The social sciences inform [Ursula K. Le Guin's] fantasies with far more earthy substance than the usual imaginary space-flight, and her hypothetical futures have a strong flavor of familiar history…. ["The Beginning Place"] describes with plenty of moral and psychological complexity the mating of two modern young people; its fantastic terrain … belongs not to any conjecturable future but to that vast, vaguely medieval never-never land whose place in our shared nostalgia was sealed by Malory's telling of the Arthurian legends, revived by Tennyson and William Morris, and given phenomenal modern currency by Tolkien's saga of Middle-earth. (p. 94)

The adventure that Irene and Hugh come to share in this storybook village is excitingly told, and so simply, boldly composed of the ancient motifs of curse and quest that any summary would reveal too much. Read as a metaphor of sexuality emerging from masturbatory solitude into the perilous challenge and...