Review of The Beginning Place (1980)
Ursula K. Le Guin (writer).
Read in 2026.
Hugh checks groceries. Irene runs errands. They perodically enter a twilight realm where the water is clear and the birds are silent.
After he had knelt for his ceremonial first drink of the water of the creek, he saw that the girl had done the same thing. She was kneeling on the shelf-rock looking down at the running water, in no conventional posture of prayer or worship; but he knew from the hold and poise of her body that that water was, to her as it was to him, holy.
This is one of the least popular, least liked of Le Guin’s novels. It is easy to see why: It’s a purposefully high-energy collision of escapism with the things the reader and the characters want to escape, and with technical literary studies. Two ordinary working-class people, with painfully credible problems, can have a trivial conversation here about their mundane lives, while sitting and snacking in the other world of their epic quest. When they get back, they have to worry about the medical bills of privatized US healthcare. That setup borders on the isekai genre’s truly bad writing, but that’s not what this is.
Despite the unusual directness of the relationship between primary and secondary world in this novel, Le Guin is circumspect in other ways. She keeps the nature of the epic quest fuzzy, which frustrates some readers. In this one novel, the author glides from the opening’s free indirect style (the erlebte Rede of a grinding routine), to just the vaguest hints of magical law and monster combat, padding it all with lyricism. I’ve read a lot of Le Guin, and I know she could describe a monster if she wanted to, but she doesn’t want to. Instead, she keeps her implementation of The Hero with a Thousand Faces (1949) formal and transparent.
Irene—but not Hugh—thinks of the monster as a dragon, not because it necessarily looks like a dragon but because Le Guin is revisiting the allegories of A Wizard of Earthsea (1968). Specifically, she combines them. The monster here is both Ged’s dragons and Ged’s shadow or “gebbeth”. Because he masturbates to try to escape from his real-world problems, Hugh finds the monster masculine, smelling of semen. Irene, meanwhile, looks at the same monster and sees the breasts and thin arms of a woman. It is not justifiable to interpret this as each of the two seeing the real-world enemy of the other, that is, Hugh seeing Irene’s rapey stepfather and Irene seeing Hugh’s controlling mother. Instead, it is themselves they see: The monster is their fear, and the self-serving escapes they make in thrall to that fear. The sword that Hugh thrusts into the monster he will later feel in himself. On a less symbolic level of the narrative, that pain that he thinks of as the sword being in him is just a rib broken by its pommel, but still.
The description of the monster is thus detailed enough to be decipherable. It is not more detailed because, in the psychoanalytical philosophy of stories like this, the referent of the symbol is transcendently powerful. It is “The Thing from Inner Space” (1999). To quote that essay, “Hegel emphasized that, in the suprasensible realm beyond the veil of appearances, there is nothing, just what the subject itself puts there when he takes a look at it.” A character in Le Guin’s secondary world spells it out: “The eye that sees gives form; the mind that knows, names.” This openness puts The Beginning Place at the tail end of a didactic trend in fantasy writing where college-educated authors knowingly replaced a naturalistic narrative with a structural analysis of the same. I don’t usually go for that sort of thing, but this novel is a redeeming example of the form, because its working-class, kitchen-sink directness functions as a counterweight to the psychoanalysis.
Omitting the monster would not have improved the novel. The unified external-internal quest is its core. That informs everything else, at once supporting and undermining the obvious escapism of the secondary world. At first, I thought it was strange that the world has water that is “kindly”, “fearless”, and “holy”, while the people in that world are instead depressingly realistic. They have lords, economics, mass butchery of goats, and so on. Irene’s abortive quest with Master Dou Sark shows not only the workings of supernatural law, but the Master she admired losing face, and losing her love. Hugh’s infatuation with Allia is similarly false, being ultimately reframed as the simpering means of sending Hugh out as a sacrifice. The secondary world is revealed as having unfreedom and manipulation like the primary world. Its nature may truly be good, but its culture is not something you can escape to, no matter how generous it looks at first. This, too, is didactic, but I was still impressed by the reassertion of Le Guin’s anarchist politics despite her ambiguous games with fantasy archism.
The rest is more peripheral. Amusingly, Hugh’s mother is literally on her own spiritual quest, which is parallel to and even more ambiguous than Hugh’s: Communing with an ancient Egyptian person, or just imagining the same. I suppose that is the Todorovian fantastic, or else Le Guin is truly playing fast and loose with the supernatural premises. The novel’s romantic plotline is also peripheral. The reward at the end of the quest is not sex with Allia or Dou Sark, but the two protagonists’ consummated love of one another as brave equals literally on their way back to face real life. There is a fetish-adjacent size difference in their relationship that does point forward to later paranormal romances like Twilight (2005), but here, love and sex is mainly a sign of wholeness and healing.