Book review: A Wizard of Earthsea

[deckardcanine]

For once in my post-school life, I set myself a daily reading quota and got ahead of it, hence little more than half a month since my last review. It helps that AWoE has something I've never seen in other fantasy books: new maps as it goes along. (There's a complete map at the beginning, but details demand magnification.) Interestingly, some labeled areas never get mentioned in the story. Either Ursula K. Le Guin was saving them for later Earthsea entries, or she knows how unrealistic it is for even an epic adventure to involve absolutely every place.

My previous experience of Le Guin was limited to the surreal short story "Schrödinger's Cat." AWoE is nothing like it, for better and worse. It's set in a world with no known continents, only islands, so the hero's journey is largely by boat, relying on both natural wind and "magewind." Yeah, I thought a little of The Legend of Zelda: The Wind Waker, but the similarity doesn't go much further.

The story follows Ged, publicly known as Sparrowhawk (because you tell your true name only to those you fully trust, lest a wizard use it to overpower you), from ages 12 to 19. Whatever grants more magical power to some people than others has been generous to him, but that alone does not a good wizard make. Ged cockily disregards the need for balance in all spells, thereby summoning a shadow entity that would use his power for ill. Thus his journeys tend to lack a geographical destination: He just wants to avoid doom until he learns how to prevent it once and for all.

Thanks in part to this travel (tho it continues in travel-free sections), the overall pace is unusually quick. I welcomed this at first, but... well, again, balance counts. In contrast to the last two books I'd read, it's not dialog heavy; nor does it feature only the occasional quotation like Winesburg, Ohio. Ged tends to keep himself a proverbial arm's length from others. As a result, by the end, I felt like I hardly knew any characters, their cultures, or even the fantasy premises (the few fauna get less focal time than in My Neighbor Totoro and seldom affect the plot). Le Guin's world building pretty much stopped at the skeleton.

As usual, I'll cover the language matters. Compared to several other books I've read in the last few years, it fares well in style and proofing. The good thing about Ged's aloofness is the rarity of abrupt POV shifts. I'm more concerned about shifts to present tense, like we're to believe that Earthsea exists today. And the use of "must" as a past-tense verb is invariably jarring.

In short, it has avoided the common pitfalls of drear, offense, glut, preachiness, boredom, and audacity, only to lack substance. To put it synesthetically, if the book were a drink, it'd be unflavored seltzer. I'd almost call it an airport novel, tho still less pulpy than Dragonflight.

For my next read, I considered The Once and Future King (which has praise from Le Guin on the cover), but I want something more different, so I picked up Joe Haldeman's The Forever War. Didn't somebody here on LJ recommend it to me?

Comments

[sleepyjohn00.livejournal.com]

If you read much of LeGuin, you will find that her Taoism forms much of the underlying philosophy behind Earthsea and several others (not all) of her work. I have read the short stories that were the inklings of the Earthsea world. It's not something that sprang fully-grown form her head, and you can see things develop in later novels and stories. If you want to, anyway.

The Forever War is about as far away from Earthsea as you can get. Enjoy it.

[nefaria.livejournal.com]

"The Left Hand of Darkness" by LeGuin left a similar impact on me, it was unquestionably well-written, but also forgettable. Sort of like a painting that you see in a museum, where you're impressed by the detail but have no desire to hang it in your living room.

"The Forever War" was my recommendation. It has some downsides (including one grisly death scene that did nothing for me, ick) but a lot of thought-provoking material about relativity and light-speed travel, plus some intriguing imagery and a good theme.

[deckardcanine.livejournal.com]

Then thank you for the recommendation. I can tell already that it's based on experience about as much as imagination, and probably the worst of the shock has worn off quickly.

That's twice in a row that you've compared a book to a painting. I guess that's more conventional and more useful than comparing one to a drink.