A Wizard of Earthsea

Third review, rating unchanged, 4 years after my first re-read. I've been craving another re-read for many years now and finally relented, intending to re-read the entire series and finally read the last Earthsea novel I've been saving.

This remains my all-time favorite book (series). In the past few years I've read hundreds of books of varying form, quality, setting and style; yet never have I been able to find anyone like Ursula K. Le Guin. She was truly one of a kind. I found it funny to re-read my first review now, simply one sentence: “Beautifully written but lacking in pace.” On this re-read, I found the pacing to be perfect, not a moment wasted.

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“This convention was and still is so dominant that it's taken for granted—“of course” a heroic fantasy is good guys fighting bad guys, the War of Good Against Evil.

But there are no wars in Earthsea. No soldiers, no armies, no battles. None of the militarism that came from the Arthurian saga and other sources and that by now, under the influence of fantasy war games, has become almost obligatory.

I didn't and don't think this way; my mind doesn't work in terms of war. My imagination refuses to limit all the elements that make an adventure story and make it exciting—danger, risk, challenge, courage—to battlefields. A hero whose heroism consists of killing people is uninteresting to me, and I detest the hormonal war orgies of our visual media, the mechanical slaughter of endless battalions of black-clad, yellow-toothed, red-eyed demons.

War as a moral metaphor is limited, limiting, and dangerous. By reducing the choices of action to “a war against” whatever-it-is, you divide the world into Me or Us (good) and Them or It (bad) and reduce the ethical complexity and moral richness of our life to Yes/No, On/Off. This is puerile, misleading, and degrading. In stories, it evades any solution but violence and offers the reader mere infantile reassurance. All too often the heroes of such fantasies behave exactly as the villains do, acting with mindless violence, but the hero is on the “right” side and therefore will win. Right makes might.

Or does might make right?

If war is the only game going, yes. Might makes right. Which is why I don't play war games.
To be the man he can be, Ged has to find out who and what his real enemy is. He has to find out what it means to be himself. That requires not a war but a search and a discovery. The search takes him through mortal danger, loss, and suffering. The discovery brings him victory, the kind of victory that isn't the end of a battle but the beginning of a life.”


Three years after reading this for the first time, I found myself drawn to it again. By now, I've gone through most of Le Guin's bibliography, completely falling in love with all of her writings, but it's the first time I revisited this.

Rarely has a book enamoured me like this. What impresses me the most about her work, and this book in particular, is how she doesn't waste a single letter. She manages to put so much in this book of only 200 pages. I don't know many writers (perhaps Calvino?) who are this expertly capable of packing such great information, atmosphere and value in such few words.

I am impressed by Earthsea's richness and depth. On a re-read, I loved the ending even more than the first time I read this.

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Previous review, 4 stars:

“You must not change one thing, one pebble, one grain of sand, until you know what good and evil will follow on that act. The world is in balance, in Equilibrium. A wizard's power of Changing and Summoning can shake the balance of the world. It is dangerous, that power. It is most perilous. It must follow knowledge, and serve need. To light a candle is to cast a shadow.”

Beautifully written but lacking in pace.