The Earthsea Trilogy (2003)
dannyreviews.com
dannyreviews.com
“You want to work spells,” Ogion said presently, striding along. “You’ve drawn too much water from that well. Wait. Manhood is patience. Mastery is nine times patience. What is that herb by the path?”
“Strawflower.”
“And that?”
“I don’t know.”
“Fourfoil, they call it.” Ogion had halted, the coppershod foot of his staff near the little weed, so Ged looked closely at the plant, and plucked a dry seedpod from it, and finally asked, since Ogion said nothing more, “What is its use, Master?”
“None I know of.”
Ged kept the seedpod a while as they went on, then tossed it away.
“When you know the fourfoil in all its seasons root and leaf and flower, by sight and scent and seed, then you may learn its true name, knowing its being: which is more than its use. What, after all, is the use of you? or of myself? Is Gont Mountain useful, or the Open Sea?” Ogion went on a half mile or so, and said at last, “To hear, one must be silent.”
Once you have full understanding of the code, the proper name should reveal itself. You didn't chose the name, it was simply not clear to you yet.
Spoilers, obviously.
The original trilogy has interesting gender roles. One one hand it's very rigid in its ideas of gender, as you'd expect from someone into Taoism. On the other, those roles were far from one-dimensional. I'd say that it presents an unconventional, but surprisingly positive view of the masculine gender role in the wizards of Roke, and a grim but original and compelling view of death. Both men and women can be cruel, but even at their worst you don't necessarily lose sympathy for them.
In Tehanu, that's all rolled back. There the men are evil, and the women are victims, period. And Ged kills a guy (which he didn't in the first three books) and gets to have sex right after, pretty explicitly as a reward - that was a bit of a "what the hell, author?" moment. And the grim afterlife is apparently the fault of those patriarchal wizards. It seems Le Guin was embarrassed at her earlier work that it wasn't feminist enough, or that it wasn't feminist in the right way. And maybe it wasn't Taoist enough either (I for one could never understand how she could combine those two).
She's still a great storyteller, of course, so it's certainly possible to appreciate those books, just know that they're written 20 years later when the author had a completely different view of many things.
> And Ged kills a guy (which he didn't in the first three books) and gets to have sex right after, pretty explicitly as a reward - that was a bit of a "what the hell, author?" moment.
Two people with a long-standing attraction having sex after a life-or-death experience seems completely natural to me. Your framing of them having sex BECAUSE Ged killed a man is a misrepresentation of what happens in the book.
...
I have written so often of how and why it took me so long to write the six books of Earthsea that the story has become like the book you have to read to your four-year-old every night for weeks—You really want to hear it again? Oh well, okay, here goes!
I wrote the first three books in five years: ’68, ’70, ’72. I was on a roll. None of them was closely plotted or planned before writing; in each of them much of the story came to me as I followed what I wrote where it inevitably led. I started confidently on the fourth book. The central character was Tenar again, of course, to balance it out. I knew she hadn't stayed and studied wizardry with Ogion, but had married a farmer and had children, and that the story was going to bring her and Ged back together. But by the middle of the first chapter, I realized that I didn't know who she was—now. I didn't know why she’d done what she’d done or what she had to do. I didn't know her story, or Ged’s. I couldn’t plot or plan it. I couldn’t write it. It took me eighteen years to learn how.
I was forty-two in 1972; in 1990, I was sixty. During those years, the way of understanding society that we’re obliged to call feminism (despite the glaring absence of its opposite term masculism) had grown and flourished. At the same time an increasing sense of something missing in my own writing, which I could not identify, had begun to paralyze my storytelling ability. Without the feminist writers and thinkers of the 1970s and ’80s, I don’t know if I ever could have identified this absence as the absence of women at the center.
Why was I, a woman, writing almost entirely about what men did?
Why because I was a reader who read, loved, and learned from the books my culture provided me; and they were almost entirely about what men did. The women in them were seen in relation to men, essentially having no existence unrelated to male existence. I knew what men did, in books, and how one wrote about them. But when it came to what women did, or how to write about it, all I had to call on was my own experiences—uncertified, unapproved by the great Consensus of Criticism, lacking the imprimatur of the Canon of Literature, piping up solo against the universally dominant and almost unison chorus of the voices of men talking about men.
Oh, well, now, was that true? Hadn't I read Jane Austen? Emily Brontë? Charlotte Brontë? Elizabeth Gaskell? George Eliott? Virginia Woolf? Other, long-silenced voices of women writing about both women and men were being brought back into print, into life. And my contemporary women writers were showing me the way. It was high time I learned to write of and from my own body, my own gender, in my own voice.
The central character of The Tombs of Atuan is female, the point of view is hers. But Tenar is just coming out of adolescence, not yet fully a woman. I had had no problem in 1970 writing out of my own experience of what it is to be a girl-child, an adolescent girl.
What I couldn't do then, and hadn’t yet done in 1990, was write a fully mature woman at the center of a novel.
Strangely enough, it took a child to show me the way into the fourth book of Earthsea. A girl-child, born in poverty, abused, maimed, abandoned, Therru led me back to Tenar, so that I could see the woman she had become. And through Tenar I could see Earthsea, unchanged, the same Earthsea as eighteen years earlier—but seeming almost a different world, for the viewpoint was no longer from a position of power or among men of power. Tenar was seeing it all from below, through the eyes of the marginal, the voiceless, the powerless.
The essay “Earthsea Revisioned,” reprinted in this edition, discusses that change in viewpoint. When Tehanu came out, a good many critics and readers saw it as mere gender politics and resented it as a betrayal of the romantic tradition of heroism. As I tried to say in the essay, not to change viewpoint would, for me, have been the betrayal. By including women fully in my story, I gained a larger understanding of what heroism is and found a true and longed-for way back into my Earthsea—now a very much greater, stranger, more mysterious place than it had ever appeared before.
Though Tehanu is named for the child character, neither it nor the two books after it are books “for children” or definable as “young adult.” I had abandoned any attempt to suit my vision of Earthsea to a publisher’s category or a critic’s prejudice. The notion that fantasy is only for the immature rises from an obstinate misunderstanding of both maturity and the imagination. So, as my protagonists grew older, I trusted my younger readers to follow them or not, as and when they chose. In the PR-driven world of publishing, that constituted a real risk, and I am very grateful to the editors who took that risk with me.
...
The later books did that. But I do see them as presenting the men as evil, and the women as victims, "period", not unless you identify the idea of privilege and power as inherently marking all of those affected by it irrespective of how they engage with it.
But I think they did! The wizards of Roke were not stereotypically masculine. They had a focus on "Being" over "Doing". They weren't into rescuing princesses. (The one "princess" Ged arguably rescued, Arha, he did so by convincing her to rescue herself. And that wasn't why he was there in the first place.) They had a basically pacifist, non-interventionist way of living.
> not unless you identify the idea of privilege and power
The first two really evil men we met in Tehanu were ragged gypsies, nobodies. (Apropos that, Le Guin might have to had make some new revisions in another 20 years, I doubt portraying wanderers like that would pass without comment today). They were anything but privileged.
I liked the portrayal of the wizards of Roke in the first books. I don't think I'd ever seen men as men presented so sympathetically in any fantasy book before. Although they certainly were capable of embodying many traditionally male faults (what the first book is about, basically), they weren't defined by what they did. They were allowed to be. Which is, as I'm sure you know, slightly at odds with Taoism and with western traditional gender roles for that matter, where it's women who are something and masculinity is performed, won by doing.
Which is why it felt like such a betrayal when Ged did a thing, killing a guy threatening a woman, and immediately became a "real man" instead of a celibate weirdo.
That's not challenging anything for fantasy, and it's an obtuse answer when the point is that her books were - and she herself has acknowledged this - written from the point of view of a tradition that focuses on the men.
In that respect Roke is an archetypical example of adhering to the gender roles: A school of wizardy entirely run by men who don't even have female partners.
> The first two really evil men we met in Tehanu were ragged gypsies, nobodies. (Apropos that, Le Guin might have to had make some new revisions in another 20 years, I doubt portraying wanderers like that would pass without comment today). They were anything but privileged.
Yes, in Thehanu. And in the first three books the wizards were all men, and the leaders were all men, and as you yourself has pointed out, while Arha/Tenar did not need to be "rescued" directly, she still needed a man to show her the path out. The women are respectively not present or helpless.
> I liked the portrayal of the wizards of Roke in the first books
Nobody has argued you shouldn't or can't. But Le Guin made the point very clearly that she had failed to tell stories from the point of view of women, and so she did that too. That doesn't erase the earlier portrayals.
> Which is why it felt like such a betrayal when Ged did a thing, killing a guy threatening a woman, and immediately became a "real man" instead of a celibate weirdo.
I don't see that as a betrayal at all. Ged had changed. People changed. The world around him has changed. And he had always been different in any case. That he was allowed to evolved through the story, and had a whole life in the stories is part of what makes them not follow the stereotypical fantasy arc.
I had certainly not read anything like it. Remember how old those books are - the fantasy of that age was closer to Moorcock, Leiber etc. Where in that sort of literature can you find gentle, hands-off wizards (hell, men of any sort) who live a largely contemplative life? And written well enough that it seems really appealing?
> That doesn't erase the earlier portrayals.
Well it doesn't exactly erase them, but it reinterprets them drastically. Also, even though Le Guin later didn't consider it good enough, the Tombs of Atuan were written from a woman's perspective. A woman who's frankly a bit hard to recognize in the book Tehanu. Isn't a bit odd that the former high priestess of the Nameless Ones, of a visibly different race (who the islanders are understandably afraid of) settles down in a domestic life, and coincidentally develops concerns about domesticity similar to modern women at that time? You'd think she'd have much worse concerns than that her son doesn't help with housework!
I feel like Le Guin devalued her own story in the first three books, failed to recognize that through its basic empathy it did tell good and thoughtful stories with a gender dimension that challenges you to think.
The new novels are both familar and sufficiently different that it's hard to judge whether someone who liked the original series will still enjoy the new ones. Part of it reflects Le Guin's reassessing her own writing, and give the female characters more space; part of it is a change of pace, and more focus on the characters and less on classic fantasy tropes.
And he began to see the truth, that Ged had neither lost nor won but, naming the shadow of his death with his own name, had made himself whole: a man: who, knowing his whole true self, cannot be used or possessed by any power other than himself, and whose life therefore is lived for life’s sake and never in the service of ruin, or pain, or hatred, or the dark. In the Creation of Éa, which is the oldest song, it is said,
“Only in silence the word,
only in dark the light,
only in dying life:
bright the hawk’s flight on the empty sky.”But I definitely understand your sentiment. I remember reading the first book of Stephen R. Donaldson’s “Thomas Covenant” series and quickly abandoned it because it followed Tolkien too closely.
(The second trilogy abandons this constraint and is a much better fantasy story for it.)
Depends what you mean by tapped out I suppose. There's great fantasy still being written. Some of my favorites vaguely recently are the Malazan Book of the Fallen, Mistborn, and the Stormlight Archive serieses.
(And Fate/Grand Order, but you don't want to get into that.)
Spoilers: I did really enjoy the way the original novel "peaked" several times, each time leaving me thinking "well they beat the big bad, now what" but then there is much much more each time and the main character reaches an entirely new level of mastery they hadn't even imagined before. It's an interesting metaphor for life.
For me, the best fantasy series of all (including those you mentioned, all of which I loved) was The Golden Compass series. Not sure if everyone would call it fantasy, but I think it is. But it's incredible world-building, incredible plotting, incredible characters, and philosophy and religion and ethics thrown in.
(I agree with everything in this review, and will probably grab my old and battered copy of the Quartet from my parents this weekend.)
LeGuin asks, "what if we could speak it?"
I saw an animated one that ... was not perfect. I think there may be some live-action version out there, as well.
From then on though, it was just downhill, with each book getting harder and harder to read. Especially book 4 could basically be summarized as "the dark thoughts of an old woman, mixed once every 50 pages with the name 'Ged', the word 'garden' and the description of a disfigured girl". :(
Like, don't crucify me please, but I could probably compress that book in 20 pages, easily, without skipping a single plot element.
Book 5 was a slight improvement, all the underworld / dead people descriptions were pretty eerie and I managed to get some immersion. Was okay, though still very watered down and prolonged and sadly again, the ending was easy to guess.
Books 2 and 3? I don't even remember them now. I only remember how extremely excruciatingly slow they were.
In any case, I know there is always the universal will-never-go-anywhere cop-out of "it's just not for you, man" but I would still be interested if anybody can elaborate what made the book click for them.
TL;DR I found the books extremely watered down, full of dark thoughts and rather meaningless stoicism, and Ged was basically a burned out veteran before he hits 30 years old which is a bit disappointing, isn't it? Not to mention, again, too much focus on the mental struggles of old people. And there isn't even any revelation or motivation anywhere, it's basically "life sucks man, what can you do".
Before you ask or claim: I really like reading fantasy and I picked these books several years ago due to their reputation. And I was -- and I still am -- legitimately confused what's so great about them.
There are plenty of people who consider themselves to play jazz, but are told by others that they do not.
There are even a few people who don't consider themselves to play jazz, but are told by others that they do.
The nature of "what jazz is" is (and likely always will be) an ongoing debate, just like its corrollary "what is jazz".
If Louis had lived until the 2000s, I suspect he might have rephrased this: "If you care about what jazz is, you'll probably never know; you're not much likelier to know even if you don't care".
Mine was specifically intended to be anti-elitist, by making it clear that the problem comes from even feeling a need to define jazz.
Armstrong's does strike me as potentially elitist, though I don't know his actual intent (obviously).
Some concepts are grounded in language and others are grounded in higher order ephemeral ideas.
It's like trying to plot an exponential curve with a polynomial equation. It's futile.
Jazz is one of those ideas. Jazz is felt. Jazz is expressed. Jazz is in the air. When Jazz happens, you know it. And that's enough. The second you put words to Jazz, you suffocate it, you put in a box.
It's like trying to explain the beauty of the Sagrada Familia by counting the number of minarets and sculptures on it. No, you take it in whole, with all your senses, and you 'get' it.
The Sagrada Familia is a thing, and everybody knows (who knows it) what that thing is. It has clear physical boundaries, and to paraphrase Soul Coughing, you can put your hands on it and then back on yourself and then back on it and say "Is Sagrada, is not Sagrada, is Sagrada ..."
The problem with things like jazz is that jazz isn't a thing. It doesn't have boundaries. You can't point to it, only to (nominal examples of) it. And people don't always agree that a given thing is an example of jazz. Some people want there to be something that unites all jazz at some level, so that "when jazz happens, you know it", but I really don't think that's true of the full spectrum of musical expression that is sometimes labelled "jazz".
What Sun Ra was doing is far from what the late 70s jazz-fusion guys were doing is so far from what Tord Gustavson is doing is so far from the Armstrong big band was doing is ...
To me, trying to say that there's some unitary idea that somehow connects all these things (and more) and that you know it or you don't ... well, maybe I don't know it.
My real point is that what ought to matter is whether you like the music. Whether it's jazz or not is really just a distraction.
You don’t like the books, that’s all. They don’t speak to you.
Nothing unusual here, there’s plenty of books I don’t like either that are apparently brilliant (The Vorrh comes to mind).
Being confused doesn’t make sense. You didn’t like them, other people do.
I think some people like to dig a little deeper than this.
It has been many, many years since I touched the first three, but sometimes it is the space between the notes which provides contrast to the notes themselves. Think of music and compare the Phil Spector "Wall of Sound" versus something sparser. "Only in silence the word, only in dark the light ..."
Earthsea is not about action or events or predictable plot beats. It's about the space between such things. Rather than the mastery of magic being D&D's verbal, somatic, and material components, instead lean toward how Vance's Dying Earth series required a wizard to hold an abstract concept in their mind. Here, magic is about the deep understanding created by observation and contemplation, rather than reaction and dissection, and that this is created over long periods.
Imagine a cup. What is ... cupness? Go over the cups you have seen in your mind. Some have handles, some do not, so a handle is not the essence of cupness, but ... an ability to be in hand is. A cup the size of a mountain is not a cup to you, you may not take it in hand. A cup the size of a dust mite is not a cup to you, you may not take it in hand. And so the cup relates to you, and your ability to handle it.
Consider it further. Topologically, with a handle, it might as well be a donut (torus). Topologically, without a handle, it might as well be a ball (sphere). And so mere topology is not the essence of cupness. But shape somehow is. You recognize cupness whether the color or the texture, but by shape. You must explore this further. Cups are fashioned, although one might see them inadvertently created by nature. This goes with their ability to be taken in hand. To fashion something may be art or it may be of utility, so that is insufficient. Consider that your cup has an orientation, such that there is a bottom and there is a top. You have seen inverted cups and from your memory you know when one is upside down. Cupness has an orientation to it. A cup is almost a sleeve, almost a hole, but for that bottom. Which again you discern, is not the place for a hole; if a thing is to be a cup to be taken in hand, that hold belongs on the side to make a handle.
Consider that utility of a cup, fashioned again and again, all over the world. From the thinness of the sides springing up from the "bottom," one is conserving matter, but also maximizing another thing, which is the space that the cup almost contains. It almost contains, but does not contain. It may partially hold. As it almost contains, it means that something may go into and out of the cup. With the orientation you have discovered upon contemplation, you now might see that gravity plays into the almost-containment. A cup is a handle-able thing which almost contains, which holds due to gravity. We now ask what.
The cup is not handcuffs or manacles, to hold a person. The cup is not a cage, to hold an animal or a marble. It has flatness across the top, most often, and one might reason that the thing held is always flat on top, held by gravity. What is held by gravity in an indention, with always a level top? It cannot be a solid object. It cannot be a gas. It could almost be grains of sand, but those form a pile. Ah, then a liquid.
This cup is to be handled, to have a liquid go in and go out, at hand and at rest with its flat bottom, such that it does not tip. It is the size of an adult hand or two child's hands, fashioned. By examination, I reach forth with my hand and may refill it or drink from it.
In Earthsea, wizardry is, in part, to allow yourself enough emptiness to observe a thing in wholeness, to derive all that might be known about it in your own mind, and thereby give yourself a power over it, but not for something so simple as the cup, but as a flower or a shadow or a person. And so in the novels, emptiness provides space for the reader to contemplate and hold what they have read in their mind.
I have no problem with slower or more introspective stories, mind you. But even if I accept the notion that Earthsea is about wizardry being more about observing and a holistic approach (which I can accept easily) I still got disappointed because there was barely any magic, and it did not move the plot. There was no conflict, factions, clashes of interests etc.
Part of the answer lies within myself as you pointed out: though I more mean in the sense that my life has not been easy, and dark thoughts and introspection have taken plenty of time from it, so I absolutely cannot get fascinated by these things in books.
If you don't mind the sex analogy, this is very similar to assertive and dominant people usually needing to be submissive in sex to get off. It's like this: you got plenty of X in other areas of life and you don't want X in your free time as well. You need Y and Z.
So I can mostly hypothesize that's why I don't like the books. I get part of the philosophy but... I wanted some magic, man. :)
Magic. Magic used in ways you might not imagine. I count myself a veteran of the Battle of the Stair at Tear, because goddamn, I felt like I was there.
Thanks for reminding me.
I did enjoy the beginning of one of Alistair Reynolds' books but haven't gotten around to read it in full yet.
"Stormlight Archive" so far I find a bit prolonged as well but Sanderson is very good at literally everything else so I'll keep going (2 out of the 4 books down so far).
Read a few short stories in the Witcher universe and loved them but haven't read the books themselves yet. But I have a feeling that I'll love them too.
Gart Nix's "Old kingdom" (the original 3 books) were okay, I loved their world-building but didn't like truly love them. 7/10 though, solid books. Haven't tried to read anything from the expanded universe yet.
And of course LOTR, though I have to admit I never managed to read it more than twice for my entire life.
Which one?
"House of Suns", 2008
I really liked the intro. I should get back to it and read it in full.
No, but seriously, if I'm accurately reading between the lines of what you wrote, you're looking for an engaging plot, and expecting world-building and character to work in service of that. I'd argue that LeGuin (at least here: a few of her other stories are different) prioritizes philosophical / moral inquiry, and world-building (in that order), with character and (especially) plot acting in service of those.
All of which is fine, of course: not judging or crucifying you at all. (I'm reading and enjoying an entirely plot-driven book right now.)
My love for the Earthsea books (especially the first three) is wrapped up in the thoughts it makes me think, and the vistas it makes me see - for me, each of those have indelible feelings attached - none of which can be condensed into a bare recounting of "here's what happened".
To be honest with you, I can't even recall how any of the books end (though I also probably foresaw the endings as I last read them), but the dryness of Tenar's life, her fascination with the hidden emissary from beyond, and her moral delimma about helping him or not, stick with me as vividly as I'd lived them myself.
And yes you are very likely correct that the entire sub-genre of this fantasy is not for me (as in, I really would like plot and world-building and some character development, not 99% philosophy).
We are all tuned to different frequencies, and sometimes we change frequencies during our lives (or during a single year even) so I get it but for some reason I can't tune to LeGuin's frequency at all.
Oh well.
Overall, however, LeGuin is almost entirely unconcerned with technology - which, to the extent that they find that to be a significant draw of the genre, may drive away some "science-fiction" fans. (I've always thought the original name, "speculative fiction", is preferable.) LeGuin's speculations run more to the anthropological than the technological, which shouldn't be surprising, given her family background.
Plus I am a patient reader and I kept thinking there will be bigger plot / action payoffs further ahead. Sadly that didn't happen.
So you are not very off-mark, yeah. Still though: these books in particular taught me to be a less patient reader.
A Wizard of Earthsea, the young wizard
The Tombs of Atuan, the adventure (not about the adventure but about the wizard)
The Farthest Shore, mage at the end of failing magic
Tehanu, retirement, ex-wizard, reconciliation
Tales from Earthsea, short stories of wizards in the field
The Other Wind, more retirement, old wizards, settling accounts
And considering how long apart they are written, I marvel at how well they keep to this effort on emotion and mood.
That is completely fine in the real life and it also happens to many people. I just don't find it engaging in a book, you know?
It's like you expect an action movie when going to the cinema and you get two characters smoking and drinking and discussing life during the entire length of the movie.
Maybe in certain moods you will love that but you have expected action that evening and everything else comes across as weird (or even dumb).
Or you have an awesome date with a lady, you are so ready for sex 3 hours later, she seems that she wants it too and then she invites you to her place and dead-seriously asks you to play chess for a few hours with her and expects you to go back to your home after.
Things like that.
It's a disconnect of expectations, sure, but even recognizing that didn't help me appreciate the books.