The Other Wind by Ursula K. Le Guin
My rating: 4 of 5 stars The End of Earthsea, or Dreams and Dragons, the Living and the Dead The Other Wind (2001) begins fifteen years after the end of Tehanu (1990), as small-town sorcerer Alder (from Taon), whose gift is to mend things, travels to Gont to see seventy-year-old Ged (the former Archmage) to tell him his trouble: every night in his sleep he has been visiting the dry land of the dead and is terrified that they will make him free them to return to the world of the living. It started with a dream where his beloved, recently deceased wife's soul kissed him—bruising his mouth—and asked him to free her. Since then, crowds of dead souls have been asking him the same thing. Unable to help Alder, the “wise” wizards of Roke (Masters of magic) have sent him to consult Ged. When Ged starts dreaming of the dry land, too, he reckons that some change is happening and working through Alder. Ged gets good old Aunty Moss to give Alder one of her kittens, and when the feline sleeps with him its warm touch prevents him from dreaming: “Maybe a cat is as good as a master of Roke.” Finally, Ged sends Alder on to Havnor, where Tenar and Tehanu are staying in the palace of King Lebannen to advise him about the increasingly aggressive dragon incursions into the Archipelago, sensing a connection between the dreams and the dragons… The rest of the compact novel sets out to resolve the outstanding issues from the earlier stories: death and dragons and human beings and animals. It also develops the characters of people we’ve come to love in Earthsea, like Lebannen, Tehanu, Tenar, and Ged, while introducing compelling new ones like Alder and the Kargish “barbarian” princess Seserakh. There is dragon diplomacy; a multi-national, multi-class, multi-species, multi-gender quest; a cute gambling game played with the islands of the Archipelago as stakes; and an unexpected way for Alder to employ his mending gift after he’s surrendered it. The Other Wind is an unusual book. It’s a page-turner that made me forget everything in the real world outside for hours at a time as I was reading, while lacking almost all the usual kinds of heroic fantasy action. We hear in passing about King Lebannen taking out a bad slavery piracy kind of force a while ago, and we hear references to things like a wizard dueling a dragon to mutual death long ago, but the present adventure is psychological, emotional, and spiritual rather than physical. There is no dark lord figure like Cob in The Farthest Shore, but rather a bad choice that some influential people made a long time ago. Although the stakes couldn’t be higher, the novel may bore people who require plenty of violent action in black-white conflicts between good-evil. As for me, I reread many sentences several times to savor their rhythm, image, idea, beauty, or power, like when Alder is introducing his dream about his dead wife to Ged: After a while he said, “We had great joy.” “I see that.” “And my sorrow was in that degree.” The old man nodded. “I could bear it” Alder said. “You know how it is. There is not much reason to be living that I could see, but I could bear it.” “Yes.” “But in the winter. Two months after her death. There was a dream came to me. She was in the dream.” “Tell it.” Or like when Ged, who has permanently used up all his power and is “just” an old man, watches Alder (with nostalgia if not envy) as he mends a Tenar’s favorite broken pitcher: “Now, fascinated, he watched Alder's hands. Slender, strong, deft, unhurried, they cradled the shape of the pitcher, stroking and fitting and settling the pieces of pottery, urging and caressing, the thumbs coaxing and guiding the smaller fragments into place, reuniting them, reassuring them. While he worked he murmured a two-word, tuneless chant. They were words of the Old Speech. Ged knew and did not know their meaning. Alder's face was serene, all stress and sorrow gone: a face so wholly absorbed in time and task that timeless calm shone through it. His hands separated from the pitcher, opening out from it like the sheath of a flower opening. It stood on the oak table, whole. He looked at it with quiet pleasure.” I like that Le Guin doesn't put people above animals as Pullman kind of does in His Dark Materials. “What’s the difference between animals and us? Maybe the difference isn’t language but that animals do and are, while we choose what we do? They’re beyond good and evil, but we have to choose them?” Anyway, we should all be part of the same cycle of life and death. It is neat how she depicts Seserakh as a lioness with humor and courage and beauty (of course) and brains, and it is moving and effective how she shows the King get over his fear of her (and of women in a group) through the course of the adventure. I'm still sad that Ged refuses to have any contact with Lebannen, who loves him and would do anything he wanted him to do. I know Le Guin is showing Ged as being done with doing and not wanting to be perceived as influencing the young king, but it still seems a little too unsentimental (if not perverse) to deny the reader (this reader!?) a little reunion candy. I also think that she may do a BIT too much summarizing of events from the past novels and “Dragonfly” so as to bring readers new to Earthsea up to speed here; at times it reads like a Greatest Earthsea Hits medley. Anyway, Le Guin is a great writer of ethical, moral, emotional, spiritual, and philosophical fantasy; simple on the surface but with depths beneath and behind; capable of sublime scenes and earthy ones. And it is amazing how what happens in this book to solve the mystery of humans and dragons and life and death does nothing to violate the first book she wrote in the series back in 1968, almost as though she knew where she'd end up. It shows how carefully thought out and rich her created world and stories in it are. (However, it also thins her fantasy world of much of its fantasy.) Almost every word in this novel is where it should be; everything works for and towards her metaphoric and symbolic and thematic ends. The audiobook reader Samuel Roukin is fine, with a nice British voice and a perfect manner for Ged and Alder, except for one nearly fatal flaw: he distractingly keeps changing the pronunciation of Irian’s name, sometimes within the speech of a single character. 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