Striking a fantastic blow on behalf of the magic of words

AS cultural icons go, libraries have had it tough. When they’re not being razed, like the great library in Alexandria, Egypt, or sacked, like the ancient one in Baghdad by the Mongols, they’re beset by prudish people who’d pick the shelves clean of whatever offends them this week. Pity the poor children in whose name these battles are often waged.

Ursula K. Le Guin aims straight for the gut of this latter group -- particularly the sort of bookish teen apt to read fantasies -- by setting her latest young adult novel, “Voices,” in a ruined household with a secret library, one that the city’s oafish conquerors are frantic to find and destroy.

Barbarians-versus-brainiacs may be well-trod turf, but Le Guin sure-footedly makes it new. She creates a protagonist with obvious appeal to her intended audience: a geeky girl with bad hair but a quick intelligence, who nurses a seething contempt for the illiterate thugs who run everything.

Memer is an orphan, the product of a rape 17 years earlier, when religious zealots swept through democratic, cosmopolitan Ansul, destroying libraries and universities and killing intellectuals and teachers. At the story’s start, she has inherited her late mother’s role as housekeeper to the largest and most cherished of Ansul’s old manors, Galvamand, and its Waylord, a man as wrecked and forlorn as his ransacked property.

He educates Memer in a mysterious chamber that hides the remnants of their culture and, quite possibly, a long-dormant oracle. Whether the oracle works or not, whether it defies logic or can be explained away is one of the book’s more satisfying enigmas.

These fabulist touches weave seamlessly into Memer’s mundane doings, as if every library were magical if only you knew where to look. And it’s refreshing to see what is often called “women’s work” given its due: “Galvamand would not scant its guests or shame its ancestors if [the cook] could help it. This is part of what I meant about housework. If it isn’t important, what is? If it isn’t done honorably, where is honor?”

There’s beauty in the daily rhythms of life and also defiance, as if the attempt to go on is the best revenge. The manor’s hospitality becomes the stage for a renewal of a vanquished people, prodded out of silence by unexpected guests.

“Voices” is a companion to “Gifts,” rather than a sequel, and it is the protagonist of the earlier book who drops in and turns Memer’s world on its head.

In “Gifts,” an Uplander named Orrec had trouble mastering the family talent of unmaking things; Gry, who is now his wife, has a knack with animals that proves pivotal in “Voices.” Orrec’s new role, now that he’s fully grown is that of a celebrated maker (in an unmistakable play on the word).

Orrec’s craft isn’t so much magical as magisterial: He’s a beloved “maker” of verse and a charismatic storyteller. (Imagine a world in which a scholarly wordsmith has the draw of a rock star.)

Le Guin takes shortcuts, however, and settles for describing his recitations rather than creating verses for us to share, but this may be deliberate:

“Orrec finished tuning his lyre, explaining as he did so that the poem was not sung, but that the voice of the instrument served to set the poetry apart from all the words said before and after it, and also say, sometimes, what no words could.”

The reader is left to imagine what lyrics might be powerful enough to heat up the city’s simmering resentments. Nonetheless, these legends and songs that refuse to stay buried take on, as banned words often do, multiple layers of meaning.

Die-hard sword-and-sorcery fans might balk at the book’s pen-is-mightier-than-you-know-what resolution, but there’s no lack of energy in Le Guin’s tightly drawn scenes of confrontation and rebellion spurred by Orrec’s recitations.

But for all the heroine’s schooling, Memer has a lot to learn, namely that the power of those squiggles and lines on the page relies not only on how they’re wielded but also on what the audience -- including herself -- chooses to see and hear.

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Anne Boles Levy writes a children’s book blog at www.bookbuds.net.