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The Earthsea Cycle, by Ursula K LeGuin | |
 rsula K. LeGuin's
Earthsea series (initially a trilogy, now up to six books) is a classic
of fantasy and a series (at least the initial trilogy) that every
fantasy fan should read. You can do it quickly too; the first four books
are no more than 180 pages each, and the sixth one isn't much longer.LeGuin's world of Earthsea is somewhat thematically similar to Tolkien's LotR, in that they both feel very real and authentic, and are tinged with sorrow and loss and sacrifice. If you want slam/bang action fantasy where the good guys triumph with super spells and swords, and the bad guys are evil and scheming and get theirs in the end, you will find Earthsea a great change of pace, and you will probably not enjoy it very much. LeGuin's series is much more about the smaller details, and the journey, and the hardships and sacrifices a man (or woman, in the later books) must make to be great and to do good for his people. Her stories are more about personal growth or redemption through great acts, rather than about the acts themselves, and the heroic deeds are usually being done out of necessity, when there is no other choice. Young heroes eager for glory and power bring evil ends upon themselves, and rash actions are usually punished just as they are in real life. LeGuin is kind of a big bang writer, (I explain that style of fantasy here.) except that her bangs aren't that big, and she doesn't really try to make them big. In her books you get pages and pages of documentary-style coverage of people living in the middle ages, making food, sailing a boat, walking around a mountain in the rain, etc, before there's finally some action and excitement. If you get into the stories and the world and the characters, it's satisfying to read about their every act, and you care more when they finally face some danger and do something heroic. If you don't, you get bored and skim a lot and wonder why anyone likes this material. For example, here's a recent review of the first book in the series, from an Amazon.com reviewer.
Now this 1 star review is
not finding much agreement, with just 1 out of 14 people finding it
useful, but while I disagree with him, I can definitely see his point.
Harry Potter is a modern children's book, with a much-simplified
morality. All of the humans and main characters are either good or evil,
and they act very consistently. There's virtually no introspection,
nothing troubling for the reader to think over, and good guys to root
for with all of your heart (unless you want to be postmodern and
contrarian and dislike Harry just because you're so blatantly
manipulated to love him). Book 1: A Wizard of EarthseaThe first book in the series is A Wizard of Earthsea. This one introduces us to the main character (at least of the first three books), Sparrowhawk, AKA Ged. He's a young boy when the book begins, born to a blacksmith father and a dying mother, and born with an intrinsic talent for magic. He first shows his talent at a young age, nearly killing himself with a spell far beyond his abilities, briefly apprentices with a very quiet and peaceful mage, then heads on to the mage school on Roke. There he is driven by pride and a lust for knowledge, gains in skill faster than any mage ever has, and nearly kills himself by working a mighty enchantment that backfires. Maimed and slowed by the injuries, he eventually gains his wizard's staff and heads out into the world, where he hopes to avoid the shadow creature that entered the world when he cast his ill-advised spell, and eventually, after several narrow escapes, realizes that he must hunt down the shadow being, rather than running from it. The book is basically about accepting responsibility for your own actions, growing to be a man, behaving wisely and not rashly, making sacrifices for those you care about, and so on. It's an enjoyable book, and a great introduction to the series, setting up a fascinating character, and interesting world, and introducing us to LeGuin's take on dragons (they are awesomely-portrayed in Earthsea). This book also includes one of my biggest complaints about LeGuins's writing; the mercilessly-overt foreshadowing. She's not that bad about doing it all through the story, as some authors are, but on page one of the first book in the series she says this is a story about Sparrowhawk, from before he became great and renowned and did X and Y and Z. Right then and there, on page 1 of the first book, she not only tells you that Sparrowhawk is going to survive the challenges he faces in that book, and that he'll surmount them completely and become famous and powerful and wonderful. She basically gives away the conclusion of the first two books in one sentence! I'm not repeating what that line says here, since it would be infinitely spoiler, but I'm not sure why I'm bothering not to when the author herself did it right off the bat. Book 2: The Tombs of AtuanBook two takes place a few years after book one ends, and while it is largely about Ged's quest to find the other half of an ancient ring that's been broken and lost for over 800 years, he's not the main character in the story. For most of the book he's not even onscreen, as we spend time with Tenar, a young priestess in the Hardic lands, islands occupied by a different culture than the dominant people in Earthsea. On her large island Tenar lives as a Dalai Lama-esque reincarnated princess, one who is held in great regard but who has little actual power. As she finds out during the course of the novel. Ged doesn't actually appear until nearly a third of the way through the book, and the first 50+ pages are instead about Arha and her life as she serves the dark and powerful Nameless Ones, who are sort of earth spirits that inhabit an ancient labyrinth beneath her temples. When Ged eventually appears she sees him in the dark tombs below the surface, and locks him into the maze, where he will surely die. He is a curiosity to Arha though, and she can't help feeding him enough to keep him alive while speaking with him to learn of other lands and other cultures and philosophies. Eventually he tells her of his quest, and his presence precipitates a schism between Arha and the high priestess who actually holds most of the power, while supposedly serving the young girl/reincarnated goddess. Arha finds herself identifying more and more with Ged and questioning the religion and philosophy she's been raised in, and eventually must make a choice between staying there and letting the foreign mage die, or giving him the ring and fleeing with him to a strange and distant land. This novel has by far the least action or adventure of the first three books, and is actually quite similar to book 4, in terms of nothing really happening until the conclusion. It's all talk and thought and introspection, rather than action or fighting or dragons. It's still a good book, and more thought provoking the more you think about it (Once you have the maturity to enjoy it for that; I disliked it when I was a kid.), but I can see an impatient reader skimming pages by the dozen, just wanting to find out if Ged escapes the damn labyrinth with the ring or not. Book 3: The Farthest ShoreBook three takes place more than a decade after the events in book two. Arha is nowhere to be seen in this novel, and Ged is now Archmage. He's done numerous great deeds since recovering the Ring of Erreth-Akbe, but unfortunately those are not detailed in this book or any of them. We just hear about them when other people think why he's so great. A new crisis faces the islands of Earthsea though, as reports continually trickle into Roke of magic no longer working on distant islands, of people losing their minds and running mad through the streets, of singers forgetting the words to ritual songs, and so on. A young prince has come bearing such tales from his own powerful island, and Ged immediately sees something in him that no one else does, and elects to take the lad with him when he sets forth, alone, to try and discover what is happening to Earthsea. They sail off, over the objections of most of the other senior mages, and go through various adventures (none of which are especially exciting). The book is pretty depressing, really, as it depicts one miserable and hopeless person and island after another, as Ged and Arren travel aimlessly around the world, steadily losing hope as the sickness that is poisoning the minds of every living man begins to work on them. It's very tricky to write from the perspective of a depressed and hopeless person without making the reader depressed and hopeless themselves. In this book, LeGuin does a very good job of letting us know just how morose Prince Arren feels... perhaps too good a job. The plot eventually picks up when a dragon seeks out Ged and Arren, bringing news of their enemy and where he might be found. A grand confrontation beckons... until when it finally occurs, there's far less to it than the reader might have expected. Imagine if in Harry Potter 7, when Harry finally faces Voldemort... they talk for a while and Harry convinces Voldemort that he's been misguided in his evil all these years, and that he should just lie down and die and he'd be happier then. And Voldemort agrees, leaving Harry alone to try and fix the hole in the world that's sucking everyone into madness and despair. The book has somewhat of a surprise ending, when Arren turns out to be far more than he appeared to be, and all of Ged's cryptic musings on how he'll be remembered more for discovering Arren than for his own deeds are explained in heroic fashion. Book 4: TehanuTehanu is the real turning point in the series. I first reviewed it long before reading books 5 and 6, and wrote a full review of it with scores somewhat different from these. My opinion of it hasn't changed since then, but I did redo the scores to make them relative to the other books in the series. This novel was written 1991, nearly two decades after the 3rd book in the series, and when I first read it I was heartbroken. I had long loved the first three novels, despite all of their slowness and introspection and lack of action, but this one took that to a new level. There is perhaps one page of action and excitement in this entire novel, it comes at the very end, and it's hardly there at all; with the crucial action climax to the entire very, very slowly developing plot basically taking place off screen. That's intentional though, as LeGuin set out to write a very different book, one without a plot or structure or tension, as such things are usually described. The first three books in the series, #2 especially, spend a great deal of time detailing the sort of events that aren't mentioned in normal fantasy adventures, and often feature the sorts of characters you never see in those books either. Peasants, housewives, powerless sisters of powerful mages, and so on. They're seldom even integral to the plots; they're just there for background or realism, or to give a PoV not usually encountered in such books. This is taken to an extreme in Tehanu, where almost the entire book is about a widowed peasant woman and the fire-scarred orphan girl she takes in. They are dispossessed from her late husband's home when her layabout son returns, they walk across the mountains with some weird, lurking guys subtly menacing them, and they settle in the home of the old, dead wizard where they scratch out a living with a few goats, some chickens, and a peach tree. Eventually Ged returns, an event that shows us this novel is set just hours after book 3 ended, but he's now broken and powerless, having spent his might to heal the rift in the fabric of the world in the end of book three. And he's not there to rest and return stronger than ever; he really has lost his power, and frankly it's damn depressing to watch him moping around a goat pasture, unknown and unloved by the local villagers, with his entire life behind him and years yet to live. Some of the Amazon.com reviewers have said it's heartbreaking to see a beloved character like Ged reduced and weakened; almost like watching a parent die. You can take that comment two ways: 1) It's realistic and brilliant writing to make people feel so strongly about a character, and interesting to see one in a way you never do in other novels. 2) Readers don't read fantasy novels to suffer and feel miserable when the characters they love are crushed and humiliated without hope of salvation. Which philosophy you agree with will largely define how you feel about this book. As I said, I hated this story when I first read it, back in the 90s, but have since come to appreciate it, though I can't say I actually like it. The first three novels in this series were written by a younger LeGuin, one who was putting her own stamp on the fantasy world, but who was essentially Tolkien-esque in having everything of importance be done by men, and skewing her tales around the great deeds of men. By the time she wrote Tehanu she was a "born-again feminist" and had a very different philosophy about life, and wrote Tehanu almost as an experiment, to see if she could construct a full novel without a single thing that your average reader expects in a fantasy novel. No kings, no wizards, no battles, no romances, etc. It's just old, poor peasants scratching out their life on the far, far side of their former glory. All the novels in Earthsea are quite solemn, with great responsibility and importance heaped upon every event, and I like that approach, so long as there is enough other interesting stuff to offset the very slow pace and very introspective style. It's not really a style I search out, but a good writer can make it work, and LeGuin does. Tehanu could have done that as well, but LeGuin seems too committed to proving she can write a novel in which nothing important happens. She's written it, but whether that's a good thing or not is very open to debate. Her approach has, as you might expect, divided her fans. As I discuss in my old Tehanu review, the Amazon.com reviews are all over the place, with more 1 star than 5 star reviews among the most popular, and reviewers denouncing it as passionately as others defend it. You may want to read Tehanu just to see what all the fuss is about, but there's a dualism there as well. 1) People who have never read any of the series might enjoy this one to start off with, since it doesn't require any previous knowledge of the characters, and it wouldn't bother you seeing Ged so weak and old. On the other hand, if you didn't know anything about the world or the characters, why would you trudge through 200 pages of this kitchen sink drama that's sadly lacking in drama? 2) People who have read the first trilogy will enjoy this to see what's become of the old characters, and it's interesting to see LeGuin's new take on her own world. On the other hand, you'll know what you're missing when there's no plot or action or conflict in this one, and you'll find it impossible to keep from comparing this one to the first three, which you will most likely think much superior. Book 5: Tales from EarthseaBooks 5 and 6 were written a decade after book 4, and that's definitely to their good. LeGuin's feminism isn't gone, but it's been tempered by reality and life experience, and she's not out to prove a point this time. Book 5 is a collection of short (and not so short) stories set at various times and places in the Earthsea world, and while none of them are especially good or exciting, none sink as deeply into mundanity as book 4 did. There are stories about dragons, about the founding of the wizard school on Roke, about how and why women are no longer permitted to learn the higher forms of magic, and even one with a scene from earlier in Ged's life, though it's unfortunately not a scene of one of his great deeds. Nothing about this book really sucks, but nothing about it is very good either. It's more consistent with the tone of the first three books though, while still dealing in a more realistic and balanced fashion with the male/female interaction. Women aren't all the main characters this time, but they aren't entirely pushed away to the irrelevant side as they were in books 1-3, and they aren't living an utterly boring and simple life, like they were in book 4. I don't think this one would be of much interest to someone who hadn't read the whole series though, and you will at least enjoy it far more if you've read the rest, and know what holes in the narrative and history it's plugging. Book 6: The Other WindThe sixth and final (for now) novel in the Earthsea Cycle is similar to the third book, in structure. Something is fundamentally wrong with the world, but this time it's affecting the dragons, and the dead, rather than the living humans. Dragons are returning to the lands of the east, raiding and burning crops and houses, as they try to drive the people away (rather than simply eating or burning them). In addition, the dead seem restless, and the more sensitive and wise people suspect there is a great sickness lying over the world. If book 4 was about feminism coming into a patriarchal society, book 6 is about ideas of reincarnation coming into a heaven/hell view of the afterlife. Lebannen, the first king over the lands in more than 800 years, needs to marry. The conqueror king of the Hardic lands has sent his daughter for Lebannen to marry. Lebannen is incensed by this, feeling trapped into a marriage with a woman who does not speak his language or know his customs, and who is the daughter of a much less powerful king, one he could crush or ignore, if he so choose. The meat of the plot has Lebannen and a few advisors, including his would-be queen, riding around and making parley with dragons, while they worry about the larger issue of the unrest in the land of the dead, a physical place in the world of Earthsea. As the plot unfolds, progress is made in dealing with the angry dragons, and Lebannen grows warmer towards the mysterious veiled girl he may have to marry while she begins to learn his language and makes efforts to make him like her. Aiding greatly in everything is Tehanu, the fire-scarred young girl of the 4th book, who... turned into a dragon at the end of it. Yes, turned into a dragon. It seemed absurd at the time, but as the mythology of Earthsea developed more over books 5 and 6, stories came about that humans and dragons were initially one creature with the ability to change between the forms. Dragons had nothing and were free, humans were greedy and enslaved by their greed, and over time humans grew more and more separate from dragons, until all memory of their common origin was lost. (I can easily see a reader finding this just too ridiculous to accept, and not being able to get into the story at all because of it.) One or two people every generation are still born with the ability to transform though. Funny, you'd think word of that would have gotten around a bit more. Furthermore, the humans of the archipelago, the main characters in the Earthsea books, believe in an afterlife where there is nothing but a dry, dead land, filled with the aimless and emotionless dead. It's a horrible place, where lovers pass on the street without recognizing each other, and nothing ever changes. Sort of like the waiting room at the DMV. The Hardic people though, including Tenar, who came along with the ring in book 2, and the princess/future-queen in book 6, believe in reincarnation, and think dying with the beliefs of the archipelago people is a horrible fate, since they will never be reborn (and apparently they're right, as far as the book goes in resolving this choose-your-own-destiny theological quandary). The climax of the book involves the king's party working to end the locked state of their afterlife land of the dead, and finding a way to become one with the other people, and discovering why no dragons ever fly through the land of the dead. It's a largely philosophical problem, but at least this book has a plot of sorts, and a love story, though it's rather uninvolving. Lebannen and his queen to be hardly interact, and they are indifferent towards each other throughout, until suddenly when the plot requires it they are completely devoted to each other and ready to die for their love. I do have to give LeGuin props for thinking up a major world-threatening plot that wasn't just based on an evil wizard (again) or attacking dragons, or attacking Kargs, or other common things. It's damn hard to threaten your world and all of the people in it again and again without repeating yourself or your villains, and she mostly managed it, with a healthy dose of theology and philosophy thrown in. My mediocre score isn't based on that; it's more due to the events during the book being pretty boring, as they lead up to the enormously important but still not very exciting climax. |
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