Then, for more than ten days, they did not see the sun again. The ground became soft and damp, like volcanic ash, and the vegetation was thicker and thicker, and the cries of the birds and the uproar of the monkeys became more and more remote, and the world became eternally sad. The men on the expedition felt overwhelmed by their most ancient memories in that paradise of dampness and silence, going back to before original sin, as their boots sank into pools of steaming oil and their machetes destroyed bloody lilies and golden salamanders.
– Gabriel Garcia Marquez, “One Hundred Years of Solitude”
This tower, patched unevenly with black ivy, arose like a mutilated finger from among the fists of knuckled masonry and pointed blasphemously at heaven. At night the owls made of it an echoing throat; by day it stood voiceless and cast its long shadow.
On both sides of the train, the city unraveled into suburbs; that sight, and later the sight of lawns and large country homes, led Dahlmann to put aside his reading. The truth is, Dahlmann read very little; the lodestone mountain and the genie sworn to kill the man who released him from the bottle were, as anyone will admit, wondrous things, but not much more wondrous than this morning and the fact of being. Happiness distracted him from Scheherezade and her superfluous miracles; Dahlmann closed the book and allowed himself simply to live.
– Jorges Luis Borges, “The South,” from the collection “Artifices”
In the presence of real tragedy you feel neither pain nor joy nor hatred, only a sense of enormous space and time suspended, the great doors open to black eternity, the rising across the terrible field of that last enormous, unanswerable question.
We are all imprisoned by the dictionary. We choose out of that vast, paper-walled prison our convicts, the little black printed words, when in truth we need fresh sounds to utter, new enfranchised noises which would produce a new effect.
The third of Le Guin’s Earthsea novels. It’s been a couple of months since I read it and it’s begun to slip from the mind – not such a sterling recommendation for the resonance of the novel over the long term. The first two seem to stick more.
However, it’s good stuff. Ged takes the role of wise-man Merlin to a young prince-who-would-be-king on somewhat of a retread of the first’s bildungsroman and plays it well, with a surprising amount of vulnerability. A return in tone to the first novel in the series, particularly in comparison to the decidedly less tourist-friendly tombs of the second.
Ged’s response to Prince Arren’s desire to bring justice to slavers met on a ship is memorable. Atypical of an adventure story from the modern West.
“Aye, if I had bound them? There were but six. The oarsmen were chained slaves, like you. Egre and his men may be dead by now, or chained by the others to be sold as slaves; but I left them free to fight or bargain. I am no slave taker!” “But you knew them to be evil men -“ “Was I to join them therefore? To let their acts rule my own? I will not make their choices for them, nor will I let them make mine for me!”
The Daoist stuff comes through loud and clear – clangingly so. The Farthest Shore, like the others in the series, is deceptively well written for such a simple book. Once in a while a paragraph materialises and shakes you deep and sticks (at least for a while).
“But then,” the boy said, frowning at the stars, “is the balance to be kept by doing nothing? Surely a man must act even not knowing all the consequences of his act, if anything is to be done at all?”
“Never fear. It is much easier for men to act than to refrain from acting. We will continue to do good and to do evil… But if there were a king over us all again and he sought counsel of a mage, as in the days of old, and I were that mage, I would say to him: My lord, do nothing because it is righteous or praiseworthy or noble to do so; do nothing because it seems good to do so; do only that which you must do and which you cannot do in any other way.”
Single sentences, too:
To see a candle’s light, one must take it into a dark place.
Every action has a reaction. It’s nice to read a book that encourages the idea of ‘being’ as a state as or more desirable than ‘doing’ without the trite, self-congratulatory trappings of the self-help section.
When I was young, I had to choose between the life of being and the life of doing. And I leapt at the latter like a trout to a fly. But each deed you do, each act, binds you to itself and to its consequences, and makes you act again and yet again. Then very seldom do you come upon a space, a time like this, between act and act, when you may stop and simply be. Or wonder who, after all, you really are. – says Ged to Arren
I enjoyed the epic fights on the border of life and death. Existential angst is explored without real depth or subtlety, but compensates for this with the poise and power of Le Guin’s prose.
Sparse sentences:
Would you have the sea grow still and the tides cease, to save one wave, to save yourself?
and:
They do not know the songs of the heroes and the kings… The rest is all of the sea.
longer ones, too (in series, even!):
But I, who am old, who have done what I must do, who stand in the daylight facing my own death, the end of all possibility, I know that there is only one power that is real and worth having. And that is the power, not to take, but to accept.
The conflict is rendered poetically and without excess. This is a story trim but beautiful.
Lebannen, this is. And thou art. There is no safety, and there is no end. The word must be heard in silence; there must be darkness to see the stars. The dance is always danced above the hollow place, above the terrible abyss.
I started reading Tehanu after this, but couldn’t get through the first couple of chapters. Such a significant tone shift that I felt lost much of what I enjoyed about the original series. Perhaps I’ll try again, later.
As a sequel to Le Guin’s first Earthsea novel, ‘The Tombs of Atuan’ succeeds in capturing the same mythopoeic style as its precursor. Not quite as engaging – more standing around in the dark than I normally care for – but it reads well and leaves an impact larger than it’s short length might lead you to expect.
Interpretations of this book as ‘unfeminist,’ particularly in comparison to other novels by Le Guin (see: Tehanu) are readings that I don’t understand. I can see glimmers of the thinking of it – young girl-child grown in female commune cut off from the outside world by the patriarchy headed by man-emperor, saved by another man (magical, this one) – but it doesn’t culminate so as to celebrate the oppression of women.
Enjoyed the depictions of Ged, now a stranger (and a straight-up badass):
He was one whose power was akin to, and as strong as, the Old Powers of the earth; one who talked with dragons, and held off earthquakes with his word. And there he lay asleep on the dirt, with a little thistle growing by his hand. It was very strange.
Glimpses of Le Guin’s own brand of Taoist ‘way-of-no-way’ creep in, something that I very much enjoy.
Why did he sit there so defenceless and so strong? Why could she not defeat him?
Cleanly written and to the point and deals with life themes in a way easy to digest.
Lovely poetic imagery and again, as with the first Earthsea, wizards and magic are well handled. The dark of the labyrinth was rendered with depth, remaining and resonating after the book ended. Reminded me of Mark Z. Danielewski’s ‘House of Leaves’.
They have nothing to give. They have no power of making. All their power is to darken and destroy. They cannot leave this place; they are this place, and it should be left to them. They should not be denied nor forgotten, but neither should they be worshipped. The Earth is beautiful, and bright, and kindly, but that is not all. The Earth is also terrible, and dark, and cruel. The rabbit shrieks dying in the green meadows. The mountains clench their great hands full of hidden fire. There are sharks in the sea, and there is cruelty in men’s eyes, and where men worship these things and abase themselves before them, there evil breeds… But they are not your masters.
Le Guin writes beautifully and the novel reads like a fable. The world of Earthsea and its characters are sketched lightly but with skill. There are moments of commanding emotional resonance and others of delicate imagery. It is a lean but generous story, and I was surprised at it’s impact – although I am not too certain that it will persist and grow as time passes.
What I particularly enjoyed were the snippets of insightful quotable quotes (think zen koans):
“Have you never thought how danger must surround power as shadow does light?”
This is how wizards should be: enigmatic and wise. The parallel between taoist sage and earthsea mage works wonderfully.
“For a word to be spoken, there must be silence. Before and after.”
The book follows Ged, the boy Sparrowhawk, as he grows from child to man and into wizard. He owns his great magical ability and learns its limitations.
“You thought, as a boy, that a mage is one who can do anything. So I thought, once. So did we all. And the truth is that as a man’s real power grows and his knowledge widens, ever the way he can follow grows narrower; until at last he chooses nothing, but does only and wholly what he must do.”
Le Guin can be heavy-handed with her themes – but that is part of the reason I enjoyed the book so much. . The didactic tone serves the story in such a way as to give it strength.
“From that time forth, he believed that the wise man is one who never sets himself apart from other living things, whether they have speech or not, and in later years, he strove long to learn what can be learned, in silence, from the eyes of animals, the flight of birds, the great slow gestures of trees.”
A Wizard of Earthsea resonates with me particularly because it emphasises the ultimate valuelessness of material wealth and power, of action without insight.
“A man would know the end he goes to, but he cannot know it if he does not turn, and return to his beginning, and hold that beginning in his being. If he would not be a stick whirled and whelmed in the stream, he must be the stream itself, all of it, from its spring to its sinking in the sea.”
This is fantasy without the pulpy trappings or pretense. Magnificent.
Perhaps I’m too underdone to appreciate this. Started reading it as part of Borges’ ‘Collected Fictions,’ but could not persevere to completion. I enjoyed it – but less than I expected in light of the mammoth reputation that Borges possesses. Pirates and bandits, love and adventure and life and death live in these stories. On the surface at least. Peel it back and find yourself bemusedly spending time with a writer not wholly engaged with any of the aforementioned – examining them and dreaming them and, most significantly, writing them – but not bringing you with him to live them. The overall effect is a strange combination of vivid dissociation, a curtain spread taut over objects so that outlines are seen but never textures. Broad impressions delivered with exhaustive attention. Narrative immediacy traded for metafictional scaffolding. Reading a writer writing about a writer writing about what he’d read. Fictional historians of sometimes fictional, sometimes factual history. Clever and engaging and stimulating and somewhat dissatisfying.
Though this novel is in some ways better paced and plotted than ‘Perdido Street Station’ (which is not to suggest that it doesn’t drag in parts) I will always have a soft place in my heart for Mieville’s Bas Lag debut (despite its comparative clunkiness). ‘The Scar’ didn’t surprise me as much. Its setting, whilst creative, didn’t inspire the same sensation of wonder (strange considering how wonderful the notion of an unfindable wooden city floating on the sea sounds. Perhaps a tad too sensational in the execution for me?)
Baroque and overwrought, prose vacillating from lumbering to evocative, though always used effectively to construct sword and sorcery monster of the week encounters (pew pew explosions what a badass type shenanigans). A truly engaging setting with not so engaging characters. A mixture of pulp niche genres – steampunk, dark urban fantasy, Cthulhu-lite-monster-fun – that gives a chunky sort of goodness somewhat lacking in nutrition.
A boy with nine lives walks through worlds, gets up to mischief and no good. Loses lives, makes friends and grows up a little. In doing so he becomes the Chrestomanci, guardian-enchanter-magician of the multiverse. Loved it.
A modern day fairy tale in an idyllic magical England. A twist on some common and not-so-common fantasy tropes framing a light-hearted coming of age story with a hint of prepubescent romance.
There are some things that you’re exposed to as a child that you end up carrying around with you for the rest of your life. The books I’ve read as I’ve gotten older do move me – but never in quite the same way.
The first time I read this novel in primary school I was still reeling from early exposure to Harry Potter. Diana Wynne Jones has a lighter touch than Rowling, more whimsical and strange. The sort of book I want to read to my children when I get around to having them.
The reading of ‘Titus Groan,’ a fantasy novel by the British author Mervyn Peake, was an experience that has stuck with me unexpectedly. I’d heard of the novel and the sterling reputation that it and its sequel, Gormenghast, have in the ‘genre’ fiction community – both are seen as landmark works that are demonstratively literary in their approach to the writing of fantasy.
I know that I myself can be a bit of a rambler – I regrettably fill pages and pages up with writing, will into being words to tumble and trickle and play viciously amongst the long slopes of language in a way that is obfuscating and entirely unnecessary. It is not out of the question that I might interject with cliché anachronisms, (their insertions can seem almost deliberate in their ruining of the flow of a piece) and at others I interrupt with phrases that are too modern and bombastic in their natures to suit the otherwise contemplative nature of what is written. I can be a horrible writer. I relish in unseemly grandiosity, in terrible examples of the purplest prose. I write without a modern voice, with affectation and distance from the present day. I write like I am afraid. There is no way to reign all this in; to do so would require such force that I’m quite sure saddle and rope would fall to pieces.
Reading Peake’s work, then, was a true revelation – amongst those barren fields of microwave-oven prose that litter fantasy novels rises a grotesque, obsessive authorial structure, one that looms on the literary horizon. A structure, a behemoth, speaking with its strength and grandeur and twisted obscurity. Titus Groan and Gormenghast strike a gargantuan pose on the landscape, digging deep to the earthen bones of the place of the novel whilst joyously scraping at the sky with jagged peaks.
A beautiful place, but one that could all the same never really be called friendly. What I love about fantastic fiction is that it can seem to stand on its own, written and so read separate from the world we live in. ‘Titus Groan’ then is a book written for itself – it is beautiful and terrible and grotesque. It is a novel that should be read, and I am very glad that it has been written.
Fruit Thief 