The Beginning Place
Encyclopedia
The Beginning Place is a short novel
Novel
A novel is a book of long narrative in literary prose. The genre has historical roots both in the fields of the medieval and early modern romance and in the tradition of the novella. The latter supplied the present generic term in the late 18th century....

 by Ursula K. Le Guin
Ursula K. Le Guin
Ursula Kroeber Le Guin is an American author. She has written novels, poetry, children's books, essays, and short stories, notably in fantasy and science fiction...

, written in 1980. It was subsequently published under the title Threshold in 1986. The novel does not belong to any of the cycles for which Le Guin is well known. The story's genre is a mixture of realism
Realism (arts)
Realism in the visual arts and literature refers to the general attempt to depict subjects "in accordance with secular, empirical rules", as they are considered to exist in third person objective reality, without embellishment or interpretation...

 and fantasy literature
Fantasy literature
Fantasy literature is fantasy in written form. Historically speaking, literature has composed the majority of fantasy works. Since the 1950s however, a growing segment of the fantasy genre has taken the form of films, television programs, graphic novels, video games, music, painting, and other...

. The novel's epigraph "What river is this through which the Ganges flows?" is quoted from Jorge Luis Borges
Jorge Luis Borges
Jorge Francisco Isidoro Luis Borges Acevedo , known as Jorge Luis Borges , was an Argentine writer, essayist, poet and translator born in Buenos Aires. In 1914 his family moved to Switzerland where he attended school, receiving his baccalauréat from the Collège de Genève in 1918. The family...

 who is known for his works of magical realism. The novel has been subject to critical studies comparing it to C.S. Lewis' The Chronicles of Narnia
The Chronicles of Narnia
The Chronicles of Narnia is a series of seven fantasy novels for children by C. S. Lewis. It is considered a classic of children's literature and is the author's best-known work, having sold over 100 million copies in 47 languages...

, Lewis Carroll
Lewis Carroll
Charles Lutwidge Dodgson , better known by the pseudonym Lewis Carroll , was an English author, mathematician, logician, Anglican deacon and photographer. His most famous writings are Alice's Adventures in Wonderland and its sequel Through the Looking-Glass, as well as the poems "The Hunting of the...

's Through the Looking-Glass
Through the Looking-Glass
Through the Looking-Glass, and What Alice Found There is a work of literature by Lewis Carroll . It is the sequel to Alice's Adventures in Wonderland...

and William Shakespeare
William Shakespeare
William Shakespeare was an English poet and playwright, widely regarded as the greatest writer in the English language and the world's pre-eminent dramatist. He is often called England's national poet and the "Bard of Avon"...

's As You Like It
As You Like It
As You Like It is a pastoral comedy by William Shakespeare believed to have been written in 1599 or early 1600 and first published in the folio of 1623. The play's first performance is uncertain, though a performance at Wilton House in 1603 has been suggested as a possibility...

.

Plot summary

The narrative focuses on the journey of the two main characters from adolescence to adulthood in two alternate worlds, the real world and the idyllic Tembreabrezi.

The story is told in alternating chapters from two starkly alternating viewpoints: that of Irene Pannis, and of Hugh Rogers. 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 more slowly than in the outside world and it is always 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 which connect the town with the rest of the country 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 beyond the town limits. 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 cross back into the 'real' world. By travelling together they can pass back and forth through the gateway at will, 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 track down the monster that brings the fear and Hugh kills it. He is injured in the fight, 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.

Characters

Allia: Lord Horn's blonde daughter.

Donna: a checker at a grocery store where Hugh works. Donna is in her mid 40s and has red hair.

Hugh Rogers: a 20 year old large, heavy bodied man. He is one of the two protagonists of the story.

Irene Pannis: a young, small framed women. She is one of the two protagonists of the story.

Lord Horn: the leader of Mountain Town in Tembreabrezi. Lord Horn is a thin, old, graying man.

Mary Hanson: Irene's mother.

Master Dou Sark: a swarthy older man who functions as the Mayor of Mountain Town.

Palizot: a mother figure for Irene in Mountain Town.

Patsi Sobotny: a young lady who rents a room to Irene in the real world.

Rick: Patsi's live in boyfriend.

Sofir: Palizot's husband and a father figure for Irene in Mountain Town.

Victor Hansen: Irene's big, handsome, and abusive stepfather.

Literary significance and criticism

In The Beginning Place the writer uses a classical theme of a fantasy story to actually develop an introspective inquiry, similarly to The Lathe of Heaven
The Lathe of Heaven
The Lathe of Heaven is a 1971 science fiction novel by Ursula K. Le Guin. The plot revolves around a character whose dreams alter reality. The story was first serialized in the American science fiction magazine Amazing Stories. The novel received nominations for the 1972 Hugo and the 1971 Nebula...

. The great mission of the two protagonists can be considered an imaginative representation of their uneasy separation from their psychologically defunct original families. In the book the novelist's 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 the discovery of the sanity of birth through the relationship with a 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 protagonists 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 two to their complete realization of human identity: Hugh kills the she-dragon and so separates himself from his damaged, passive-aggressive mother to start a relationship with Irene, while Irene, through the separation from her stepfather (who had tried to sexually molest her) allows herself to befriend a nice man.

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
Id, ego, and super-ego
Id, ego and super-ego are the three parts of the psychic apparatus defined in Sigmund Freud's structural model of the psyche; they are the three theoretical constructs in terms of whose activity and interaction mental life is described...

-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.

Michael Moorcock
Michael Moorcock
Michael John Moorcock is an English writer, primarily of science fiction and fantasy, who has also published a number of literary novels....

 has observed common elements between The Beginning Place and Robert Holdstock
Robert Holdstock
Robert Paul Holdstock was an English novelist and author best known for his works of Celtic, Nordic, Gothic and Pictish fantasy literature, predominantly in the fantasy subgenre of mythic fiction....

's award winning fantasy
Fantasy literature
Fantasy literature is fantasy in written form. Historically speaking, literature has composed the majority of fantasy works. Since the 1950s however, a growing segment of the fantasy genre has taken the form of films, television programs, graphic novels, video games, music, painting, and other...

 novel Mythago Wood
Mythago Wood
Mythago Wood is a fantasy novel written by Robert Holdstock that was published in the United Kingdom in 1984. The conception began as a short story written for the 1979 Milford Writer's Workshop; next a novella of the same name appeared in the September 1981 edition of The Magazine of Fantasy &...

; among other similarities, both novels involve alternate worlds and forest settings.
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