Tehanu

2.5 stars, rounded up. Kind of a drag, and not up to usual Ursula benchmark. A heavy-handed, unimaginative conclusion to an otherwise excellent Earthsea series.

So the previous Earthsea books were meditative, nature-soaked high fantasy tales that out-Tolkiened Tolkien. They followed Ged, your usual talented but proud hero wizard, as he (in the first book) learned his wizarding ways and accidentally unleashed a hell-demon in his teens, (in the second book) freed a creepy girl-queen from her crypt kingdom in his ~20s (?), and (in the third book) made friends with an awesome noble prince and dealt with a widespread magickal problem in his ~50s (as Archmage, by then, even!).

So book 4 picks up days after book 3 - Ged is JUUUST back from his Hades excursion - and 25 years after book 2 - so the girl-queen is now an older lady. OLDER LADY. Do you hear me? OLDER WOMAN, THE PROTAGONIST OF THIS BOOK IS AN OLDER WOMAN DO YOU HEAR ME DAMMIT. Is that clear enough!?! Because Ursula Le Guin wants you to be damn sure that you are aware that THIS IS A FEMINIST BOOK WITH AN OLDER WOMAN PROTAGONIST DID YOU KNOW THAT “WOMEN'S WORK” IS UNPAID EVEN IN AGRARIAN SOCIETIES IT'S NOT JUST CAPITALISM THAT CREATES THE PATRIARCHY YOU KNOW –

Oh? Too overt for you? Yeah, me too.

I don't know why Le Guin wrote it like this - especially given how subtle and nuanced her handling of gender was in one of her masterpieces, The Left Hand of Darkness - but here it is sledgehammer obvious. While I started the book pleased and refreshed by Goha AKA Tenar AKA the girl-queen from Tombs of Atuan AKA AN OLDER WOMAN YOU DON'T SEE MANY OF THOSE AS PROTAGONISTS EH INDEED THEY ARE INVISIBLE DAMN YOU PATRIARCHY DAMN YOU. But, really, I was pleased, because Le Guin was making excellent points - through Tenar's thoughts - about how, indeed, invisible older women are in men's eyes, how being a mom both incredibly limits you in your freedoms but adds richness and how dudes are BLIND I TELL YOU BLIND re: picking up the damn dishes.

But then Le Guin's hand becomes quite heavy and Tenar - who already felt like an authorial stand-in - began to feel like a Mary Sue, what with Ged coming back all busted up and handsome with his handsome hair and handsome aquiline nose and HANDSOME I GET IT URSULA HE'S HOT - and wtf there are romantic feelings between Tenar and Ged?! I thought Tenar was a CHILD when Ged saved her from that crypt kingdom place?! Whaaat.

So yeah, basically this last book felt like indulgent fanfiction ABOUT the Earthsea universe. While the previous books featured ponderous, ominous villains in the style of Hayao Miyazaki villains - it's all gray! - this book featured two main villains, a rapist (!) and a mediocre mid-level wizard who - AND I AM NOT SHITTING YOU - puts a (literal) hex on Tenar because he just damn hates uppity women. What? WHAT?! This was all so absurd that I was like, really?

Oh yeah, that reminds me - there's another character: a young girl who was terribly victimized by her family and gets terribly burned. Tenar adopts her. It is implied she has magical powers too.

But mostly the book is Tenar thinking angry thoughts about how shitty the patriarchy is, and how none of these damn men do their dishes or realize that women live in fear etc etc. I was honestly bummed by how blunt - and even limited! - it all was. Ursula! This is not how you usually do your thing!

Indeed, her afterword immediately begins on the defensive - and she basically accuses the people who were disappointed by this book as being crypto-sexists that can't handle an old woman protagonist and so on. Which is a bummer cuz I (a) am a lady, (b) and thus am super on board with how the patriarchy sucks and yes, “women's work” has always been constricted to unpaid labor - LABOR - throughout the ages, but (c) indeed probably arising sometime around the agricultural revolution, but (d) I CAN STILL FIND THIS HEAVY-HANDED. Oof.

In other news, Ged was described with such loving affection - such a handsome man! - that I decided to cast David Strathairn as him in my head. You're welcome.