The Style of Atuan

To be entirely fair about matters of style, I think it’s time to turn the lens on Le Guin, she who skewered so many in “From Elfland to Poughkeepsie.” So here’s a little passage from The Tombs of Atuan, the second in the Earthsea series:

One high horn shrilled and ceased. The silence that followed was shaken only by the sound of many footsteps keeping time with a drum struck softly at a slow heart-pace. Through cracks in the roof of the Hall of the Throne, gaps between columns where a whole section of masonry and tile had collapsed, unsteady sunlight shone aslant. It was an hour after sunrise. The air was still and cold. Dead leaves of weeds that hard forced up between marble pavement-tiles were outlined with frost, and crackled, catching on the long black robes of the priestesses.

They came, four by four, down the vast hall between double rows of columns. The drum beat dully. No voice spoke, no eye watched. Torches carried by black-clad girls burned reddish in the shafts of sunlight, brighter in the dusk between. Outside, on the steps of the Hall of the Throne, the men stood, guards, trumpeters, drummers; within the great doors only women had come, dark-robed and hooded, walking slowly four by four towards the empty throne.

Two came, tall women looming in their black, one of them thin and rigid, the other heavy, swaying with the planting of her feet. Between these two walked a child of about six. She wore a straight white shift. Her head and arms and legs were bare, and she was barefoot. She looked extremely small. At the foot of the steps leading up to the throne, where the others now waited in dark rows, the two tall women halted. They pushed the child forward a little.

Whatever I was planning to say, I take it back. Someone who writes like this can say anything she likes about others’ prose style.

What’s really disconcerting is that this is the book closest to hand as I write this, and this is just an early description passage that I opened to more or less randomly. Le Guin was that good.

So… what makes this so excellent?

The first crucial point is (no surprise here) something she talks about in that essay: nobody ever wrote like this. This isn’t how English ever sounded, not really. It’s kind of archaic, just a little, but there’s no “ye olde fashiondde” garbage here. Nor is there pitch-perfect non-modern English, the way E. R. Eddison wrote it. It’s all just off, somehow, as though it fell through a portal from somewhere—from Elfland.

The most obviously “Elfin” phrases are “One high horn shrilled and ceased” and “unsteady sunlight shone aslant.” Those are odd, frankly, pregnant with sound devices we associate with verse (consonance, assonance, alliteration…). Once we tune our ears to this, we notice it everywhere: “The silence that followed was shaken only by the sound of many footsteps keeping time with a drum struck softly at a slow heart-pace.” A soft susurrus….

Of course, people use alliteration all the time, and usually when there’s a lot in one place, it doesn’t work. Frankly, if you’re noticing it, it’s probably bad. What’s interesting is not so much that Le Guin does it as that she gets away with it. So how does she?

I think one thing is that she’s got a very light touch. As soon as we begin to notice all this odd poetic stuff and the prose starts to catch the ear—as soon, in fact, as we begin to think, “isn’t this perhaps just a little mannered?”—then she’s already moved on with something nobody could object to: “It was an hour after sunrise. The air was still and cold.” Richard Stark could have written those sentences—but not the preceding ones!

This balance-striking, once spotted, turns out to be the key. Look at the third paragraph schematically:

Two came, tall women looming in their black, one of them thin and rigid, the other heavy, swaying with the planting of her feet.

The imagery here is prosaic, when push comes to shove, yet the formulation is anything but. “Two came” strongly echoes the “They came, four by four” opening of the previous paragraph. “Tall women looming in their black” is not quite like anything in normal English. Syntactically, the whole sentence is close to run-on. What’s more, it’s weirdly unbalanced, in that it’s set up as though to construct a kind of triangle (two, then A and B), but A and B aren’t equivalent grammatically, because B gets two verbs of her own, and A none; in fact, one has to wonder whether Le Guin intended this unbalance to reflect these women’s bodies: the first is so thin and rigid that verbs don’t have a place to stick on, and the second so heavy and cumbersome that she needs two just to prop her up. Then:

Between these two walked a child of about six. She wore a straight white shift.

Now despite the obvious contrast (older women in black, child in white), the prose contrast is almost more stark. The complexity rapidly falls away to reveal simplicity and purity. By the end of this third sentence, there is no one else here, only the one girl in white. Suddenly:

Her head and arms and legs were bare, and she was barefoot. She looked extremely small.

In essence, starting with odd complexity—not convolution, but a strangely crabbed first sentence, brooding on itself—we’ve come to naiveté. And now, Le Guin immediately underscores and balances this by challenging it sharply:

At the foot of the steps leading up to the throne, where the others now waited in dark rows, the two tall women halted.

An almost Germanic sentence here, with subject and verb pushed off until the end. Are we back in the hieratic world of the looming black-robed women? Yes… and no:

They pushed the child forward a little.

A perfect concluding sentence, in my view.

In these three paragraphs, Le Guin begins with various forms of subtle distancing, efficient and sharp, but without overemphasis. She doesn’t bother with real archaisms; instead, she allows some sound devices and the like to do most of the work, and then describes the place more by absences (gaps in walls) and nuances (colors, dawn and dusk) than actual things. As our “camera” closes in (paragraph 2 and then 3), it catches a striking image: the most alien priestesses with a little girl who, whatever her other qualities, remains a little girl. Something is happening, something uncomfortable and frightening. And at the very end, the priestesses shove the girl, just a bit, up to the Throne. What does this tell us?

Written this way, with this much intricate subtlety happening in the prose, it tells us a great deal. We can immediately guess (even if we hadn’t read the book’s Prologue) that this girl is being initiated into something pretty dread and ancient. Think how many awful clichés Le Guin is striding into. The priesthood are fanatical monsters who think everyone else should be burned…. The priests are fanatics who don’t see that their gods are false…. And in The Tombs of Atuan, all that is quite true.

But we now also know that the priestesses are not monsters or fools. They’re doing something of considerable gravity, initiating this little girl, and ultimately they use a little push. Why? Because they know she’s scared, and they don’t want her to say anything wrong or freak out, but they want to remind her of the thing she’s supposed to do, so be a good girl and go ahead and do it, we’re right here behind you….

What I’m saying is, without all that hieratic setup, without the looming priestesses with their unequal bodies, without the little girl in the white shift looking so very small, that little push wouldn’t work. Here it works, and it tells us that, whatever else may be happening, it’s a fundamentally human story. These people are people like us. This is important: if they’re not like us, if they’re fanatics manipulated by weird gods, then we can’t understand them—but nor can we judge them. And it’s essential that we do so.

At the same time—and for me, this is Le Guin’s magic—it should not require much work to convince readers that people are people, and stories are about people. That’s normal. What’s devious about it here is that, paradoxically, it is because all of this is so fundamentally human that it all feels so dreadfully distant. We are very, very deep into Elfland here—so far, in fact, that our Virgil needs to take our hand and assure us that she can lead us home again.

I don’t know about you, but I’m now going back to re-read all of Earthsea.