The Farthest Shore

*As always there are spoilers ahead, so read on at your own risk.*

The Farthest Shore is Le Guin’s third book in the Earthsea cycle, and another excellent novel.  At root, it is the story of Arren as he journeys from being the boy prince of Enlad to the man and future King of All the Isles.  Arren travels with Ged across the Western isles and into the realm of the dragons in search of who is responsible for what appears to be the death of magic in Earthsea. 

The list of Le Guin’s talents and gifts as a writer is long, but one of my favorite is her refusal to tell any story but the one that is right to her, no matter what genre and tradition might say.  We have seen the story of the boy who became king many times.  If he’s a prince, as Arren is, then he’s usually arrogant and used to wielding power, and he must learn humility and responsibility.  Or he is feckless and must learn the gravity of what it means to rule.  In other stories, he proves himself in battle or saves the realm with feats of heroism.

Arren has none of these traits.  He falls in love with Ged upon meeting him and wishes only to serve him.  He may not be humble, but nor is he arrogant.  He puts others above himself for most of the story.  When he is on the rafts of the Children of the Sea, the ruler acknowledges Arren as a prince, but doesn’t know whether to address him as an equal or a child.  The narrator tells us at that time that Arren prefers to be thought of as a child.  Arren’s sword remains in Lookfar throughout the novel, coming out only as Ged and Arren land at Selidor.  He swings the sword once, but it does nothing against Cob because “there is no good in killing a dead man.”

The battle with Cob seems to be what the narrative is bending towards from early on in the novel, once Ged and Arren determine that one wizard is likely responsible for the state sweeping over the world.  But there is never a battle at all.  When living Cob faces Ged, Orm Embar the dragon crushes Cob before the battle begins.  In the realm of the dead, when Ged and Arren again face Cob, Ged makes it clear that Cob has no actual power; he can’t even remember his own name, let only exert any magic.  Arren swings his sword, but it does nothing, and Ged, well, Ged doesn’t even bother with Cob.  The climax isn’t about Cob at all, but about the healing of the rift that has been torn between life and death.  Ged spends all his magic not defeating Cob but restoring balance to Earthsea by closing the rift.  And Arren grows to manhood, not by partaking in that act, but by bearing witness to it and carrying Ged up the mountain to reenter the world of the living.  We know that he has grown because when he meets Kalessin the dragon, he meets him as an equal, one ruler to another.  Now, Arren doesn’t prefer to be treated like a child.  Instead he says to Kalessin, “Let my lord be.  He has saved us all, and doing so has spent his strength and maybe his life with it.  Let him be!”  Arren spoke “fiercely and with command. He had been overawed and frightened too much, he had been filled up with fear, and had got sick of it and would not have it anymore. He was angry with the dragon for its brute strength and size, it’s unjust advantage.  He had seen death, he had tasted death, and no threat had power over him.”  Yelling at the oldest dragon on the planet is pretty badass, and a sure sign of Arren’s growth. 

The Farthest Shore is about a world being torn apart by self-interest and greed, the willingness to ruin the world if only it means I can live forever.  But Cob and his greed is only a symptom of the larger problem.  The ring of Erreth-Akbe have been returned and peace should rule the land, but it doesn’t.  There is an absence of war, but that is a poor substitute for true peace.  True peace in this tale comes by the uniting of all the islands under one ruler.  I think this is not about the importance of a ruler, but about the coming together as a joint entity, not as a nation, but as a people.

The whole series is about split things coming together.  In the first novel, Ged is split with himself and must rejoin the two.  In the second novel, East and West come together to deliver the ring of Erreth-Akbe to Havnor.  In the third novel, all of Earthsea is rejoined by the separating of life and death.

There’s a reading to be made about the importance of dragons in this novel, how they are linked to human beings, so that the rift between life and death affects them both equally.  They move from legend and distant threat to partners with Ged in this book.  I was particularly struck by Arren’s observation when Orm Embar curls up beside Ged as he slept after arriving at Selidor: “Arren was aware of his yellow eye, not ten feet away, and of the faint reek of burning that hung about him.  This was no carrion stink; dry and metallic, it accorded with the faint odors of the sea and the salt sand, a clean, wild smell.”  Dragon are not supernatural, but a part of nature. This reading of the dragons, I’ll leave to others, but I will say that Le Guin was clever in her use of them to escalate the stakes of the conflict.  Seeing the dragons cannibalize each other and go mad made clear that all of Earthsea is endangered by Cob’s actions, not just the fate of the people of Earthsea.

I really enjoyed the novel, though The Tombs of Atuan is still my favorite of the Earthsea novels so far.  I am excited to get back to Tenar in the next half of the series!

The Tombs of Atuan

*As always, this review is intended for others who have already read the novel, so there are plenty of spoilers ahead.*

This is my first time reading through the Earthsea cycle, and I’m ordering the books as I go, one at a time.  When I got halfway through The Tombs of Atuan, I went to Amazon to order the next book, The Farthest Shore (because, sadly, our library doesn’t carry it).  I’ve seen excited posts in the last week or two about the new illustrated collected volume of the Earthsea books, a thousand-page, hardbound edition full of quality illustrations.  So I considered getting that instead of buying the 2012 rereleases that I have been getting.  But I didn’t, in part because I didn’t want an artist’s interpretation of the texts coming between me and what I was reading for the first time.  The illustrations are really fantastic, and on second readings, I would love to see them to see how they align with my own mental pictures.  But the real reason I’m sticking with the editions I’m reading is that they include an afterword written by Le Guin herself in 2012.  As I said in my review of A Wizard of Earthsea, no other artist can evaluate her own work like Le Guin, and these afterwards, though only 8 pages or so, are full of insight and humor and top-notch analysis of both the intellectual and artistic variety.  Ann and I had dinner a few nights ago before finishing The Tombs of Atuan, and a lot of the observations we brought up in our conversation about the book over that meal Le Guin includes in her afterword, only more sharply observed and more eloquently phrased.

I will add a few observations of my own, but let me included for you some of what she says here.

[W]hen I started The Tombs of Atuan, I saw it, as well as I can recall, simply as a sequel.
 And a change of gender.  Ged would play a part in it, but the person whose story it was would be a girl.  A girl who lived far from the cities of the Archipelago, in a remote desert land.  A girl who could not seek power, as young Ged could, or find training in the use of it as he did, but who had power forced upon her.  A girl whose name was not given to her by a kind teacher, but taken from her by a masked executioner.

The boy Ged, offered wisdom, refused it through his own pride and willfulness; the girl Tenar, given the arbitrary power of a goddess, was taught nothing about living her life as a human being.

When I was writing the story in 1969, I knew of no women heroes of heroic fantasy since those in the works of Ariosto and Tasso in the Renaissance.  These days there are plenty, though I wonder about some of them.  The women warriors of current fantasy epics – ruthless swordswomen with no domestic or sexual responsibility who gallop about slaughtering baddies – to me they look less like women than like boys in women’s bodies in men’s armor.

Be that as it may, when I wrote the book, it took more imagination than I had to create a girl character who, offered great power, could accept it as her right and due.  Such a situation didn’t then seem plausible to me.  But since I was writing about the people who in most societies have not been given much power – women – it seemed perfectly plausible to place my heroine in a situation that led her to question the nature and value of power itself.

The word power has two different meanings.  There is power to: strength, gift, skill, art, the mastery of a craft, the authority of knowledge.  And there is power over: rule, dominion, supremacy, might, mastery of slaves, authority over others.

Ged was offered both kinds of power.  Tenar was offered one.

Heroic fantasy descends to us from an archaic world.  I hadn’t yet thought much about that archaism.  My story took place in the old hierarchy of society, the pyramidal power structure, probably military in origin, in which orders are given from above, with a single figure at the top.  This is the world of power over, in which women have always been ranked low.

In such a world, I could put a girl at the heart of my story, but I couldn’t giver her a man’s freedom, or chances equal to a man’s chances.  She couldn’t be a hero in the hero-tale sense.  Not even in a fantasy?  No.  Because to me, fantasy isn’t wishful thinking, but a way of reflecting, and reflecting on reality.  After all, even in a democracy, in the second decade of the twenty-first century, after forty years of feminist striving, the reality is that we live in a top-down power structure that was shaped by, and is still dominated by, men.  Back in 1969, that reality seemed almost unshakeable.

So I gave Tenar power over – dominion, even godhead – but it was a gift of which little good could come.  The dark side of the world was what she had to learn, as Ged had to learn the darkness in his own heart. (215-218)

And this:

In The Tombs of Atuan, the Old Powers, the Nameless Ones, appear as mysterious, ominous, and yet inactive.  Arha/Tenar is their priestess, the greatest of all priestesses, whom the Godking himself is supposed to obey.  But what is her realm?  A prison in the desert.  Women guarded by eunuchs.  Ancient tombstones, a half-ruined temple, an empty throne.  A fearful underground labyrinth where prisoners are left to die of starvation and thirst, where only she can walk the maze, where light must never come.  She rules a dark, empty, useless realm.  Her power imprisons her. (218-219)

And this:

She is only able to escape when Ged becomes her prisoner.  She, for the first time, exerts her power to – her freedom of choice.  She chooses to let him live.  So she gives herself the chance to see that, if she can free him, she can free herself.

Some people have read the story as supporting the idea that a woman needs a man in order to do anything at all (some nodded approvingly, others growled and hissed).  Certainly Arha/Tenar would better satisfy feminist idealists if she did everything all by herself.  But the truth as I saw it, and as I established it in the novel, was that she couldn’t.  My imagination wouldn’t provide a scenario where she could, because my heart told me incontrovertibly that neither gender could go far without the other.  So, in my story, neither the woman nor the man can get free without the other.  Not in that trap.  Each has to ask for the other’s help and learn to trust and depend on the other.  A large lesson, a new knowledge for both these strong, willful, lonely souls.

Reading the book, more than forty years after I wrote it, I wonder about many of its elements.  It was the first book I wrote with a woman as the true central character.  Tenar’s character and the events of the story came from deep within me, so deep that the subterranean and labyrinthine imagery, and a certain volcanic quality, are hardly to be wondered at.  But the darkness, the cruelty, the vengefulness . . . After all, I could have just let them go free – why did I destroy the whole Place of the Tombs with an earthquake?  It’s a kind of huge suicide, the Nameless Ones annihilating their temple in a vast spasm of rage.  Maybe it was the whole primitive, hateful idea of the feminine as dark, blind, weak, and evil that I saw shaking itself to pieces, imploding, crumbling into wreckage on the desert ground.  And I rejoiced to see it fall.  I still do. (219-220)

Yeah, that’s better than I could have said.

So over that dinner the other night, Ann and I agreed that something about writing a young adult novel did cool things for Le Guin’s style.  The need to be straightforward with a clearly directed plot makes for sharper storylines than her earlier work.  (Note: I love the way Le Guin lets her plots unfold and meander, so I’m not knocking that at all.)  At the same time, she doesn’t let that need for direct storylines affect her ability to tell the kinds of leisurely plots that she is inclined to write.  We see this is in A Wizard of Earthsea once Ged is in pursuit of the shadow.  As I said in my review of that book, the pursuit of the shadow is when the book really starts to feel like a Le Guin novel.  That feeling is amplified and extended, to my mind, in The Tombs of Atuan.  Though it’s a much shorter novel, it reads more slowly and moves more quietly than A Wizard.  Plenty happens on the island of Atuan, but it’s a novel that is concerned with the interior life of Arha/Tenar.

We see all the classic Le Guin themes at play in this novel: the coming together of opposed cultures; the negotiating and “marriage” of them as some synthesis occurs, creating something entirely new; the meaningful bonds formed between two thoughtful and opinionated minds.  If I were to make a study of the book, I would love to go through the novel again and see how Le Guin weaves together plot and personal reflection.  The novel never drags and never wanders off into onanistic philosophizing, and I’d love to see how she strikes this wonderful balance.

Another amazing talent Le Guin possesses is the ability to stay focused on a main character.  There are so side plots or diversions away from Arha’s journey.  Another author could easily have made a side story about of Arha’s relationship with Penthe or Manan.  Another author could easily have made a cartoon villain out of Kossil as well.  There are a thousand ways to have messed with this story in I think detrimental ways, and Le Guin steers through all the dangers true, like Ged with his mage wind. 

As much as I like A Wizard of Earthsea, The Tombs of Atuan is the book I think I’m most likely to reread and revisit going forward.