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Your old road is rapidly agin'
Nov. 29th, 2022 10:13 amOver the Thanksgiving break I snuck in some time to read Tehanu, the fourth book in Ursula K. Le Guin’s Earthsea series. This one brings us back to Tenar, the protagonist of The Tombs of Atuan, now a widow with two adult children. With her two children out of the house, Tenar, now known as Goha, adopts a foundling child whose face has been half burned off by the bandits she was born to. Most other folks on the little island of Gont are scared of the little girl with the melted face but Tenar does her best to treat her normally and kindly and slowly little Therru starts to heal.
Things get interesting when Tenar gets a message that the old mage Ogion is dying. Tenar and Therru take a trip up to Ogion’s house to send him off and, in the aftermath of his death, Tenar finds herself navigating a series of thorny questions and little power struggles involving various witches, wizards, and dragons, as well as a number of nonmagical humans and their assumptions about magic, gender, and blame. Ged Sparrowhawk comes back from his adventures of The Farthest Shore on the back of the dragon Kalessin, having a full-blown existential crisis because his magic is gone. Weird men start hanging around. The king is about to be crowned in Havnor and the local pirates are big mad about it. The local lord on Gont is rumored to be up to some sort of creepy dark magic that’s making his son sick, and his pet wizard is a douchebag. Tenar has a lot of somewhat rambling conversations with people trying to make sense out of all this.
It’s hard to describe in terms of plot that doesn’t sound like squabbling over farmland, but one of the points of the story is that these things aren’t petty or unimportant–the work of tending to other people and the land and all those ordinary things is at least as important as the work of kings and mages. Another major theme is the inevitability of change–something in Earthsea is changing, and not just the political news, but it is elusive what. It perhaps has something to do with dragons, as one recurring motif is the legend about how dragons and humans used to be one species, which went off in a sort of divergent evolution many thousands of years ago.
I really just don’t know how to explain this book. A lot of it is quiet and domestic but it never feels slow, and other parts of it are pretty action-packed, but those don’t feel super action-y either, not even the part where Ged almost murders a burglar with a pitchfork. It mostly just feels very tense, somehow both mundane and dreamlike, and very philosophical in a way that is inconclusive but not vague. It’s very strange but it’s very good.
Things get interesting when Tenar gets a message that the old mage Ogion is dying. Tenar and Therru take a trip up to Ogion’s house to send him off and, in the aftermath of his death, Tenar finds herself navigating a series of thorny questions and little power struggles involving various witches, wizards, and dragons, as well as a number of nonmagical humans and their assumptions about magic, gender, and blame. Ged Sparrowhawk comes back from his adventures of The Farthest Shore on the back of the dragon Kalessin, having a full-blown existential crisis because his magic is gone. Weird men start hanging around. The king is about to be crowned in Havnor and the local pirates are big mad about it. The local lord on Gont is rumored to be up to some sort of creepy dark magic that’s making his son sick, and his pet wizard is a douchebag. Tenar has a lot of somewhat rambling conversations with people trying to make sense out of all this.
It’s hard to describe in terms of plot that doesn’t sound like squabbling over farmland, but one of the points of the story is that these things aren’t petty or unimportant–the work of tending to other people and the land and all those ordinary things is at least as important as the work of kings and mages. Another major theme is the inevitability of change–something in Earthsea is changing, and not just the political news, but it is elusive what. It perhaps has something to do with dragons, as one recurring motif is the legend about how dragons and humans used to be one species, which went off in a sort of divergent evolution many thousands of years ago.
I really just don’t know how to explain this book. A lot of it is quiet and domestic but it never feels slow, and other parts of it are pretty action-packed, but those don’t feel super action-y either, not even the part where Ged almost murders a burglar with a pitchfork. It mostly just feels very tense, somehow both mundane and dreamlike, and very philosophical in a way that is inconclusive but not vague. It’s very strange but it’s very good.