2020/90: Gifts -- Ursula Le Guin

...treasuring the written words not only for the story they told but for what I saw hidden in them: all the other stories. The stories my mother told. And the stories no one had ever told. [loc. 640]

First read in 2007 (review here): I remembered some aspects of the story, but not its ending.

Orrec is the heir to Caspromant, a windswept and mountainous domain. His mother Melle comes from the Lowlands, with a wealth of stories: his father Canoc is Brantor of Caspromant, bearing the Gift of his lineage -- the gift of undoing. With a glance and a gesture, he can break a bowl, wither a willow wand, kill a rat. The Gift is their protection, but Orrec worries that he hasn't inherited it. His nightmares are of accidental destruction, or of failing his father. His friend Gry sympathises, but can't truly understand: her Gift, of calling animals (but not to the hunt), comes easily to her.

As tensions rise between the families of the Uplands, Canoc is increasingly insistent that Orrec use and nurture his Gift: and, to protect (and perhaps to warn) others, he has Orrec wear a blindfold so that he doesn't inadvertently turn his destructive power on an unintended target.

The novel opens with a visitor, a thief from the Lowlands who delights in the stories told by Orrec and by Gry: indeed, various stories are woven through the whole of the book. Melle brings literacy to Caspromant, but there is a strong oral tradition too. Orrec learns to become himself through the stories he hears, and reads, and retells: he begins to realise that he would rather make than unmake, that he would rather invent and imagine than destroy. But the blindfold, the implicit threat, is another kind of story, and one that Orrec -- perhaps prompted by the thief Emmon's questions -- eventually rejects. Why must the Gifts be harmful and destructive? Why must he play a role he doesn't want?

One aspect of this story that I didn't recall, but that resonated powerfully with me this time around, was the final argument between Orrec and his father. Orrec accuses Canoc of making him a threat, a weapon: and Canoc never has the chance to respond. Does he truly believe that Orrec's Gift is so dangerous? I found that lack of closure tragic.

Beautifully written, a story about the power of stories: I read this for lockdown bookclub and was inspired to read the other two books in the 'Western Shore' trilogy, which I'd owned for years but never opened.