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i've been reading ursula le guin lately

posted 2024.10.16 •
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In particular I’ve been reading her Earthsea novels: the original trilogy (A Wizard of Earthsea, The Tombs of Atuan, and The Farthest Shore) and its later sequel The Other Wind.1 They’re good books. While the world and plot are mostly typical for Western fantasy fiction, I quite appreciate the ways in which they differ.

Wait but first what is Earthsea

map of earthsea

Earthsea is the name of the archipelago in which the novels are set. It’s not a very creative name, but it ties into the cosmology of the world so I won’t fault her for it. It has magic,2 wizards, dragons, and some ancient powerful entities, but besides that it resembles an amalgamation of the real world many hundreds of years ago.

Ok, and how are the books?

Often when I read the first two books, I found myself thinking, “Wow, I wish I had discovered these books when I was younger!” This, I think, was a reaction to my embarrassment at how excited I was about books clearly written for 12-year-olds.

A Wizard of Earthsea is the most clearly written for children. It’s not juvenile, nor does it treat the reader as simple-minded, but the themes are very coming-of-age, namely of an age about half mine. Though, perhaps because of the age of the book, I still would have needed to look up several words in a dictionary had I read it as a tween.3

One thing I found odd is that Ursula Le Guin doesn’t mind spoiling the general plots and some minor details of the following two books. In the universe of Earthsea, the events of the books are folk tales or epic poems, so in that sense they couldn’t be “spoiled” any more than the Iliad and the Odyssey could be spoiled.

The Tombs of Atuan doesn’t have any childish themes, really, but it doesn’t have particularly adult ones either—it’s just a gripping fantasy tale. A master of her craft at the top of her game. I read it one chapter a night by my bedside lamp, which was the perfect way to read this book.

The Farthest Shore is slightly more adult, maybe more appropriate for a teen than a tween. There are parts where I think it drags, but I do love exploring so many fascinating parts of the archipelago that aren’t visited in the earlier books.

The Other Wind is maybe the worst of the four that I read, but it’s still good. She gets a little too “Model U.N.” with her characters at times—a few too many pages where the characters just debate their viewpoints, and maybe too loving a characterization of how her kingsona Lebannen governs. But the end of the book wraps up the cosmology of the series very nicely, so I like it for that.

some criticisms and some nice details too [spoilers]

Now, I’m not saying Ursula Le Guin should have spelled out all the the mechanics of magic like it’s some sort of video game. Powerscaling is not part of the tradition of myth and fantasy. But when Ged narrowly survives something, it usually feels like it’s because the author arbitrarily allotted that amount of power to him at that time. Climactic moments, instead of a tense back-and-forth, are more like promises that the participants are very powerful followed by deus ex machina. When Ged describes to Tenar the charms he placed on the Nameless Ones, and how they won’t last much longer, the description is so vague that I feel like I have to just take him at his word—it’s a very tell-not-show way of communicating his wizardly power. I have a similar feeling about the gebbeth, his journey to the dry land in the first book, Ged’s narrow survival before their rescue in The Farthest Shore, the battle with Cob, and whatever happens at the end of The Other Wind.

And I have some specific criticisms of The Other Wind, which as I said was the weakest of the four books I read. The pacing, I feel, is way off. It doesn’t feel like it’s close to any sort of climax until about 30 pages from the end. By then I’d spent 2/3rds of the book gradually caring less about Alder (because he doesn’t do a lot in that time), so my heart wasn’t in it to start caring about him again all of a sudden. And I thought it was a little over-the-top how often she writes that Tenar misses Ged. Ok that’s it for the criticism.

Now a shoutout to some of my favorite details:

Why do you think it’s different from other fantasy

When I compare to other fantasy, I’m mostly comparing to the following types of fantasy:4

The two things I appreciate about the Earthsea books compared to most of the examples above are: heavy consideration for the lives of everyday people; and genuine conviction.

When I say genuine conviction, I mean that the world takes itself seriously, and the people in the world take itself seriously. For example, the The Tombs of Atuan begins so strongly because that the religion and worship it describes feel genuinely mystical. It has compelling tenets, demands, and perhaps most importantly, rites with powerful symbolism. The rites are really cool! They lend the religion a real gravitas that is lacking from many other works of fiction. While the religion5 is not uncritically believed by everyone, and contains some correspondence to real-world religions, it’s far more compelling than the religions of much modern fantasy fiction, which are often pantheons without real myth or rites, or else are thin caricatures of the Catholic church. It especially perplexes me when a religious entity is literally real and observable in a fantasy world but people still kind of act like it isn’t. (Many a D&D campaign is guilty of this one, though it’s hardly fair of me to hold tabletop DMs to the standard of Nebula-Award-winning author Ursula K. Le Guin.)

The other difference I mentioned is that Ursula Le Guin clearly considers the lives of Earthsea’s ordinary inhabitants. The protagonists are wizards, royals, and priestesses, yes, but the world doesn’t revolve around them. The most common uses for magic aren’t spells for slaying dragons; they’re for herding animals, steering ships, mending clothes, that sort of thing. Government and money are mostly informal outside of cities,6 and most people are illiterate and engaged in food production or other such simple laborer. Unlike most other works, where common folk are rarely characterized or rarely seen, the societies of Earthsea could actually plausibly function if they existed, unlike many fantasy worlds where seemingly everyone is a merchant, an artisan, a noble, or a soldier.

It’s cool! It’s different. You can tell Ursula Le Guin put a great deal of care into her world, and her deeply-held beliefs about equilibrium, sustainability, and harmony really shine through. So that’s my review. I recommend it. Especially if you’re 12.

  1. There are two sequels I didn’t read set in between the original trilogy and The Other Wind. I’ll add reviews of those as I get to them. ↩

  2. In Earthsea, people with magical ability can use “true names” (in the language of the Old Speech) to control things. Like you can help steer a sailing ship by using the name of the west wind. People also individually have true names but it’s not clear what exactly other people can do if they know your true name. But the true name is usually kept secret because of this. ↩

  3. And I had a big vocabulary! ↩

  4. I have not actually watched / read all of these works, so in parts I will rely on cultural osmosis or lean on some examples more heavily than others. ↩

  5. And other types of superstition and spirituality from the other regions of Earthsea—which blend, at some point, into what could just be considered “magic” and not really religion ↩

  6. Which is to say, there’s no 50-person isolated fishing village that inexplicably has a general store and tavern denominated in standard coinage. ↩