The Beginning Place
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| The Beginning Place | |
 Front cover. |
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| Author | Ursula K. Le Guin |
|---|---|
| Original title | Threshold |
| Genre(s) | Science Fiction |
| Publisher | Harper and Row |
| Publication date | 1980 |
| Media type | Book |
| Pages | 183 |
| ISBN | ISBN 006012573X |
| OCLC | 5605039 |
The Beginning Place is a science fiction novel by Ursula K. Le Guin, written in 1980.
This novel does not belong to any of the cycles for which the writer is well known. The story is relatively short to be a novel, and its category can be collocated somewhere in between science fiction and fantasy literature. The type of narration anticipates somehow specific characteristics that the author would then further develop in the 2004 novel The gifts.
[edit] Plot summary
The story is told from two alternating viewpoints: that of Irene, and of Hugh. They live in the suburbs of an unnamed US city, in difficult circumstances and with troubled families. They independently discover a place hidden in a local wood, where time flows much slower and it is always the evening, a "threshold" between their own world and another; though Hugh finds it first, within the story, Irene has already been visiting the other world for some years. She has another life there, in the town of Tembreabrezi, an adoptive family of sorts, and has learned the local language. Both Irene and Hugh love the "beginning place", the threshold; they feel a sense of belonging and home there that they lack elsewhere in their lives.
As Hugh stumbles upon the beginning place, Irene discovers that something is wrong in Tembreabrezi; the paths are closed somehow, and no one can reach or leave the town except for her. The closing is not material but emotional; the townsfolk are struck by a desperate fear which will not allow them to move further. Despite her anger with Hugh, and her resentment of his disturbance of her hidden sanctuary, they find that they must work together; she has had increasing trouble in passing through the gateway into the other place, while he cannot always get back from it. By travelling together they can pass back and forth, and so they return to Tembreabrezi together. Hugh is welcomed in the town as the hero for whom they have waited; Irene is jealous, wanting desperately to win the admiration and respect of the townsfolk and especially the Mayor or Master, Sark, whom she has loved for a long time. Hugh is largely unaware of her feelings, but wants to complete the quest to become worthy of the Lord of the Manor's daughter Allia. In the end, they embark together on a mission to save the town and reopen the roads. Together they are able to track down the monster that brings the fear and Hugh kills it with a sword he has been given; he is injured, but Irene helps him to keep going until they can reach the gateway back to their own world. On the other side, the trust and the love they have discovered together opens a different sort of gateway, providing them with a possible future together that avoids the destructive patterns of their own families.
[edit] Comment
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In Beginning Place the writer uses a classical theme of a fantasy story to actually develop an introspective inquiry, similarly to a previous novel she wrote, named The lathe of heaven. The great mission of the two kids can be considered as an imaginative representation of the story of an uneasy separation of the two from the psychologically sick dimension of their respective original families. In the book the novelist art gets mixed with a deep analysis (explicitly declaring this across the narration) of the psychic dynamics which take place between the characters, which is basically the discovery of the sanity of birth through the relationship with the different human being, or in other words the relationship between a woman and a man. From the initial suspicious state of mind, conditioned by cold logic and rationality, this relationship evolves towards the irrational passion which turns the kids inside out, moving them across the territory of the unknown (a likely representation of the unconscious), with its fears, but also with its cleanest and most vital dreams. The journey brings the boy and the girl to their complete realization of human identity: Hugh kills the she-dragon and this way he refuses his damaged, passive-aggressive mother as to start a valid relation with the girl, while this one, Irene, through the separation from her stepfather (who had tried to sexually molest her) eventually lets herself abandon towards the image of a nice man, one who is completely different from her father.
Le Guin's prose is complex and atmospheric, with much use of metaphor; her writing changes the story from a relatively straightforward quest-fantasy into something stranger and darker. It is a psychological piece as much as a fantastical one; the monster is not purely a killer but something almost internal, Id-like. Implicit within the relationship of the Master and Lord of Tembreabrazi is the story of the last encounter with the monster, some generations earlier; Master Sark's grandfather sacrificed his daughter to the monster, knowing that the surrender of what was precious to him would bind it. Lord Horn argues that in turn the villagers were bound to the monster in fear, and that it must instead be defeated. The idea of fear in the story - both incarnated in the monster and the responses to it within the other world, and in the dysfunctions of Hugh and Irene's families and their relationships with them - is one of the central themes of the book.
