Powers

Powers is the third volume of Ursula Le Guin’s new series, ‘Annals of the Western Shore’, following the earlier Gifts and Voices. Comparisons inevitably arise with the incomparable ‘Earthsea’ sequence, and there are certainly things in common. There is a complete imagined world, with a precise and significant geography, at a roughly medieval stage of technology, learning and social development. There is a central figure with special gifts, like the wizard Ged, who undertakes a long physical and psychic journey. But Powers is a very different kind of book, and it demands an older reader.

Its hero is Gav, a ten-year-old boy at the start, a young man at the end. Gav is a slave in Etra, one of several warring City States. An intelligent boy, he is being educated to become the future slave tutor to the children of his owners, in a house where slaves are well treated. Only at the end, when Gav has reached a place of true freedom, does he fully understand that a ‘well treated slave’ is a contradiction in terms. One terrible event divorces the teenaged Gav from his house and sets him on his long and troubled road to freedom. Gav has ‘powers’ of his own: an astonishing gift of memory, and visions which foretell the future. His inner powers are set against the outward powers of others – wealth and status, authority, bullying, slave-ownership, charisma. The novel is about the varying forms of human power. Above all, again and again, it is about trust and betrayal.

In Powers themes and ideas are more important than plot. Le Guin seems deliberately to play down her story’s opportunities for narrative excitement. Everything is slow, subdued, low-key, except what happens in its remarkable young hero’s mind and heart. Ostensibly an adventure story for young readers about slavery, escape, flight and ultimate freedom, it is actually a psychological novel for teenagers and adults using one young man’s long adolescent trials to explore and illustrate some abstract but important human themes.