A Wizard of Earthsea
Ursula K. Le Guin
182 pages
published in 1968

I had forgotten how good these were.

The Earthsea Trilogy are the sorts of books everybody interested in fantasy should've read at least once, at age twelve. Not that they're children's books, they're books children would like. They're not condescending, they're not written down and they stay interesting even for adults.

To be honest though, calling this series a trilogy is stretching the definition of trilogy a bit too far. This is not a continuing story, you can read all of them without knowledge of the other two. However, they read best in the order they were published. what they do have in common, apart from being all set in the world of Earthsea, is that these are all stories about growing up, about having to become adult in order to be able to deal with an external menace. They're classic coming of age stories, which is surley part of their lasting appeal.

Another part of which is surely the world of Earthsea itself. Girded by an endless sea it is a world of hundreds if not thousands of smaller and greater islands, some inhabitated by only a few dozen people, others home to great and beautiful cities, many more not inhabitated at all. Earthsea feels real, far more real then the average quasi-medieval world of extruded fantasy. It has some wonderful imagery, for instance of dragons so big they at first are mistaken for a castle, but it's the small details that convince me most.

The story in A Wizard of Earthsea revolves around Ged, a young goatherd who is discovered to have magical powers and eventually send to the Wizards school on Roke, where he in a fit of anger summons an evil force. The rest of the novel is about how he attempts to repair the damage he did in his arrogance and hubris. As said, a classic coming of age story.

The Tombs of Atuan
Ursula K. Le Guin
146 pages
published in 1971

The Tombs of Atuan, of the three Earthsea books, is the one which features Ged the least. Here the focus is almost exclusively on Arha, the Eaten One, priestess of the ancient and powerful Nameless Ones. Everytime the priestess dies she is reincarnated at the moment of her death. The temple then has to find an unblemished female child born at the exact moment of her death, which if she stays unblemished will be taken from her family to become the next incarnation of Arha. Not a good life, especially since worship of the Nameless Ones is dreary and their priestess is little more then a figurehead in the hands of the priestess of the more recent Godking. For the current priestess, Tenar, this happened only fifteen years ago. Not that long ago, but long enough for her to forget all about life before the temple took her, even her real name.

Powerless and trapped in dreary ritual, everything changes for Tenar when a young wizard comes to the tombs of the Nameless Ones to seek its greatest treasure, the broken ring of the Earthsea heroe Erreth-Akbe, a young wizard named Ged...

This is the shortest of the three books and it shows how much Le Guin can pack in so few pages. The atmosphere in The Tombs of Atuan is claustrophobic and oprresive after the open and sometimes exhilarant atmosphere of A Wizard of Earthsea, especially in the descriptions of Tenar's daily life. What I found impressive was in how Le Guin ended the story. No fairytale happy ending for Tenar; life doesn't end, isn't made perfect by her liberation.

The Farthest Shore
Ursula K. Le Guin
197 pages
published in 1972

The Farthest Shore deals with a common fantasy plot: the magic is going away. Not only are magicians and witches losing their abilities to work magic on some of the more remorte islands, on those islands so afflicted all people lose their creativity, their zest for life. Could this be a natural phenomenon or is this the work of some evil force? That is what Ged, by now the Archmage of Roke and his young companion, prince Arren of Enlad, who came to warn him of the danger, have to find out. Unknown to Arren, he is destinied for greatness, if he survives the quest...

Of the three Earthsea books, I found this one to be the least successful, in part because I disagreed with some of Le guin's philosophy underlaying the story. For one, she uses the old fantasy cliche of the rightful king as panacee for all evil, which grates on this republican's nerves. Usually I don't mind this in fantasy, I just found it odd that Ursula Le Guin, of all writers, would use such a timeworn cliche. The other thing that grated was the thought of longing for immortality and immortality itself as an evil thing, that death is what makes humans human, which is another fantasy cliche. I disagree with this philosophy: death and life are not unique to humans, they're not what defines us.

Those two objections aside, this is still an enjoyable story, just slightly disappointing.