Books Read: A Wizard of Earthsea by Ursula K. Le Guin

Look Ori, I read it! Now stop bugging me about it!!!

No, I hadn’t read it.

Of course, I was aware of Earthsea—a friend of mine (hi, Ori) regularly recommended that I read it. But I had such a deep and abiding hatred of fantasy—a direct result of being bored senseless by Tolkien¹—all I read was horror.² The prejudice ran deep.

What finally broke through those layers of loathing was Tigana by Guy Gavriel Kay, which I read while holidaying in New York. That remarkable novel—which I picked up because the aforementioned friend (hi, Ori) swore, body and soul, that it was one of the great fantasy novels ever written—made me realise what a narrow-minded fool I’d been.

I still didn’t pick up Earthsea, though. I believed, incorrectly, that I’d missed the boat—that it was a trilogy best read when you were young. And even when I realised this reasoning was spurious, I was so ashamed that I, a fucking reviewer for Locus, hadn’t read one of the seminal fantasy trilogies—possibly the only one to rival Tolkien in terms of popularity—that I kept avoiding it.

So why pick it up now? Well, Backlisted, of course.³ But I was already drifting in that direction, having loved The Dispossessed.

It will come as no surprise that I loved every single page of A Wizard of Earthsea. Every character, from Ged to Ogion to Vetch, enters the story fully realised. It’s almost magical that Le Guin achieves this without leaning heavily on tropes—mainly because she’s creating those tropes right before our eyes. Even then, there’s a freshness to her approach: Ogion’s vulnerability and tenderness, Ged’s curiosity and arrogance, Vetch’s kindness and loyalty. You’ll find traits like these in Tolkien’s characters, but not expressed quite like this.

What surprised me most was how little time Ged spends in wizard school. I’d always understood that Le Guin was one of the first—if not the first—to execute this idea. I assumed, then, that Ged’s tutelage would take up most of the novel. But once the inciting event occurs—Ged’s summoning of the nameless Shadow in a haughty and ill-conceived bid to show off his magical superiority to the smug, elitist Jasper—Le Guin moves briskly through the rest of Ged’s time at Roke.

The remainder of the novel follows Ged’s attempt to defeat the Shadow—an adventure that takes him across the length and breadth of Earthsea (or at least it feels that way), including a thrilling encounter with a dragon. It’s vivid, exciting, and darker than I expected. As a coming-of-age narrative, there’s a complexity to Ged’s psychology that would make most contemporary novelists jealous. The section where Ged is shipwrecked on a small island in the East Reach is the most subtle and yet gut-wrenching portrait of tragedy and trauma.⁴ How the fuck does she do it?

This time, I’m not going to muck around like I did with Gormenghast. Expect reviews of the next two novels in the original trilogy in the weeks to come.⁵

1. I’ve since reread The Lord of the Rings, and it’s not even remotely boring.

2. And Doctor Who novels. I was the perfect age for the New Adventures, which started coming out when I was in my late teens.

3. 92% of the time the answer is Backlisted.

4. And, on reflection, one of the most important scenes in the trilogy.

5. I know that people love Tehanu, and I will read it, along with Tales from Earthsea, and The Other Wind in the next twelve months.