mountain Town, he is given a standard-issue sword and sent out to slay a woefully worn-out dragon.

The most effective prop in Le Guin's act is the quick, sharp description, the vivid detail that lights up its surroundings. The author catches one of Hugh's fellow checkers with a single sentence: "She had a lot of dark red hair, which she had recently got made into a fashionable mane of curls and tendrils that made her look twenty from behind and sixty face on." She gives Mountain Town a medieval European feel simply by looking down at one of its narrow lanes, "so steep that at intervals the street broke into steps, like a person breaking into giggles or hiccups, and then resumed its sober climb, until it had another fit of steps." The eerie, lonely beauty of perpetual dusk is condensed in an impression: "Northward above the mountain shoulder she saw one bright star shine clear, gone the next instant, lost, like the reflection in a raindrop or the glitter of mica in sand."

Although she assembles an array of epic material, Le Guin does not venture much past the borders of the lyrical. The novel thus seems a little too modest for its own good. It concludes with a conventional clinch, boy and girl returning to a real world now much nicer than before, that undercuts the stern logic of initiation and quest. Like many would-be heroes challenged in first combat, Hugh is wounded; unlike them, he heals easily. Despite this tentativeness, The Beginning Place demonstrates what readers of Le Guin's highly praised science fiction have known for a long time: she is as good as any contemporary at creating worlds, imaginary or our own. --Paul Gray

Though they have covered many odd, speculative spots in the universe, most of Ursula Le Guin's 19 books were conceived and written in one place: an 80-year-old four-story frame house perched on the west bank of the Willamette River in Portland, Ore. The rooms are large, the furniture casual, obviously lived-and lounged-in by the three Le Guin children, who grew up there: Elisabeth, 22, Caroline, 20, and Theodore, 15. An occasional antique betrays an interest in the past; Charles Le Guin, Ursula's husband of 26 years, teaches history at Portland State University. Only one touch suggests that the house is inhabited by a prolific, award-winning author of science fiction and fantasy: a gargoyle, purchased in Montmartre, hangs over the kitchen doorway.

This combination of demonic and domestic is apt, since Le Gum, 50, has spent much of her life successfully balancing the two. The only daughter of Anthropologist Alfred L. Kroeber, Ursula grew up in a lively intellectual home. Her three older brothers all became college professors, and her mother Theodora wrote nonfiction books, chiefly on the American Indian. The little girl turned into an avid reader and writer; her tastes in both ran to the exotic or bizarre. The first story she can remember completing told of a man who was eaten by elves. As her manuscripts began piling up, Le Guin pondered but put off resolving the question of whether she should turn her hobby into a profession. "I mean, it's like music," she says, recalling her decision. "Are you just going to play the piano in the basement, or is it going to be for real?" She was graduated from Radcliffe, received a master's degree in French literature from Columbia and went to Paris on a Fulbright scholarship, where she met her future husband.

Writing while bringing up children, Le Guin sold her first short story when she was 30 and then began building a stellar reputation among sci-fi fans; her 1969 novel The Left Hand of Darkness won both a Hugo and a Nebula, science fiction's most prestigious awards. The Farthest Shore (1972) received a National Book Award. As the youngsters went off to school, the author fell into a writing schedule that she still maintains. She goes to her writing room in the house each morning at 9 and sits there for at least four hours, whether ideas are flowing or not. "You need a door to shut," she says, "although it doesn't necessarily keep anything out." She spends much time reading: "The science-fiction writer had better keep up with current science and avoid dumb mistakes, or the other writers really let you know about it." She now attends fewer science-fiction conclaves and conventions than she once did, and has given up the pipe smoking that made her stand out in the crowds.

Although she has complained in the past that science fiction was not taken seriously enough by mainstream critics, Le Guin now concedes that the form "still hasn't grown up completely." Some of her recent books, including The Beginning Place, Malafrena (1979) and Orsinian Tales (1976), have contained little or no conventional scifi, although she is not considering abandoning the form for good. She still feels challenged by its "total freedom of plot; there are no limits except those of imagination." That is certainly not true of science in the real world, as Le Guin was reminded last month when the Public Broadcasting Service carried a TV adaptation of her novel The Lathe of Heaven. A winter storm knocked out the power in much of Portland, leaving many of her local friends and fans with blank screens.

Excerpt

" 'Lord Horn,' she said, 'I wish I had gone to the City, when--when people still could go.'

'There is more than one road to the City,' he said.

'Were you ever there?'

He looked at her with his grey, distant gaze.

'I have been to the City. That is why I am called lord, because I have been there,' he said, kind and cold and calm.

'Did you see the King?'

'The shadow,' Horn said, 'I saw the bright shadow of the King,' but the word was feminine so that it must mean the Queen or the Mother; and none of the words he spoke meant anything, and she understood them as she had never understood anything in her life. His eyes that looked always from a distance were on hers. If I ... touch him I will see clearly, she thought. The screen will be gone and I will stand both there and here. But in that knowledge I am destroyed.

Horn's grey eyes said gently, Do not touch me, child."

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so viewer discretion is required.