A Wizard of Earthsea

Le Guin is a rare breed, an author who is not only willing to reflect on what she has written but is skilled at breaking down what her novel has accomplished, where it shines, and where she feels it falls short.  My copy of Earthsea comes with an afterward that Le Guin wrote in 2012, some 44 years after the novel was first published.  Reading it, she said everything I was thinking about the nature of her hero and his quest as it relates to other fantasy quests.  Here’s what she says:

Hero tales and adventure fantasies traditionally put the righteous hero in a war against unrighteous enemies, which he (usually) wins.  This convention was and still is so dominant that it’s taken for granted – ‘of course’ a heroic fantasy is good guys fighting bad guys, the War of Good Against Evil.

But there are no wars in Earthsea. No soldiers, no armies, no battles.  None of the militarism that came from the Arthurian saga and other sources and that by now, under influence of fantasy war games, has become obligatory.

I didn’t and don’t think this way; my mind doesn’t work in terms of war. My imagination refuses to limit all the elements that make an adventure story and make it exciting – danger, risk, challenge, courage – to battlefields.  A hero whose heroism consists of killing people is uninteresting to me, and I detest the hormonal war orgies of our visual media, the mechanical slaughter of endless battalions of black-clad, yellow-toothed, red-eyed demons.

War as moral metaphor is limited, limiting, and dangerous.  By reducing the choices of action to ‘a war against’ whatever-it-is, you divide the world in Me or Us (good) and Them or It (bad) and reduce the ethical complexity and moral richness of our life to Yes/No, On/Off.  This is puerile, misleading, and degrading.  In stories, it evades any solution but violence and offers the reader mere infantile reassurance. All too often the heroes of such fantasies behave exactly as the villains do, acting with mindless violence, but the hero is on the ‘right’ side and therefore will win.  Right makes might.

Or does might make right?

If war is the only game, yes. Might makes right.  Which is why I don’t play war games.

To be the man he can be, Ged has to find out who and what his real enemy is. He has to find out what it means to be himself.  That requires not a war but a search and a discovery.  The search takes him through mortal danger, loss, and suffering. The discovery brings him victory, the kind of victory that isn’t the end of a battle but the beginning of a life.

Like all her novels, A Wizard of Earthsea is beautifully written and narratively compelling.  Unlike her other novels published before it, A Wizard of Earthsea is focused, moving with a purpose from chapter to chapter.  It’s not rushed; it unfolds leisurely as is her want, but each chapter moves us measurably along a course that is discernible to the reader.  At some point in every novel before this one (and at many points in most of them) I have wondered where the story was going, what it was building to, what it was about.  A Wizard of Earthsea sets up Ged’s contest with the shadow early on and doesn’t veer.

It was a quite refreshing tactic, and I was thrilled to see that she could accomplish the feat without sacrificing any of the style that makes her writing so rewarding. The most that’s-so-Le-Guin part of the story was, to me, Ged’s and Vetch’s sailing beyond Lastland through the open waters, and getting to it was like rejoining a friend after a long parting. 

The world of Earthsea, the system of archipelagos as the only known lands, is a rich idea for a fantasy world, and Le Guin uses her art to bring the system of islands to life, giving each region and cluster its own flavor and history.  I can see already why the book was turned into a series, not something Le Guin had originally planned to do.

We are going to be starting on The Tombs of Atuan even tonight.