I’m changing things up a bit today. Often here at Culling The Classics we — the royal “we”; it’s literally just me — talk about old books, “boring” books, Important Books that some Important Professor at Yale brags about adding to an Important List while trying to impress a student he wants to sleep with.
These books are the pillars upon which today’s literature is merely a fancy arch — the stout tree trunks supporting the garish blooms of contemporary writing. The books we cover have made society what it is today, gosh darnit! You need to read them whether you like it or not!
But not this time. Today we’re taking on the infinitely more difficult task of reviewing a book we know is fantastic, we know is enjoyable, and that we know everyone and their mother should read. Oh, spoiler alert, apparently: YOU SHOULD READ THIS BOOK. Now all we* have to do is convince you why.
*still just me
The Book
A Wizard of Earthsea, by Ursula K. Le Guin (Parnassus Press, 1968)
The Numbers
A progenitor of modern fantasy literature for both adults and children; winner of multiple awards across multiple decades, including many more for its five sequels; one of the best examples of considered, responsible, universal storytelling that the English language has produced; Goodreads rating of 4.01.
The Spoiler-Free Skinny
On the island of Gont in the archipelago of Earthsea, a young boy with a latent ability to wield the magics of the world saves his village from a band of sea-faring raiders. Ogion, a powerful local mage, takes the boy on as an apprentice and bestows upon him a true name: Ged.
Ogion tries to teach Ged about maintaining equilibrium rather than using magic for every little convenience, but the boy is impatient and overly confident and does not heed his master’s warnings. Hoping to impress a local girl, he accidentally summons a strange and dangerous shadow, which Ogion banishes. It is decided that rather than continue his studies on Gont, Ged will travel to the school for wizards on the island of Roke.
Although Ged quickly excels at his studies on Roke and greatly increases his abilities, he doesn’t make many friends, and he once again unleashes something powerful and dangerous while trying to impress his peers. Ged tries to move on from his mistake, but this new shadow stalks him wherever he goes, threatening to consume him.
You’ll Love It
A Wizard of Earthsea combines so many elements of brilliant storytelling that it’s unreal. All at once it somehow manages to be a million different things:
- a traditional high fantasy novel with dragons and wizards and rocks possessed by ancient malevolent gods;
- a spiritual work on Taoist equilibrium and the importance of maintaining balance in our ecosystems;
- an archetypical epic worthy of a Joseph Campbell essay or two;
- a subversive commentary on race in Western society and the implied associations between skin color and morality in fiction;
- a treatise on anthropological linguistics and how words shape and create our world;
- a fun coming-of-age story about a boy and his pet rodent.
There are so many points of entry for this book, but at its heart, it’s an interesting story told well. The settings are vibrant and varied. The characters are infused with their own unique motivations. The tension ebbs and flows. For such an intelligent and layered novel, it is just incredibly easy to read.
You’ll Loathe It
Do you still love Harry Potter? No, but like really, really love Harry Potter? Like still actively throwing money at that woman in the 2020s? Yeah, Ursula K. Le Guin was not her biggest fan. In fact, she’s thrown some of my favorite literary shade of all time in the direction of Ms. Rowling herself.
Exhibit A:
“I have no great opinion of it. When so many adult critics were carrying on about the ‘incredible originality’ of the first Harry Potter book, I read it to find out what the fuss was about, and remained somewhat puzzled; it seemed a lively kid's fantasy crossed with a ‘school novel,’ good fare for its age group, but stylistically ordinary, imaginatively derivative, and ethically rather mean-spirited.”
Exhibit B:
“‘I didn't feel she ripped me off, as some people did,’ she says quietly, ‘though she could have been more gracious about her predecessors. My incredulity was at the critics who found the first book wonderfully original. She has many virtues, but originality isn't one of them.’”
Exhibit C:
“She didn't plagiarize. She didn't copy anything. Her book, in fact, could hardly be more different from mine, in style, spirit, everything. The only thing that rankles me is her apparent reluctance to admit that she ever learned anything from other writers. When ignorant critics praised her wonderful originality in inventing the idea of a wizards’ school, and some of them even seemed to believe that she had invented fantasy, she let them do so. This, I think, was ungenerous, and in the long run unwise.”
So I guess if you want your annoying boy wizards to stay annoying boy wizards forever, and not really grow or learn very much, you might not love Le Guin’s work.
Or if you prefer when authors leave gender, race, and sexuality issues out of their novels and instead claim after the fact that they were written explicitly with those things in mind all along, you may want to stay away.
Or if you’re still crying over a grown man staring deeply into the eyes of the teenaged boy he’s terrorized for the past seven years — as he tells him how much he wanted to bone the boy’s mother, who patently thought the dude was a creep — then perhaps A Wizard of Earthsea isn’t for you.
Okay, you caught me: This was secretly a second “You’ll Love It” section. Sorry not sorry.
Read It Or Leave It?
A Wizard of Earthsea challenges the reader to see the tropes and themes of a familiar genre in a way that doesn’t line up with the history of the canon. Don’t love fantasy novels? Well, you might actually enjoy this one. Already love fantasy novels? Then you’re REALLY gonna enjoy this one.
Earthsea feels populated and alive in the way that the best fictional worlds always do, but it also doesn’t feel overly precious. Nothing changes if nothing changes, after all. Le Guin isn’t afraid to let her characters grow and their environment evolve. Ged is not the same person on page 2 as he is on page 200 — and if you make it to subsequent books in the series, you can expect even further growth.
In fact, one of the reasons why Earthsea hasn’t had as much of a cultural impact as other works of fantasy is that its adaptors keep reducing it down to its tropes, ignoring its true depth. In the 2004 Sci Fi Channel miniseries Legend of Earthsea, dark-skinned Ged was played by the extremely pale Shawn Ashmore. Studio Ghibli’s Tales from Earthsea, released in 2006, dialed up the violence while dialing down the morality. No adaptation is perfect, but A Wizard of Earthsea is the poster child for the importance of reading the source text.
The Final Verdict
This was honestly one of the hardest CTC columns I’ve had to write. I am incapable of being objective about this novel. As one reviewer put it:
“I wish all books were this good. It has reminded me why I’ve loved novels all my life, and what I might be missing when I stray from them after a string of bad reads. I love almost everything about this book.”
I couldn’t have put it any better myself… possibly because that “reviewer” was me updating my Goodreads a few years ago.
In my defense, the praise is well-deserved and close to universal. There are few things that Western culture has produced that I stan as emphatically as A Wizard of Earthsea, and few authors I respect as immensely as Ursula K. Le Guin. She understood the power that stories hold and the responsibility that authors take on when they choose to tell those stories. She was not interested in writing works that merely entertained their audiences. She strove to help build the future in which she wanted to live.
Yet for all that, her works also entertain their audiences. A Wizard of Earthsea is smart, conscientious, and morally responsible — but also, a dude fights a dragon! It’s all the things! A little race-based genre subversion here, a bit of high-intensity Viking pillaging there. There’s mystery, adventure, hubris, morality, and petty teenager things, and it’s all woven together expertly while somehow not being preachy.
I love this book. I love it. Please read it.
About the author
Brian McGackin is the author of BROETRY (Quirk Books, 2011). He has a BA from Emerson College in Something Completely Unrelated To His Life Right Now, and a Masters in Poetry from USC. He enjoys Guinness, comic books, and Bruce Willis movies.
