Myth interpreting

Ursula K. LE GUIN can't easily be pegged. Her ample body of work includes science fiction novels and stories, poems, essays, books for children and much else beside; yet it's difficult to know who or what she is. Perhaps her latest novel makes all of this plain: She creates other worlds that seem uncannily like our own. This is certainly true of "Lavinia," which is historical fiction of a kind, a spinoff from Virgil's "Aeneid."

I've always had a soft spot for this genre and have long admired the novels of Robert Graves. But he had a great deal of source material to ransack, including the works of Tacitus, Plutarch and Suetonius -- as well as endless classical historians. "The Aeneid" lies behind Le Guin's novel, and it's not history but myth. In a straightforward way, "Lavinia" is an adjunct to the great Roman epic, an attempt to fill in gaps, to amplify Virgil's myth in modern ways.

Le Guin has given voice to the daughter of King Latinus of Latium. In Virgil's story, Lavinia merits only the briefest mention: She is the second wife of Aeneas, the epic's hero. Her mother wants her to marry her relative, the hard-driving and impossible Turnus, who reigns over Rutuli, a nearby kingdom. He's a good-looking, charismatic figure, but Lavinia seems to have her doubts. An omen has appeared that naturally unsettles her: The day before Aeneas arrives by ship, Lavinia's hair swirls in a ghostly fire. This apparently augurs war, and war is what we get, as Lavinia's parents disagree about the future spouse of their daughter, and a family dispute becomes, as it would, a larger dispute.

Amata, the queen of Latium, has suffered the loss of her sons -- "little Latinus and baby Laurens" -- and has lost some of her rational faculties as well. Her powerful husband prefers Aeneas for a son-in-law, and a king's will is a king's will. Meanwhile, Turnus will not easily be spurned and begins a civil war in protest. Even the peasants get into the mix. But where is Lavinia? At the outset of the story, she goes to the mouth of the Tiber to get salt, in spring. She is 19 and innocent of adult predations, warlike thoughts or social turmoil. She has known nothing but ease of living. Then an ominous vision greets her: "a line of great, black ships, coming up from the south and wheeling and heading into the river mouth. On each side of each ship a long rank of oars lifted and beat like the beat of wings in the twilight."