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Ursula Le Guin
This is one that escaped me as a child but which I would have loved. It is the story of Ged and his growth as a wizard and as a person, from a proud and boastful youth to one who must face the consequences of his decisions and find a way to have an internal peace. It explores destiny in a wonderfully light touch way, never quite clear if destiny is driven by people reaching towards or away from something, an external reality or something you create yourself. Ged explicitly considers some of these questions and a philosophical and thoughtful main character is one of the joys of the book.
The world of Earthsea is wonderfully generous and expansive, in a similar way to that I discussed when writing about the Moon of Gomrath it weaves fragments of names, histories and stories together to give a sense of depth, of a world that you travel through, viewing small aspects which carry on existing when you have passed. Another of the signs of generous writing is how the map is used, maps in books are one of my favourite things but it is reletively rare that I will find myself refering to them mid book. With this one I often would check to see which islands Ged was sailing past. Mostly this is comes from how the book is written, journeys are described in relation to places and those places seem important. Part of my connection to the joureys though was the world being an archipelago. Ships carry with them a sense of exploration, and it is easier to imagine islands as having distinct and individual characters which made me want to see what lots of them were like. This is where the genrosity comes in, the map is full of islands and Ged visits a remarkable number of them over the book. We are not just shown a map of abstract places, we hear about them and often get to visit them too. A notable exception is Havnor, the biggest and central island. This says a lot about the focus of the book not focused on the machinations and interplay of the powerful but about a single person and their search for rest.
The order you read books matters, We All Hear Stories In The Dark (a brilliant experimental chose your own adventure set of short stories) posits a perfect reading order for all the books in the world in a way that builds understanding and relationships between texts. Between the first time of reading this and the second I have been reading the Tao Te Ching, a key Daoist text, as part of research for a Dungeons and Dragons campaign. I was interested to read about Ursula Le Guin's fondness for Daoism to the extent that she created her own 'rendition' of the Tao Te Ching (an article here talks a bit about how hers is different). Reading through this lens was a lot of fun, seeing connections and building my understanding of both texts. Some are very obvious, the book starts with a short verse:
" Only in silence the word,
only in dark the light,
only in dying life:
bright the hawk's flight
on the empty sky.
-The Creation of Ea"
This sense of opposites giving substance to each other is a key part of Daoism and continues through the book in more subtle ways, Vetch (probably Ged's truest friend) and Ged are almost never both confident at the same time. For most of the books Vetch has a faith in Ged that Ged struggles to feel for himself but, later in the book, Ged gains a certain surety that Vetch doesn't understand. These contrasts fit the Daoist sense of a world at balance well, but they are also simply good storytelling. The presence of Vetch's confidence in Ged heightens our sense of uneasiness at Ged's uncertainty and when Vetch loses some of that confidence it heightens the serene heroism of Ged's confidence. Another pair of opposites are light and dark, it feels familiar of fantasy in the style of Alan Garner or Susan Cooper but the sense of balance exerting a gravitational pull on the story gives it a slightly different complexion. It is not about an endless struggle (although at times Ged feels that it is) but about how things exist in relation to each other and how we can come to terms with that. Another key concept of Daoism is the idea that it is good to take minimal action, to be flexible, to bend rather than break. The idea that the best way to solve a problem is to have the wisdom to deal with it before it becomes big. Ged's hubiristic summoning of the shadow he then contends with feels an illustration of this, his problems created by his own unwise actions. I know reletively little about Daoism as a whole but I really enjoyed noticing parallels and would highly recommend fans of Earthsea read bits of the Tao Te Ching for some of those connections.
A key part of the magic of Earthsea is that of true names. If you know, understand and can name a thing you have power over it. This as a magic resonates with Ursula Le Guins views on literature as a potentially revolutionary force. The follow up to one of my favourite quotes from her speech accepting The National Book Foundation Medal for Distinguished Contribution to American Letters makes that quite clear, "Resistance and change often begin in art. Very often in our art, the art of words." Ursula Le Guin thinks about how she uses that art and how she can address and subvert power structures. The vast majority of the characters in Wizard of Eathsea are black (although you wouldn't tell from the bizarre cover) but our first introduction to this doesn't centre their blackness as a point of difference to be commented on but comes from observing the whiteness of others outside the archipelago, this normalises their blackness and, through the depiction of the white outsiders, invites readers to consider what our constructs of race are. A Wizard of Earthsea doesn't subvert expectations of gender in the same way it is still a patriarchal society and I would have enjoyed some variance, perhaps between the islands about this.
Asides from all of these themes it is a great read. I have long thought that seeing growth or development in something is satisfying in its own right, almost abstracted from the context it exists in. Ged's growth both in power and wisdom feed that urge to see things improve and to get better and contribute to making this an almost compulsive read.
I really like the chapter headings illustrated by Ruth Robbins (Who also did the cover of the first edition which Ursula Le Guin called "The book's one true cover."). They have a feel of ancient illustration, supporting the feel of this as a legend or an oral telling. I can imagine the whole thing being told by a storyteller, walking along and giving context and detail to panals on a wall, carved to illustrate that same story.
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