The living and the dead

At 72, Ursula Le Guin returns to Earthsea to mend the wounds that have long divided her fantasy world

By Donna Minkowitz

Oct 4, 2001 | Ursula K. Le Guin is one of the few writers I know who excels at both political fiction and epic fantasy. She's brilliant at both. But unfortunately, she's not always brilliant at both at the same time, and indeed, bringing them together is very, very hard. The intuitive demands of myth-making are only uneasily combined with the keen analysis required by a search for justice and equity.

As an avid Taoist, Le Guin knows this better than anyone. Suspect all correctives, look askance at attempts to restore benevolence and righteousness, Le Guin might say, yet her two new books, "Tales From Earthsea" and "The Other Wind," have been written as a sort of corrective to her stunningly inventive Earthsea Trilogy, originally published between 1968 and 1972.

In the new story collection and novel, Le Guin drastically revises the politics of her archipelagan fantasy world, changing its outlook on gender, class and hierarchy. Can a fantasy world have an outlook?, you may ask. Certainly -- just ask yourself if the elves are good in Tolkien, and if his trilogy believes in kings. Le Guin, who is now 72, has also drastically revised Earthsea's worldview on death.

I loved the three original Earthsea books -- "A Wizard of Earthsea," "The Tombs of Atuan," and "The Farthest Shore" -- but the trilogy, like the "Tao Te Ching" itself, was a little quiescent about evil. In it, "keeping the balance" was always more important than fighting slavery or other human wrongs.

When wizards in the novels were smart, they did as little as possible and hung out in the woods. Action and power didn't avail much. Note: this was also one of the best things about the trilogy. Few writers of epic fantasy would have dared to have a work end with the hero "neither losing nor winning" or, as in "The Farthest Shore," with the same hero, Ged, completely losing his power.

Le Guin has always shown an openness to writing about loss, defeat and death, an openness that is extremely unusual (and refreshing) in the triumphalist world of fantasy. But fantasy is, on some level, always about triumph and especially the triumph over evil, and the trilogy's main strength also makes it unsatisfying and on a certain level ethically troubling. (Here's a corrective of my own: After Sept. 11, Le Guin's Taoist refusal of triumph makes much more sense to me. Fantasies of ultimate victory over evil now seem more troubling.)

Then there was the novels' attitude towards women. Though Le Guin is a feminist, her school for wizards, Roke, only admitted men, and women's magic in her world was both "weak" and "wicked." (The other deeply annoying thing was that Ged never became lovers with Tenar the Kargish girl who bravely renounces her position as a priestess of evil power, an act that's typical of the very boldest things women get to do in Earthsea.) With "Tehanu," a late addition to Earthsea published in 1990, and these two just-published books, Le Guin has taken care of all three problems. But fixing problems, as Le Guin would be the first to point out, is one of the most problematic things a writer can do.

"Tehanu" was awe-inspiring and infuriating at the same time because it introduced the notion of "a bad thing" (the burning, beating and rape of a child by her parents) into the pious, "good and evil are one" world of the Archipelago wizards. The abuse it detailed could not be looked at honestly in a way that could lead anyone to conclude that good and evil were one.

Next Page: Better politics, but didactic as sin

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