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language: English
country: USA
year: 1972
form: novel
genre(s): fantasy
series: Earthsea, #3
dates read: 14.8.12, 6.11.16-11.11.16, 10.11.23-17.11.23
I have slightly more mixed feelings about The Farthest Shore than I do about the first two Earthsea books. I still, to be clear, think it’s very good. it is, however, ultimately about the restoration of a benevolent monarchy, which seems like a very weird choice for her and which I do not love.
here, most clearly of the first three books, Le Guin is doing the kind of thing Jameson talks about in “Radical Fantasy” — making magic itself the object of contention and clearly and unequivocally linking it to human creativity as such. something is wrong with the balance, and magic — and, with it, humans’ sense of wonder and ability to desire or imagine change, anything different from their current way of life — is disappearing from the world. Ged, now the elderly archmage, sets out to right the balance, accompanied by Arren, a prince from Enlad who sees Ged, immediately falls in love with him (and his feelings are explicitly described at one point as “romantic”), and swears to follow him on this quest, which takes them into the unfamiliar south and then into the impossibly far west, where they meet sea people who live their lives in raft-villages, dragons, and the immortal sorcerer who in his quest for eternal life has opened a hole in creation through which the words of the True Speech — which, we know from A Wizard of Earthsea, is literally the basis of everything in the universe — is slowly draining out.
both Arren and aged Ged are appealing characters, the one as a counterpoint to the other. I’m not convinced by Ged’s certainty that Arren should become king, though, and not just because I don’t think anyone should become king. it seems as if the quality Ged identifies is something primarily supernatural rather than any particular indications that Arren will provide good governance, and because the novel is primarily from Arren’s perspective it’s not at all clear what this supernatural quality is.
the sequences in the land of the dead are harrowing, which is another point of tension within the text — Ged affirms that while we should, perhaps, regret death we shouldn’t let fear of it overwhelm or rule us, and yet the portrayal of the Dry Land is horrifying, a desert void where the dead wander eternally, never interacting, never speaking, all their living relationships erased forever. Le Guin sidesteps this problem by distinguishing between the essence of a person (the details of this are vague) and their name — that is, the true name they bore in life. their essence, we’re now told (in line with Kargad theology), is born again — only their name, the mark of the specific, temporally-bounded identity they wore in a particular life, passes into the Dry Land. I actually think this is conceptually really interesting, but it’s also more of an evasion of the central problem of death than a solution to it.
it’s a good, engaging book, but with some conceptual challenges that it doesn’t quite manage to satisfyingly surmount.
moods: adventurous, challenging, mysterious