The Farthest Shore by Ursula K. Le Guin
My rating: 5 of 5 stars A Perfect Conclusion to a Great Trilogy The concluding book of Ursula K. Le Guin’s first Earthsea Trilogy, The Farthest Shore (1972), begins with Arren, son of the prince of Enlad, gone to Roke, Isle of the Wise, there to get counsel at the famous School for Wizards for the troubles in his home island: magic is dying, joy fading, luck failing, and disease spreading. Arren is a boy not quite yet a man, not exactly a pampered prince, but thus far in his life a facile player of games. But Arren’s name means sword, and he’s descended from the legendary Morred and Elfarran, and when he meets the middle-aged Archmage Ged, the most powerful man in Earthsea, he takes “the first step out of childhood… without looking before or behind, without caution, and with nothing held in reserve,” falling in (hero-worship) love with the Archmage. And when, “awkward, radiant, obedient,” he offers his service to Ged, we sense that some important destiny has been set in motion for the long-kingless archipelago. Because the disturbing situation on Arren’s home island has been occurring throughout Earthsea, Ged decides to take the youth on a voyage to seek the cause of the draining of the magic from life and world. Told from the point of view of Arren (as A Wizard of Earthsea is told from that of Ged and The Tombs of Atuan from that of Tenar), The Farthest Shore becomes an increasingly metaphysical sea-road story, as Ged and Arren visit a series of islands (including a trade island, a craft island, a hostile island, a raft island, and a remote island) in their attempt to locate the source of what’s wrong with Earthsea. For the reader, Arren is a perfect travel companion for Ged, being eager, brave, and ignorant--providing opportunities for the older man to dispense Le Guin’s gnomic wisdom, about balance and imbalance, being and doing, life and death, good and evil, nature and humanity, and more, as in the following exchange: “Nature is not unnatural. This is not a righting of the balance but an upsetting of it. There is only one creature who can do that.” “A man,” Arren said, tentative. “We men.” “How?” “By an unmeasured desire for life.” “For life? But it isn’t wrong to want to live?” “No. But when we crave power over life—endless wealth, unassailable safety, immortality—then desire becomes greed. And if knowledge allies itself to that greed, then comes evil. Then the balance of the world is swayed, and ruin weighs heavy in the scale.” Such stern lessons wax poetic and bracing: “To refuse death is to refuse life” “Lebannen, this is. And thou art. There is no safety, and there is no end. The word must be heard in silence; there must be darkness to see the stars. The dance is always danced above the hollow place, above the terrible abyss.’” “That there is only one power that is real and worth the having. And that is the power, not to take, but to accept.” And Arren learns: “I have given my love to what is worthy of love. Is that not the kingdom and the unperishing spring?” The pair’s journey is not easy. There are dangers: slavers, madmen, drugs, dragons, and above all, the tall man in Arren’s dreams, the king of shadows, the great enemy standing in the dark and beckoning with a pearl of light. There are devastating developments, as when Arren becomes estranged from Ged, or when Ged realizes that something he did when younger is responsible for the current draining of magic and life from Earthsea. Set in the dry land across the wall, the last chapters comprise a harrowing sequence. Arren poignantly becomes the leader and Ged the follower: “I use your love as a man burns a candle, to light his way. And we must go on.” The climactic “boss” confrontation is less surprising than that in A Wizard of Earthsea but is just as sublime and more shocking in its ramifications (developed in Tehanu: The Fourth Book of Earthsea). As the first novel in the trilogy is about accepting our light and dark parts so that we may mature and live good lives, and the second is about choosing the light and life rather than the dark and death, this third one is about being fully aware of life and death and accepting both. Moreover, because the releasing of Ged’s shadow into Earthsea in A Wizard of Earthsea and the opening of the hole in Earthsea in The Farthest Shore both derive from Ged’s having acted in anger and vanity, the third novel bookends the first, and by extending the effects of such ill actions from Ged’s self to his world, it perfectly concludes the original trilogy, which as a whole expresses the idea that our actions influence our lives and world in unexpected ways. Despite being a quest novel, The Farthest Shore demonstrates that being is superior to doing and that even young people—who have much to do and must learn from their mistakes and should achieve big things—should understand that fully aware being is the “greater kingdom.” Or “Dragons do not do. They are.” The book also says that life is wonderful because it ends, that the price we pay for life is death, “That selfhood which is our torment, and our treasure, and our humanity, does not endure. It changes; it is gone, a wave on the sea,” and that we have sufficient immortality in being part of the natural cycles of the world. The audiobook reader, Rob Inglis, is prime, but I can’t help but feel that he’s reading The Lord of the Rings, with, for instance, Ged talking like Gandalf, and I wish that they’d found an equally fine American reader for the book, like George Guidall or Jonathan Davis. Like all of the Earthsea books, this one is marked by concise, vivid, poetic prose, with each word and each sentence being just right, like this: “The living splendor that was revealed about them in the silent, desolate land, as if by a power of enchantment surpassing any other, in every blade of the wind-bowed grass, every shadow, every stone. So when one stands in a cherished place for the last time before a voyage without return, he sees it all whole, and real, and dear, as he has never seen it before and never will see it again.” View all my reviews
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