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Loading... The farthest shore (original 1972; edition 1974)by Ursula K. Le Guin
Work InformationThe Farthest Shore by Ursula K. Le Guin (1972)
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Sign up for LibraryThing to find out whether you'll like this book. No current Talk conversations about this book. The Farthest Shore is the third book in Ursula Le Guin’s EARTHSEA series, and the concluding one for several decades. This wraps up Le Guin's original trilogy of Ged, better known as Sparrowhawk, the greatest wizard of Earthsea. It's a story about death, the deathlands, and the end of magic. It's dour subject matter. In a way, some of the themes of this book reminded me of The Last Jedi. Ged is essentially hermit Luke. The subject matter of this story is great but it is sad to see a character we just felt like we getting to know fade and his powers disappear. Its hard to bear. That is why in a similar fashion, The Last Jedi was a challenging film: it is hard to say goodbye to beloved characters, it is even harder to see them go through temptations and trails. Its hard to see our heroes lose, become old, and face the realms of death. What is The Farthest Shore about? Well, Darkness threatens to overtake Earthsea: the world and its wizards are losing their magic. Despite being wearied with age, Ged Sparrowhawk — Archmage (head of the magic school on Roke), wizard, and dragonlord — embarks on a daring, treacherous journey, accompanied by Enlad's young Prince Arren, to discover the reasons behind this devastating pattern of loss. Together they will sail to the farthest reaches of their world — even beyond the realm of death — as they seek to restore magic to a land desperately thirsty for it. This of course is a wonderfully written work but as many readers have noted, it is hard to read about magic going out of the world and Earthsea becoming horrible. It is in many ways also hard to identify with Ged and Arren. Le Guin said this is about death, but as Jo Walton noted: it’s about the way the fear of death sucks all the joy out of life. That's a tough pill to swallow in a so-called children's book but it is true and real and brutally honest. In some ways this is much more like a conventional fantasy novel than the first two, which are small scale. Here we have a familiar fantasy troupe: a dark lord seeking and promising eternal life (cough cough way to rip off Le Guin J.K. Rowling!) It was hard to read through this book because well, it is often bleak, but the ending does offer a ray of hope, don't worry. This is still a vivid, philosophical work of the imagination, one that I think in time will grow on me, but I found it to be a more challenging read in comparison with the first two Earthsea novels. This third Earthsea book exhausts my reread of that series from my childhood, so that I can now continue to the later volumes. Each of these books has been more surprising (i.e. poorly remembered) than the last. Ged is now the aged Archmage of Roke, and a new character Arren takes on the burden of the young adult viewpoint. Although he becomes Ged's companion, he is not an apprentice wizard. He is instead a princeling who could fulfill the promise of a renewed kingship offered by Ged and Tenar's restoration of the Ring of Erreth-Akbe. (Tenar, "the White Lady of Gont," is mentioned only briefly: 10, 200.) For all that The Tombs of Atuan was dark and often oppressive, The Farthest Shore is gritty and nasty in ways unprecedented for this series, quickly bringing in slavery, drug abuse, and criminal violence. Magic is perishing, and magicians are being maddened and persecuted. The full ordeal offered to Arren resembles in several ways that of Ged in A Wizard of Earthsea, but it is more extraverted. He is devoted to the Archmage, and struggles with the sense of duty kindled in him by their relationship. The foe that they ultimately confront is not of Arren's making, but indirectly (and once more) of Ged's. Le Guin's 2012 afterword in this edition treats her exploratory approach to authoring fiction and how she learned about dragons in the writing of this book. It also discusses her unbelief in pie-in-the-sky-when-you-die and laments the social and spiritual deficits of capitalism. I was a little surprised to find her reflections here setting The Farthest Shore into a shared cultural space with Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas. Postscript: If the Evangelical Satanism-scaremongers and biblioclastic Moms for Liberty really knew about this sort of literature, this book would reasonably take pride of place on their delenda agendas. The story is a terrific indictment of their sort of "faith" and the "savior" they espouse.
As adventure narrative this lacks the concrete tensions of its predecessors, but once more the themes -- centering here on the "unmeasured desire for life" and its misapplications -- are deeply embedded in the action (though far from peculiar to the imagined kingdom of Earthsea) Is contained inInspiredAwardsNotable Lists
A young prince joins forces with a master wizard on a journey to discover a cause and remedy for the loss of magic in Earthsea. No library descriptions found. |
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That said, this is classic LeGuin. It's hard to go wrong with spending time reading her. Recommended.