A Wizard of Earthsea

[sawyl]

A comfort read in the form of Ursula Le Guin's A Wizard of Earthsea; the brilliant modern classic that first inspired my great love of Le Guin.

The book opens with a child named Duny in a remote village on the rocky island of Gont. Tutored in magic by the local wise woman, acquiring the use-name Sparrowhawk in the process, the boy conjure a fog to defend his village when it is threatened by foreign raiders; a feat that attracts the attention of the wizard Ogion the Silent. Spotting the boy's potential Ogion gives him a new name, Ged, and takes him on as his apprentice.

But Sparrowhawk is too impatient to learn the lessons that Ogion is trying to teach him and, goaded into by a local girl, opens one of his master's books of great magic. In the aftermath, Ogion gives the boy a choice: to remain on Gont or to travel to the school of magic on the island of Roke. Sparrowhawk chooses Roke, where he excels at everything the school has to teach him. Still impatient and arrogant, he allows himself to be provoked into a great display of magic: the summoning of a long-dead spirit. The spell goes horribly awry summoning a great shadow that badly injures Sparrowhawk before it is put to flight by the power and sacrifice of the Archmage of Roke.

Almost broken the shadow, Sparrowhawk gradually recovers to resume his studies albeit with more uncertainty and difficulty than before, eventually earning his staff. Assigned to a poor, dragon-menaced village, he continues to brood over the shadow and the threat it posses to his new friends in Low Torning. Deciding to remove the threat by removing himself, Sparrowhawk sails off to confront the dragon directly. During their encounter the dragon offers, at great cost, to reveal the name of the shadow — an offer that is later repeated by the Servants of the Stone when Ged travels to the Court of the Terrenon on Osskil — but it is only when he seeks the help of his old master, Ogion, that Ged realises what he must do.

A Wizard of Earthsea is a book that greatly rewards re-reading. Every time I read it, I seem to find something new in it; not bad for a children's book of less than 200 pages. There are many obvious things to say about it, not least that all the characters are people of colour — despite the many cover illustrations, it's explicitly stated that the only pale-skinned characters are the viking-like Kargs — and that there are only three female characters, only one of whom is a portrayed in a positive light — a strange oversight given Le Guin's commitment to feminism and something she later tried to correct in The Other Wind.

At its heart, the book is essentially an exploration of Taoism and the concept of balance. On Roke Ged quickly tires of mere illusion, asking Master Hand how to permanently alter the structure of the world instead of merely changing how it is perceived. The answer he gets does not satisfy him at the time: that although things can be transformed by changing their true names, this should not be done without very great need because it upsets the Equilibrium, the balance of things in the world. Thus the shadow is released when Ged, in his arrogance and pride, tries a spell that is not necessary and will upset the balance between life and death. The central struggle between Ged and the shadow is also one of balance — something that is presaged by Master Hand's comment that the act of creating a light is also responsible for casting shadows. Thus Ged comes to realise that the goal of his quest is not to undo the creation of the shadow or to destroy the darkness — cf. Harry Potter — but to continue through the process and bring it to its natural end, whatever that may be.