The Selected Stories of H.G. Wells

 I sought out this specific collection of H.G. Wells’s short stories because they were gathered, ordered, and edited by Ursula K. Le Guin.  I had read a few of Wells’s longer stories (War of the Worlds, The Island of Dr. Moreau, The Time Machine), but I read them as entertainment, not as literature.  I don’t mean that with any kind of judgment. Wells writes entertainingly and to entertain, and to read a story to hear a good yarn is a perfectly legitimate enterprise.  I just mean that I hadn’t paid any attention to Wells as an artist, making artistic decisions.  Coming to these stories in this collection through the eyes of Le Guin is like taking a small course on Wells as a writer, or seeing his works through the eyes of friend.  It shaped the way I see and understand Wells’s writing.

 

Instead of presenting the 26 short stories, spanning 40 years of Wells’s life, in chronological order, from the first written to the last, Le Guin has grouped the stories by genre: “Because almost all Wells’s stories are genre stories and because I value them as such, I arranged them, not chronologically, but in sections by kind.  Each section has a brief introduction, discussing what kind of stories they are, where this kind of story came from and what it may have led to” (xii).  It is a clever way to group an artist’s work, and it makes you conscious of how each story relates to the other stories within its grouping, and of course, how blurry and artificial those lines are in the end.  Her first grouping is not by any larger-recognized genre that I’m familiar with: “In one way or another all the stories in this section have to do with what somebody sees” (italics in original, 3).  And while these first 7 stories are built around gifted vision, Le Guin uses the category to set the larger theme that she sees running through all of Wells’s work: his incredible ability to bring a scene, a landscape, a person, a world to life.  It was a joy to slow down and see how effectively and efficiently Wells could describe a thing, especially in a world that predates big cinema.  So often when I read 21^st century novels, I can feel the writer writing for the big screen, or even for the prestigious small screen.  Wells had no such experience with cinematic scenes of war or romantic lighting or catastrophic destruction, and yet his descriptions bring those very things to life.  Here’s a small taste, from “A Dream of Armageddon” (grouped by Le Guin in “Technological and Predictive Science Fiction”). In it, a man and woman are feeling a war-torn part of the world. They are resting for a moment when war planes fly over-head, firing indiscriminately (and this was written before World War I, even before the Wright Brothers had been to Kitty Hawk): “Overhead in the sky flashed something and burst, and all about us I heard the bullets making a noise like a handful of peas suddenly thrown. They chipped the stones about us, and whirled fragments from the bricks and passed . . .” (194).  You can hear and see it like it were on a screen before you, and yet it is all a part of his finely-tuned imagination.

 

I was struck by how modern Wells’s language felt, especially given that some pieces were nearly 125 years old.  Both the general sentences and the dialogue are vibrant and present, alive and human.  I realized that one of the reasons he reads so quickly and easily is that his language is unobtrusive.  His words give you the image, create the feeling, propel you forward, and then disappear.  The world is alive and the people understandable and the situations both human and intriguing.

 

There are a few stories that I found hard to stomach for their racism.  Le Guin tries to smooth over the issue by noting that “the writer’s sympathy is with the black man,” but that is an unfortunately facile way to apologize for the problems at its root.  She suggests that the problem with “The Lord of the Dynamos” is essentially the use of the N-word, but the problems are much deeper.  Even if Wells expresses sympathy for Azuma-zi, there is a world of racist assumptions and stereotypes propping Azuma-zi up.

 

I found “The Country of the Blind,” the story that concludes the collection, to be fascinating in that it seems to make an argument unintended by the author and unrecognized by the editor.  The story involves an isolated people in a small valley of the Ecuadorean Andes.  For whatever reason, the environment his led to all the inhabitants, for generation after generation, to become or be born blind.  One day, a mountain climber from Bogota accidentally finds himself stranded in the valley.  He initially thinks his gift of sight will make his superior to, and a natural leader of, the blind people, but he finds that the world and life they have built favors blindness and he is outmatched by them.  Because he talks of things they cannot comprehend, they consider him a lunatic, heretical, and an idiot.  He is dependent on them for survival, living entirely in their world, and he submits himself to their ways.  The story is supposed to be about how a visionary is stifled and dismissed among the ignorance of the masses who are unable to even understand the language of the visionary.  And to that end, the story is effective.  But Wells undercuts this idea by having the seeing man be such an arrogant fool.  First, Bogota (the name the blind people give him) is a rich mountain climber, indulging in his own abilities, not trying to improve the world in any way. Second, the near-immediate thought that Bogota has once he discovers where he is, is the refrain “In the country of the blind, the one-eyed man is king.”  And his expectation is not to serve or help anybody, but the rule over them.  He comes into the village like an empirical force, learning nothing of the local culture or their ways and assumes they are childish and ignorant and in need of his wisdom and experience.  My sympathies were entirely with the blind folk.  Wells showed that if the world were set up with differing abilities in mind, that there is no actual handicap to blindness, that in fact there are advantages and special gifts that come with it.  It is living in a seeing world that refuses to accommodate blindness that disadvantages the blind person.

 

Like all of us, Wells is blind to his own assumptions, and when they stick out so apparently to me as they do in these last two stories I describe, it is a little painful. But I have discussed only the two stories that are problematic, so please don’t let those two stories dissuade you from reading the other 24 presented in this collection.  In fact, I would definitely recommend “The Country of the Blind” because there is a lot of thought in it, and even when it has sour tastes, there is a lot to relish.

 

Wells has a lot of interesting approaches to interesting topics.  Some tales are like Twilight Zone episodes, and some are unlike anything I’ve read before, artful and contemplative and unexpected.  “Under the Knife” and “The Star” are two that come to mind.  H.G. Wells touches upon nearly everything that will be the stuff of science fiction throughout the 20^th century. Strange magic shops (“The Magic Shop”), body switching (“The Story of the Late Mr. Elvesham”), seeing through time and space (“The Crystal Eggs”), new technology making war more horrifying still (“The Land Ironclads”), oversized beasts (“The Valley of the Spiders”), underwater discoveries (“In the Abyss”), the nature of the soul and out of body experiences (“The Stolen Body”), and so much more.  All told from interesting, human perspective with thoughtful explorations of what these things mean for the world.

 

This collection is a delight, and having Le Guin’s guiding voice to move through them is a treat.

The Language of the Night: Essays on Fantasy and Science Fiction

I found this book in my library catalog.  It’s a 1989 edition of and 1979 publication that first collected Le Guin’s essays, talks, and non-fiction works about Science Fiction and Fantasy.  The book is now out of print, and I understand why.  The introductions to Le Guin’s first five novels are all available in their most recent printings, and Le Guin updated those introductions in 2012, I believe.  The essays that cannot be found today are either tied to the specific state of Science Fiction in the ‘70s and ‘80s, or take positions that Le Guin has further refined and stated better at some point in the 21^st century, or both.

In other words, what we have here is hardly necessary reading, even for a general fan of Le Guin’s thoughts and writing.  That said, it is a wonderful and interesting read, both for the essays themselves, which are as insightful, critical, and humorous as Le Guin’s writing always is, and for the look at Le Guin at this other time period.

In the 1970s, Le Guin was in her 40s and at what she must have thought were the heights of her creative and cultural abilities.  She could not have known then that she would only continue to grown in her power, skill, and perspective.  There is a lot of youth and vigor in these essays, which are a joy to encounter, and I loved getting to see this younger version of her critical self.  She has all the wit and fire that she will possess throughout her career, but there is something of the hot shot in her writing, like she’s spoiling for a fight, confident in her ability to take all on comers, but with some nervous energy.  Over the years, this tone will mellow, never losing the certainty, but no longer concerned about any return punches, and a complete readiness to be wrong if she is proven so.  The gloves are laid down as the opinions stand for themselves.

Susan Wood selected and ordered the essays.  She also writes short introductions for each of the five sections she creates, and headnotes that pull quotes from essays and talks that are not included in the collection.  This was clearly the work of someone who loved and admired Le Guin’s writing, and she did a wonderful job.

If you are a fan of Le Guin’s writing on writing, and you want to see some early works of hers, this is a wonderful collection.  I hope your library has a copy, because they are rather expensive on ebay.  Too expensive for me to add to my collection for the mere sake of collecting.

Words Are My Matter: Le Guin on Books and Writing

 

Le Guin is a rare artist.  Her fierce intelligent is guided by her unerring instincts, so that she works through her stories both intellectually and emotionally, by thought and by feel.  As I read my way through her novels, I took special pleasure in reading her own forwards (which I often read as afterwards, instead) because she had the additional gift of being able to evaluate her own work from a loving distance, crediting and admiring what deserved credit and admiration, and criticizing what she saw falling short.  Better still, her non-fictional essays were written with the same grace and energy as her works of fiction.

When I was contemplating writing a collection of critical essays, I knew I wanted to peel myself away from my own academic style of writing.  So I picked up this copy of Le Guin’s essays on writing. About half of the book is comprised of book reviews and introductions that she has written for the works of other authors, and the other half consists of essays and talks about the art and field.  I had originally intended to pick and choose the essays for inspiration and study, but instead I found myself reading the collection in its entirety.

I find the way Le Guin looks at and considers the world to be both comforting and inspiring, although I can’t put my finger on what it is.  There is a determined optimism combined with a certain crankiness.  A loving gentleness and a sharp critical eye.  A large sense of understanding and a demand that things get done right.  I don’t agree with everything she says, but nor do I dismiss anything she says, because I know each position is considered, both in its content and in its presentation.

I was so moved by one of her introductory essays, that I immediately got a copy of the book and read it before finishing Le Guin’s.  That book was Vonda McIntyre’s Dreamsnake, and I loved it.  By the time I finished this collection, I had created a reading list of some 20 books that I have every intention of working my way through: the Books Le Guin Admired.  I have a few things to read before beginning the list in earnest, but I’ve very excited about it.  When I find someone I admire and trust, I like to look at who they admire and trust in turn.  Because her essays are earnest and don’t hold back on criticism any more than they do praise, I fully trust her evaluations.

I am impressed that this book has sold well and is still in print, because I imagine that the audience for it is rather small: those of us who enjoy Le Guin’s writing and person enough to want to hear what she has to say about dozens of other authors.  But if that sounds like an enjoyable trip by the premise, you will find a lot here to enjoy, and just as much to inspire you onward.

Tehanu and Power in Earthsea

 *As usual, this post is filled with spoilers and the assumption that you have read the novel already—proceed at your own risk.*

 

I have been excited to get to Tehanu ever since I learned that we would be reuniting with Tenar from The Tombs of Atuan.  I don’t know what I expected, but I most certainly could not have predicted the story Le Guin has created.  Of course, that’s one of the things I love about Le Guin as a storyteller.  In all the novels of hers I’ve read, I have never been able from the half-way point in the novel to predict where it was going.  She accomplishes this feat not through trickery and twists and turns of plot, but through having a desire to tell stories that lie outside conventional norms.

 

As I’ve said in some of my other posts, I often read books to my wife before we go to bed, and Tehanu was one of these nightly readings.  Unlike the other Earthsea books, however, this one made for difficult pre-sleep reading.  We begin with a child maliciously burned in a fire after being beaten nearly to death and raped.  Good jesus, that’s a sobering note to begin on and a clear signal that Le Guin will be dealing with an aspect of Earthsea’s that we have not hitherto seen.  Shortly thereafter, Tenar and Therru are menaced by a group of men on the trail to Ogion’s home.  This is a clever way to place the novel within the time frame of The Farthest Shore, but seeing our protagonist threatened is unnerving.  We most certainly have never seen Ged threatened like that, in a way that made us genuinely concerned for his safety.  The of course Ogion dies, and Ged comes home, not triumphantly, but in crisis over who he is now that he has been drained of his powers.

 

This is heavy stuff, and while it made for rocky bedtime reading, I loved it.  As Le Guin says in her afterward to my edition:

 

By the time I wrote this book I needed to look at heroics from outside and underneath, from the point of view of the people who are not included.  The ones who can’t do magic.  The ones who don’t have shining staffs or swords.  Women, kids, the poor, the old, the powerless.  Unheroes, ordinary people—my people.  I didn’t want to change Earthsea, but I needed to see what Earthsea looked like to us.

 

That theme of power and powerlessness are laced throughout the story, of course.  Tenar meditates many times on what it means to be a middle-aged woman beyond her child-bearing years.  She sees women’s power as residing in their sexual power and maternal power, and once they are beyond that, what power do they have left?  Like Ged, she has found her cup of power, what litter there was, emptied, and she was wondering how to define herself as well.  And this theme of power is directly related to why this story has to be violent and threatening as it is, in a way that none of the other Earthsea books before it have been.  How do you show powerlessness so you can discuss it?  To truly show the power lacking, you have to show her at the mercy of others’ powers, threatened by them, degraded by them, attacked by them, and terrified by them.

 

Looking back, it seems only fitting that this would be Le Guin’s focus once she turned her attention back to Tenar.  Tombs of Atuan is equally about power, and its crisis for Tenar lies in the moment she realizes that she is treated as though she has power when she in fact has none and is at the mercy of the other priestess who had no respect for the Nameless Ones.

 

The book questions the patriarchy and anti-feminism that lies at the foundations of Earthsea’s hierarchies and political structures.  In her long conversation with Ged about power over the winter, they speculate what just power might look like, and it might resemble parental power, in that the parent knows that their child is obedient only because they choose to be.  And they will only choose to be obedient for as long as they trust you.  I loved when Tenar wished that Ged had killed Hake with his pitchfork, because now the King’s justice would demand that hake be punished.  Tenar rebels against the idea of someone meting out punishment because punishment is an act of power, remember how Handy wanted to punish Therru and Tenar.  They both wish Ged had just killed Hake and both cannot stand idly by and let him die, even though they both want it.  That complication and impossible position is so relatable and achingly painful.  And everything then comes into stronger focus with the return of Spark, her son.  She realizes she has “failed” because she has repeated the sexism and hierarchy in him instead of using what influence and power she had to make him different, and in doing so make the world different.  Spark was once an underdog, struggling to survive, but he has returned home with a firm position of power, and nothing about his previous status has taught him how to wield that power, let alone to give it up.

 

In the other novels, I feel like Le Guin had philosophical positions about life and death and how one should live that she wrapped her narratives around.  Tehanu is not that.  There is searching and struggling in Tehanu.  There is an unresolved attitude, a wish that is at odds with the way we have experienced life so far.  There is a knowledge of right and wrong but still no easy answer to lay before.  Ged laid things bare for Tenar in Tombs of Atuan.  He explained the crisis clearly and succinctly to Arren in Farthest Shore.  But here, he’s got nothing.  Just some observations and feelings.  This Ged is not a mystic full of power.  He’s a mess of a man, and he’s lovelier for it, struggling with Tenar instead of leading her to safety.

 

I also love how names take on a different meaning in this book.  We know that names hold power in this world, that they name a reality that can be obscured by the world around us.  But here, Le Guin goes beyond the division of real names and use-names.  Tenar has a wealth of names: Arha, Tenar, Goha, Mother, and Wife.  At one point Tenar has a conversation with herself and Le Guin frames it as Goha talking to Tenar.  This isn’t a use-name talking to the real thing.  This is two different aspects of Tenar’s character and life debating with one another.  Likewise, Ged has become Hawk because he is a different person than his old use-name Sparrowhawk.  In the worlds of the powerless, everything is less clear, and even use-names have power.  The power of the mage is the power of reduction: reducing the world to what seems and what is.  Tehanu blurs those lines and asks if that division is even any good to begin with.  Such a division is only useful if we all stand on an equal footing, and the world of Earthsea, like our own, is anything but equal.  When Aspen has the power, he forgoes both Tenar’s real name and her use-names and assaults her afresh with the word Bitch.  We see evil in Aspen (good lord did I hate that motherfucker), but Tenar is also frustrated with the wizard on Lebannen’s boat who for all his knowledge is blind.

 

In my review of Farthest Shore, I said I’d leave analysis of the relationship between humans and dragons to someone else, and I’ll continue to pass the buck here, where Therru/Tehanu is concerned.  Ann believes that Therru’s dragon-personhood came about because she was pushed into that fire and it burned away her human part.  I suspect she was born that way, speaking the words of the Making as all dragons are.  The fact is, I don’t think Le Guin could answer that question if she were still here to have it posed to her.  One of Le Guin’s magical qualities is that she brings together intense intellectualism with fierce instincts and always seems to know when one should yield to the other.  When she decided that dragons were closely related to people in the Farthest Shore so that they were affected by Cob’s actions, she didn’t know why that was the case, she just knew it was right.  And here we can see her prodding those instincts farther, growing the legend and the connection out. There’s great analysis to be done about these dragon-people, but I’m not the one to do it.  I’m just here to gush about how cool it is.  How much did I love that fan detail?!  So much!

 

This is a book I will definitely revisit when we finish the next two books.  There’s a lot here to unpack and think about, and I don’t think I can do so fully without a full re-read.  For now, my love for this book rivals my love for Tombs of Atuan.  Something about Tenar pushes Le Guin to do her best work.

The Eye of the Heron by Ursula K. Le Guin

*Spoilers ahead*

The Eye of the Heron is another fantastic novel by Ursula K. Le Guin.  Because of its brevity and directness, it feels at times like a YA novel, but its depth and complexity says that it’s intended for mature readers.  It occupies this between ground comfortably and elegantly, and impressively.

Reading the story in early 2019 was surprisingly hard, emotionally-speaking.  As with all of the other Le Guin novels we’ve read, I read Eye of the Heron aloud to Ann each night, so the progress was slow-ish and the challenges facing the people of Shantih had time to resonate in our heads at the end of each chapter for a day or two before we can pick the book up again.  For those of you who read the novel a while back and need a quick refresher, the book is about two societies on the planet of Victoria.  Victoria was originally a prison planet for prisoners from Brazil.  Those people founded the City of Victoria and have a classic capitalist power structure with the aristocratic bosses and peasants.  Their culture is also divided along what we consider traditional gender roles, with men as dominant and privileged and women as property and fragile vessels of morality.  Fifty or so years after the first settlers were sent, a third ship arrived, this time with 2,000 members of a communist labor group.  They founded the town of Shantih, where they work farmland for communal benefit. The two civilizations have a relationship, each providing things that the other needs.  At the beginning of the book, set 70 years or so beyond the arrival of the last ship, the people of Shantih have found a place in the wilderness to establish a second settlement, and they plan to send half the population northward. The bosses of Victoria City are afraid of losing their labor force and plan to put pressure on the people of Shantih so that they lash out, giving the military force of the bosses and reason to quell the “rebellion” and turn the peaceful and leaderless communists into slave labor.

So the non-violent people want to extricate themselves without violating their code of non-violence while the all-too-familiar power structure of Victoria city is looking for any excuse to subdue and conquer them.  Even though I knew that Le Guin is an optimist, or if not an optimist, someone who believes in providing models of hope, I didn’t see any way for the people of Shantih to escape their horrible situation.  Or I should say, I didn’t see any way for them to do so without the author pulling some punches or creating cheap escapes.  So I read with dread of either watching the one group subdue and yoke the other.  Since we are living in a time in America that a third to half of the political forces in America are willing to embrace authoritarianism and vilification of the weakest amongst us in the name of stability and privileged comfort, the dilemma of the book hit me very viscerally, way more than it would have done if I had read the book four years ago.

The resolution was of course thoroughly satisfying.  Le Guin is not only a gifted writer but a perceptive student of humanity.  The thing that makes her novels so thrilling and interesting is that she can turn her mind into a laboratory of human conditions.  She creates a test lab of limited variables, puts people into her constructed situation, details those people with specificity and uniqueness, and then records what she sees in her minds eye.  In the case of Eye of the Heron, she reduces the world to two cultures in a world with no outside influences but their traditions and memories. Then she gives each side simple desires that are opposed to each other, and a set of techniques and beliefs that govern the way they act on those desires.  But her magic ingredient is that she clothes these generic positions in specificity, grounding them in real characters with relationships and individual desires and personal commitments.  She’s concerned about things at a high level, but her stories take place in the weeds and mud of real people.  Large ideas might be forceful and driving, but they are always channeled through people.  Falco is no nameless capitalist, but a man with a specific position, a specific relationship with his daughter, and relationships with the other capitalists both established and upcoming.  Lev and Vera and Luz and Andre and Southwind and Macmilan are each anchored by their own relationships and views of the world that exist simultaneously within and separate from the larger movement of which they are a part.  The best social science fiction writers do this, and Le Guin is among the best of the best.  The laboratory of the mind can and should never be a fully sterilized place.  There are variables that must be removed for her experiment to take place, but as soon as the characters of the experiment are complicated and breathing people, a million tiny forces of reality are at play, and the talented author sees them and acknowledges them and grants them space to affect the story unfolding.

As usual, my intended introductory remarks have grown into their own little analysis, leaving me little room to comment on the things that I filled my paper with while brainstorming about the book after finishing it.  I’ll just throw out some of the ideas now and you can do with them what you will.  Ignore them, foster them into full ideas, use them as leaping off points for your own thoughts—whatever you do is cool by me.

The book begins and ends with wotsits, the most alien of creatures on Victoria.  All the other animals are based on the initial inhabitants’ memories of earth: herons, coneys, pouchbats.  The wotsit, as the name suggests, is completely strange.  It’s something like a three-eyed, feather-winged, shadow-colored toad.  Where it goes, it goes of its own will.  It cannot be coerced and it cannot be caged, because all caged wotsits die.  Knowing this, no one tries to cage them.  The wotsits appear to be an obvious analogy for the human spirit, and the people of Shantih in particular, who are making their break from the bosses of Victoria city.

The ringtree is a gorgeous creation and another beautiful image.  The tree grows solitary and at some surprise moment, explodes its one seed pod that then plants seeds in a neat circle around it, where in time, 40-60 trees take root and create a ring of trees around a center in which nothing but shrubgrasses grow and often a pond forms where the original tree was rooted once it has died.  Ringtree becomes tree ring and then the cycle starts all over again.  The relationship between the individual and the society seems an obvious read as the individual leader is only leader for a moment before the strength is given over to the masses to hold the line together until such a time as another leader is needed.  Perhaps it’s also related to the people of Shantih’s Long March, where an idea is the seed for a gathering of like minded people who can carry the idea to its end, until another idea from the crowd bursts forth to have its influence, with Luz being the next ringtree to explode, instigating the final expansion into the wilderness, taking Lev’s and Vera’s place.

I love the first section of Chapter 10, the section that immediately follows Lev’s death.  Luz, Vera, Southwind, and Elia are wrestling with what happened on the hill and what it means for the community.  Nothing is easy and nothing is clear, and even though they survived as an independent people, no one is comfortable with how things shook out or where things should go from here.  Not only is Lev dead, but the army was turned back because the people of Shantih responded by rushing the army, an act of violence.  Moreover, Falco’s shooting of Macmilan and other soldiers was also a significant reason for their victory, and his motivation was not one of peace or an interest in protecting the people of Shantih.  So the philosophy that is at the foundation of their movement is shaken and challenged and they are all struggling with how to proceed.  It is painfully human and complicated, and all it does is raise questions and not answers.  It is a beautiful section because it recognizes what has happened and doesn’t attempt to line up lessons or morals.  We are still believers in non-violence, but we must acknowledge that we don’t know its limits or how it exists entirely separately from violence, to which is always exists in relation.

I also loved chapter 6, the one in which the hundred or so people of Shantih are being forced to labor in the new fields at gunpoint.  This chapter is stunning in its depiction of power and consent.  Even though the soldiers have rifles, the laborers are there only because they have consented to be there.  As such, it would be more productive to lay down the rifles and share in the labors.  More would get done and community could thrive, but the city soldiers believe there is a hierarchy as long as they have the guns.  We know that belief is an illusion.  We often think of this dilemma as Angel did when he thinks the laborers are stupid because they outnumber the guards but do nothing to challenge them and are sheepish instead.  Lev makes it clear that it is not sheepishness that makes them organize as they do.  We are all connected and interdependent, and the more we acknowledge that unity rather than try to force a difference the better work we can do.  Le Guin is careful I think to not criticize those who have yielded to the oppressive power of guns—hell, it’s the thing that caused me so much anxiety while reading the book.  But power is always a relationship of consent, and when that consent ends, so does the power.  The people of Shantih are educated enough to know this; the people of Victoria City are not.

The novel is interested in the difficult relationship that we have with traditions and our past.  The understanding of “this is who we are” comes from our past.  The storyteller in chapter 10 tells of the Long March, and every child knows the stories.  This is who we are and how we handle adversity.  They are a comfort to us and a guide, but they can equally become a prison.  The traditions of Victoria City are what led Vera to staying in Casa Falco, which is what influenced Luz to side with the people of Shantih, which determined the course of the story.  There is tradition and there is growth and adaptation.  Luz is the one who rejects tradition, and as such she becomes a leader and a force for change.  She first rejects her own culture and then challenges her new people to push on beyond their boundaries.  Which I guess brings us back to the wotsit.  All the other creatures are traditional to us, things that remind us of home, but the wotsit is unique and fully adapted to the planet Victoria.  They are everywhere and free and totally alien.  And they are a sign of hope and the people who Luz has joined will become something as unique and perfectly suited to the life they are creating.

Very Far Away from Anywhere Else

*Spoilers ahead.  Read at your own Risk.*

This novella is the first non-science-fiction/non-fantasy work of Le Guin’s that we have read. It is, however, pure Le Guin, as it deals with one of her central themes: how two people connect across the gulf of our own minds and experiences.

When we began it, neither Ann nor I was particularly excited, since it felt so very much like a young adult novel, with a wise-cracking teen narrator who is both smart and lonely, feeling like a freak among his “normal” peers.  It’s not really until Natalie enters the picture that the novel takes off.  Once our two protagonists met on the bus, we knew we were going to be okay because Le Guin was going to do one of the things that she does best.

The length and limits of the novella speak of Le Guin’s focus and her ability to get right to the heart of the matter.  We are used to Le Guin’s stories taking their time, unfolding gradually and organically.  There is no such wandering in Very Far Away from Anywhere Else.  It’s not that there’s rushing or shut-off avenues; it’s just that this is a story about the complicated nature of love between a young man and a young woman.  The novella could easily have been expanded by exploring other facets of young adulthood as so many young adult novels have done, looking at all the tough parts of growing up.  I appreciate Le Guin’s unswerving attention to Owen and Natalie’s relationship.

I also appreciate that this is not a story about how Natalie saved or ruined Owen’s life.  Natalie does save Owen’s life in her own way, but her purpose in the story is not just to save Owen.  Natalie is a woman of focus and ambition who does not want anything to distract from those dreams.  Owen’s story is of how he learned he was not alone in the world and that he should not sell out his own dreams to live the life his parents (and by extension, society) wants him to live.  Natalie doesn’t just listen to and advise Owen; she is a living example of what Owen needs to see.  Natalie is a friend and an inspiration.

The crisis of the story is when the phantom of romantic love begins to haunt Owen’s mind.  As Owen says, he convinces himself that his fondness for Natalie is capital-L Love, and he begins to play the part of the lover, if only in his own mind.  This pressure echoes the other pressures in Owen’s life, the pressure to live by a script written by someone else.  The things he does as a lover—mooning over her looks, writing poetry, quietly aching in his heart—are all things that American pop culture defines as the behavior of love.

What I love is that in their healing discussion, Natalie confesses that she made mistakes too, that Owen is not the only one who reacted poorly to the love growing between them.  She says, 

The way I figured, I didn’t want to get really involved with anybody.  Falling in love or love affairs or marrying or anything like that.  I’m pretty young, and there’s all these things I have to do. That sounds stupid, but it’s the truth. If I could take sex lightly the way a lot of people do, that would be fine, but I don’t think I can.  I can’t take anything lightly.  Well, see, what was so beautiful was that we got to be friends. . . . I thought we’d really made it, and everybody’s wrong when they say men and women can’t be friends.

Owen apologizes for “pushing the sex stuff in where it didn’t belong,” but Natalie counters, ”Yeah, but it did belong. . . . You can’t just tell sex to go away and come back in two years because I’m busy just now.”  She felt the sexual tension and desire too, and her error was to ignore it because it was inconvenient.  But this realization is not followed by a declaration of love and restructuring of plans.  Natalie’s solution appears to be to move forward as before but with the full awareness of what they both feel.  That’s amazing, and beautiful, and everything I expect from Le Guin. 

So many writers skip past the difficult conversations needed to foster true connection between people, using the pressures of love to elide the hard work of communication.  The joy of this novel is that that conversation is made the climactic moment of the story.  As a writer you can’t do that unless you know exactly what you believe about human relationships and love itself.  Le Guin knows, and I can listen to her talk about it all day.

Destruction and Survival on the Lathe of Heaven

There are tons of spoilers ahead, so tread knowingly.

The Lathe of Heaven is one of Le Guin’s shorter novels, but it packs a big punch.  It’s a dystopic novel in which the dystopia is always changing because living in this Utopia is a man whose dreams change the very fabric of reality.  It’s is trippy and heavy, funny and irreverent, sad and thought-provoking.

As in the best of her novels, in The Lathe of Heaven Le Guin uses her unique world to tell the story of very human characters.  There are three main characters in this story.  George Orr, in his late 20s or early 30s is the man whose dreams are at the center of the novel.  He has been having his “effective” dreams since he was 15 or 16, but they didn’t cause him much worry until four years before the start of the novel.  We learn that something happened that April—we never know what, only that it was an action that Orr worries was unjustified—that made Orr fear the power of his dreams to change reality.  At that point he started to take drugs to keep himself from dreaming.  As the novel begins, George is delusional from having taken a dangerous combination of drugs and is ordered by the state to go to Voluntary Therapy to avoid a sentence.

Dr. Haber is the therapist George is assigned to.  Haber is an oneirologist, a scientist of sleep and dreams.  He is a man of quick judgments and conviction.  After the first session with George, Haber learns that the young man’s dreams can indeed change the world.  Haber wants to learn how George does it and wants to use the power of those dreams to make the world a better place.  As the novel starts, the earth’s population is stretched to its limit while climate change was ruined food production so there is very little for very many people.  But George’s dream-power is like the cursed monkey paw, and every changes Haber brings about is accompanied by an unintended shift.  For example, Haber instructs George to dream that there is plenty of elbow room for all, and the past is rewritten so that there was a major population crash, wiping out 6 million people.  Haber instructs George to dream of peace, and history is rewritten so that all the countries of Earth are united . . . against an alien species that has occupied our moon for years.

Heather Lelache is an attorney in Portland, Oregon (where the novel is set), a hard-nosed attorney who takes civil rights cases.  George comes to her when he suspects that Haber is using George’s dream-power against George’s will.  While our first impression of her is that she is as strong-willed as Dr. Haber, her dismissal of George upon first meeting of him gives way to gentler feelings and a drive to understand.  She observes one of George’s sessions with Dr. Haber in the name of the ACLU, making sure that the new technology Haber is devising to work with George’s dreams is safe and legal.  When George dreams, only he remembers the past truths as well as the present truths, unless someone is with him when he dreams, in which case that person two holds memory of the old and new world.  By witnessing the session, Lelache learns the truth about what is happening.

These three characters and their relationships make up all the energy and drama of the story, all with the backdrop of a rotating horror of global strife and tragedy.  No matter what George dreams, the climate has been thoroughly ruined by corporate greed and human apathy.  Man, I would love to see a quality mini-series made of this book—it is perfect for what television can do today.

For all that, what is the book about? 

Each chapter begins with a literary quote, most of which come from Zhuangzi, both the author and the book.  I was unfamiliar with Zhuangzi or his writing, so I did a little research.  Zhuangzi is a philosopher, and his tales are about the mystery of the nature of reality and how to live in an uncertain world.  The title of the book, The Lathe of Heaven, comes from chapter 23 of Zhuangzi, and is included as the quote at the head of chapter 3 of the book: 

Those whom heaven helps we call the sons of heaven.  They do not learn this by learning.  They do not work it by working.  They do not reason it by using reason.  To let understanding stop at what cannot be understood is a high attainment.  Those who cannot do it will be destroyed on the lathe of heaven (26).

The Lathe of Heaven, taken as a whole, is a kind of parable that could appear in Zhuangzi, if Zhuangzi was a modern work of science fiction.  The philosophy at its core is one of balance and acceptance, of being a part of the world even as you see yourself as apart from it.  That quote above is about accepting and being a part of the world not through human action, but by being.  To not be, to push for your own ends will lead to destruction upon the lathe of heaven.  Be shaped by the will of heaven.  To fight it and try to be the lathe yourself will only end in horrors.  Which is, of course, precisely what happens to Dr. Haber.  He wishes to push his own will on the heavens and pays the ultimate price for it, and makes a huge chunk of the world pay that price as well.

Orr, on the other hand, is a son of heaven, in the sense of the quote above.  George is the living embodiment of balance, as we learn in chapter nine, when Haber tells him about the results of his personality tests, calling him “the man in the middle of the graph.”  For Haber, to be so centered is to be “self-cancel[ing]”: “You cancel out so thoroughly that, in a sense, nothing is left.”  A colleague of Haber’s proposes a different reading: “he says your lack of social achievement is a result of your holistic adjustment,” a notion Haber finds laughable, but that we can see the wisdom of. We are told early on that 

Orr was not a fast reasoner.  In fact, he was not a reasoner.  He arrived at ideas the slow way, never skating over the clear, hard ice of logic, nor soaring on the slipstreams of imagination, but slogging, plodding along on the heave ground of existence. He did not see connections, which is said to be the hallmark of intellect. He felt connections, like a plumber (39).

See how that connects to the sons of heaven?  He does not reason it by using reason.  He does not work it by working.  And he is only too happy to let understanding stop at what cannot be understood.  After the aliens come to Earth, George learns from them and rediscover this inner peace by asking for their help.  George snaps back to a feeling of balance that abandoned him four years ago when he began trying to control his dreaming.  For nearly 10 years before that, he dreamed easily and the world didn’t suffer.  (I admit that is an uncertain statement to some degree, insofar as the world kinda sucked, and we have no idea how George affected reality before the start of the novel.  But whatever his dreams did or didn’t do, we know that the lathe of heaven is turning and shaping him, using him to shape the world, in the philosophy of the text.)

I’ve got much more buzzing around in my head than I have time to write right now.  I suspect that George Orr’s name is a nod to George Orwell and simultaneously important because “or” is the balancing point of alternatives. George can let both parts of the or exist without tension or exclusion.  There is no “either” to George’s “or.”  That would be a fun path to pursue.

I would like to read a whole essay about Lelache, who is, I think, a crux in the novel.  She is introduced in opposition to George just as Dr. Haber is, but she is no Haber.  Her mixed racial background makes her almost a living example of opposites meeting, so much so that her blackness is so crucial to who she is that she cannot exist in the gray-skinned world Haber creates through George’s dreams.  I would love to see an analysis of how Lelache matters to the themes of the novel.  Because I think it’s a critical role she plays.

I want to talk about the opening chapter and how George is like the jellyfish in the ocean.  I want to talk about the Aldebararians and why they look like sea turtles, how they are the eastern mystics, and why they talk out of their left elbow.  I want to make connections between their broken speech and George’s broken speech in the first chapter, in which we get insight into the back story of his broken sentences while the listening characters are clueless.  I want to talk about the snake poison analogy and its implications.  I want to talk about the alien quoting Macbeth and George responding with Hamlet.

There’s so much to think and talk about in this short novel because it is insanely rich and beautifully crafted.  Here, Le Guin is at the top of her game.  Read it and write about all the things I couldn’t, please.

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.

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.