Gifts

This novel is the fine opening of what ought to be a new trilogy. It is not ‘Earthsea’ but still thoughtful, wise and exciting storytelling – fantasy in a new setting which explores serious themes, and some of the same (and contemporary) concerns that could be summed up in Shakespeare’s ‘They that have the power to hurt and will do none…’ Here are the tensions of being powerful – and powerless, as the older Ged/Sparrowhawk discovered in those later Earthsea novels. The clans of the ‘Uplands’, living in medieval conditions on their poor and isolated farms, each have a special ‘gift’ which gives them power over others, people and animals, with the most powerful and most destructive gifts allowing domination of the unstable alliances. This book tells the story of Orrec and Gry, a boy and girl from neighbouring farms, who question the use of the gifts to deform, wither and destroy, who wonder if the gifts might once have been for healing ‘then people found out they could be weapons… and forgot the other way’. The complexity of having the ‘gift’ is embodied in Orrec who is blind – but actually blindfolded to stop him using the family’s gift of destroying through looking – ‘there’s harm in me’. Through his mother, a lowlander lacking these gifts, he discovers another gift, of storytelling, and its special power (being exercised as we read). With his mother’s illness (suffering the ‘gift’ of a rival lord?) we feel alongside Orrec the awfulness of the traditional ‘gift’ and the intense desire to use his to retaliate. Gifts is deeply provoking about the way we and the world are. That it achieves this through the apparently innocent artifice of a children’s fantasy is another gift – and there must be more to come.