Tales from Earthsea by Ursula K. Le Guin
My rating: 4 of 5 stars “What matters is whose house we live in and who we let enter ours.” Ursula K. Le Guin’s fifth Earthsea book, Tales from Earthsea (2001), collects two novellas, three short stories, and a Description of Earthsea. Though some of the tales are better than others, all of them are vintage Le Guin: thought-provoking, imaginative, original, moving, and poetically and precisely written. The characters are compelling and the action suspenseful, without relying on violent action. Except for the novella “Dragonfly,” which is “a dragon bridge” between the fourth and fifth Earthsea novels, the stories are stand alones. In the Foreword (well read by Christina Moore), Le Guin talks about things like the commodification of fantasy, how she came to revisit Earthsea after having subtitled Tehanu “The *Last* Book of Earthsea,” and how real world history writing is similar to fantasy world history writing. All with her wit and clarity. “The Finder” is a moving novella about love, power, learning/teaching, and gender during a time of disunity, slavery, and tyranny, similar to what is going on around the later chaotic time of The Farthest Shore and Tehanu. Otter’s boatwright father tries to beat the boy’s natural gift for magic out of him, until he is bound to work as a dowser for a crazy, amoral wizard looking for cinnabar to refine into quicksilver. How this hellish situation leads to the founding of Roke School (by men *and* women) makes an interesting story. Especially moving and neat are Otter’s relationships with a nude, deformed, mercury-poisoned female slave and with a pirate king’s “crafty man” finder, the Hound. “All the hope left in the world is in the people of no account.” (4 stars) “Darkrose and Diamond” is a romantic story about Diamond, the gifted son of a wealthy lumber merchant, who thinks he can only choose one thing, music, magic, or business, though his mother believes that everything in life is connected, tangled together. Will Diamond follow his bliss and his heart or fulfill his father’s desires? Will Diamond’s beloved Darkrose, daughter of a witch, fit into his life? Le Guin has decided that the voluntary celibacy of wizards is misguided, unnecessary, and possibly harmful. “Why can’t you have everything you want?” (3.5 stars) In order to try to save Gont Port Town from being destroyed by an earthquake, the old wizard Dulse teams up with his former student Ogion to use a powerful elemental spell taught Dulse by his teacher Ard sixty years earlier. The perfectly crafted story, about relationships between teachers and students, fathers and sons, friends and friends, and humans and the earth, is moving. It also says subtle, potent things about gender. It’s poignant to see Ged’s old teacher as a young man. “In the dark under the water all islands touch and are one.” (5 stars) The widow Gift thinks that a traveler who shows up one day at her farm is a king or a beggar. He is surely broken and may be mad, but she senses that he is a kind and true man and offers him hospitality, and he sets about healing the area cattle afflicted by an awful murrain. The story is like a western in which a damaged gunfighter shows up in a small town, hides his guns for fear of harming another person with them, and works on a widow’s ranch. What is the man’s story? Who is he running from? Is he dangerous or safe? When a scarred stranger called Hawk shows up at Gift’s farm, we expect a wizardly showdown. Will Le Guin subvert genre again? Her story is a moving middle-aged romance. “The changes in a man's life may be beyond all the arts we know and all our wisdom.” (4.5 stars) “Dragonfly” is a novella about an uneducated, uncouth, large, vital, beautiful young woman who wants to find out who she is and so tries to enter the male-only Roke School for wizards disguised as a young man and catalyzes a change in the school. The story develops more of the human/dragon thing introduced by Tehanu. The relationship between Irian and a bitter expelled wizard from Roke called Ivory, is neat and funny. I love it when he tries to cast a love spell on Irian, and she punches him while her dog grins at him. The story links Tehanu (1990) to The Other Wind (2001). “I think we should go to our house and open its doors.” (4 stars) After the five tales comes A Description of Earthsea, in which Le Guin writes a kind of encyclopedia entry on Earthsea, with topics like the traits and cultures and histories of the Hardic, Kargad, and Dragon peoples (including their Languages, Writing and Magic), the School on Roke, and Celibacy and Wizardry. Most of this appears here and there throughout her six Earthsea books, but it’s ever a pleasure to read Le Guin’s writing. (3 stars) The audiobook closes with a new Afterword (well read by Christina Moore) in which Le Guin explains why she published the fifth book of tales before she wrote the sixth novel. She uses an analogy between the “uncertain beginning of the last movement of Beethoven’s last symphony,” wherein he’s searching for the right way to go forward, and what she was trying to do with these tales: find the right way to finish her Earthsea cycle. She also talks about the need for the reality of imaginative fantasy literature in our contemporary virtual world. The audiobook reader Jenny Sterlin is prime. View all my reviews
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