[bala · home]
[okadenamatī · reviews]
[mesaramatiziye · other writings]
[tedbezī · languages]
language: English
country: USA
year: 2001
form: novel
genre(s): fantasy
series: Earthsea, #5
dates read: 20.12.23-23.12.23
The Other Wind is very good — a triumphant culmination of threads from each of the earlier books. Ged’s understanding of power, Tenar’s negotiation of her position and (for that matter) her life, Lebannen’s intimate familiarity with death, Tehanu’s uncertain nature. the possibility of change.
it’s still, like The Farthest Shore, ultimately kind of an evasion of the problem of death, but I begrudge it less, insofar as it’s trying to find a way through death into something else. I don’t know that it entirely succeeds in this, but I love narratives about unfinished and forgotten history coming back to demand resolution, so it averages out okay. I must say, though — not to devalue Le Guin’s own theoretical interests or contributions — this was very much a reworking of Diane Duane’s Young Wizards books, in a way that fits so neatly into that conceptual framework (“Beware the choice! Beware refusing it!”) that it’s difficult to think it wasn’t direct influence.
Tehanu left us poised in the moment where change is possible, and The Other Wind picks up some fifteen years later, with the world still caught in that moment. dragons and dreams (perhaps uncoincidentally the title of an anthology edited by Jane Yolen that includes a Young Wizards short story) are haunting Earthsea, along with the memory of winged beings who are both human and dragon, or perhaps something else entirely. something is wrong in the dry land of the dead, and something new is, Tornor-esque, struggling to be born — peace, perhaps, under the young king who is trying to unite not only the Archipelago but also perhaps the Kargad lands.
I’m not being very coherent here, because I don’t want to spoil things. it’s a novel about thinking together, reconsidering and abandoning old ways when they turn out to be wrong, abandoning our knee-jerk preconceptions, tearing down walls, and becoming reconciled to the possibility of death — but holding out, still, the possibility of something beyond death. it’s a fitting conclusion to the series, with its many virtues and its flaws (the unquestioned heterosexuality of it all — in this case the insistence that Lebannen is straight when all signs that Le Guin herself wrote are clearly pointed the other way, lol). it‘s very good, though inevitably imperfect.
moods: emotional, hopeful, reflective