A Wizard of Earthsea

The writing was beautiful and the world building interesting, but the pace was slow and the story clearly sexist.

A Wizard of Earthsea is a classic fantasy story about a Ged, a great sorcerer who makes a mistake when he’s a student. His mistake unleashes a terrible and unnamed shadow creature, which will destroy him if it can and then wreck havoc upon the world. The story’s reminiscent of a fable or fairy tale. The writing’s lyrical, and characters tend to be simplistically described. As other reviewers have pointed out, Le Guin tends to tell instead of show. I didn’t have too much of a problem with this aspect – for me, it added to the fable-like feeling of the story.

My biggest problem with A Wizard of Earthsea is that it’s show more openly sexist. Magic is explicitly only for men, and if a woman’s using magic, she’s clearly evil and ineffective:

“Weak as women’s magic” (page 5)

“Wicked as women’s magic” (page 6)

The few female characters present are primarily evil - Serret and Ged’s aunt for instance. Yarrow’s the only notably good female character, and she’s Ged’s best friend’s little sister who shows up in the second to last chapter. Her role is to look sweet and ask Ged questions. She’s described as beautiful but stupid:

Spoken by her brother: “This is my sister, the youngest of us, prettier than I am you see, but much less clever” (page 169)
Spoken by Yarrow herself: “I wish I could truly understand what you tell me. I am too stupid” (page 177)

All in all, it’s a rather vile image. The only good women are pretty, powerless, and stupid. They serve their men and don’t take actions of their own. I’m given to understand that this changes later in the series. The second book for instance, has a female protagonist. However, don’t expect to find any good female characters or even a book with female characters present in the plot in A Wizard of Earthsea.

The majority of characters do have dark skin, which makes it atypical, especially for a fantasy book published in the 1960s. While this is laudable, I’d have trouble recommending this book to anyone because of the prevalent sexism. show less

A Wizard of Earthsea was an early venture into "YA Fantasy" publishing, and it set much of the pattern for the wizard bildungsroman that later made the fortune of the world's richest woman. More than half a century after its original publication, it holds up very well. It is certainly a better book than its more "successful" imitators. I first read it when I was less than ten years old, and I had forgotten many of the details and much of the structure--despite in the interim having sampled some of the attempts to adapt it to the screen.

While the publishing press and the author herself have been quick to compare this high fantasy Earthsea to Tolkien's Middle Earth, I found the style far more reminiscent of Lord Dunsany, an author praised show more elsewhere by Le Guin with language similar to her remarks in the 2012 afterword to Wizard. There she mentions other fantasy literature that "mostly lurked in small secondhand bookshops smelling of cats and mildew" (262). To the extent that this book is an "epic" fantasy, it is more Odyssey than Illiad, deliberately spurning the matter of great wars and killer heroes.

As an orientation to esoteric wisdom, Le Guin's work far exceeds more recent tales of "wizard school." The teachings of Lao Tzu that she imbibed at her father's knee are evident in the magic of Earthsea. She has one clinker in her diction, where she misuses "adept" to mean "neophyte" (26). That lexical slip is far outweighed by such musings as this:

"You thought, as a boy, that a mage is one who can do anything. So I thought, once. So did we all. And the truth is that as a man's real power grows and his knowledge widens, ever the way he can follow grows narrower: until at last he chooses nothing, but does only and wholly what he must do ..." (99, italics and ellipsis in original)

Le Guin quietly but consciously twitted racial preconceptions of US readers when writing this book, but she admittedly conformed to received gender types for fantasy literature (263). As a result, the business with Serret reflects Aleister Crowley's observation that "the neophyte is nearly always tempted by a woman."

My reread of this novel was undertaken with a view to reading the entire Earthsea cycle of six volumes. Only the first three of these had existed for my childhood reading. As a reading project, then, it shares elements of my mature returns to Susan Cooper's Dark Is Rising books (a series about magic enjoyed in my childhood) and Gene Wolfe's Solar Cycle (a reread in order to approach the volumes subsequently published). I'm only encouraged by this first book. show less

Since I am probably the only person in the world not to have read the Earthsea Quartet as a child, when I found a copy of A Wizard of Earthsea for £2 in a charity shop, I thought I had better remedy my ignorance. I'm really sorry now that I didn't find it when I was younger—I can see my eight or nine-year-old self loving these books immensely. Even as an adult reading it for the first time, I have to admit that it is very finely written. Le Guin has this great ability to write in the measured, formal language of high fantasy without it seeming stiff or forced. The anthropology stuff was a real delight, as well—in two hundred pages, Le Guin manages to build a world which seems more real, more plausible, and more inclusive than show more anything that, say, George R.R. Martin conjured up in a work six times the length. I'll have to look out for the rest of the series, I think. show less

I can't remember how many years it's been since I read anything by Ursula K. Le Guin, nor do I recall what it was that I read. So when Le Guin appeared in an article recently, it was a good excuse to reacquaint myself with one of her classics, A Wizard of Earthsea.

Sparrowhawk is young when a wizard sees his talent and takes him as an apprentice, but a hunger for power leads him to unloose on the world a dark and evil magic. As he grows and increases in ability, he finds himself facing the temptation to use the power he has unleashed. However, power does not come without a cost, and Sparrowhawk soon understands that he must face the evil he has unleashed, or it will undo him and the world.

Though A Wizard of Earthsea is the first of the show more Earthsea novels, Le Guin wrote two short stories in the Earthsea world several years before. Several of the novels have won awards, including the Newberry and a Nebula. I've not read them, but I enjoyed A Wizard of Earthsea enough that I plan to collect and read the series.

That said, reading A Wizard of Earthsea was a flash back to an age of fantasy writing that is long gone, where the explanation for magic is less important than thematic development and handwavium hocus pocus. Where Brandon Sanderson might use a magic system that is highly scientific, with rules for operations, Le Guin's style of magic owes more to Tolkien and is more reminiscent of something that might be familiar to readers of folk tales and stories centered on Medieval Europe. Power is in knowing the name of something, its true name, and a few select individuals are able to draw on that power to manipulate the world around them in ways beyond the understanding of the average person. These are wizards.

Le Guin weaves into Sparrowhawk's story a theme centering on the allure and danger of power, not only in the wrong hands, but also in the right ones. Even the good and decent can be corrupted by power, and short of discipline, agency, and self-sacrifice power will destroy those who wield it. One could imagine that Le Guin's story, published in 1968 at the height of the Cold War and the space race, was not without reflection in the real world. show less

Ursula K. Le Guin truly took me full circle with this one! I started out A Wizard of Earthsea disliking whiny, defensive, know-it-all teenage Ged, and then gradually grew to love him over the course of the book.

Le Guin has a removed style of writing, and my emotional reaction to her writing always sneaks up on me! She got me good with the conclusion of The Left Hand of Darkness, and she got me good with this one, too. By the end, I was in tears!

I loved that the magic system has to do with knowing the true names of things. While the magic system explanation stayed vague, Le Guin made sure to give it limitations, which made me feel like I understood the scope of it better.

A Wizard of Earthsea features some truly beautiful sentences and show more word choices! I was often in awe of Le Guin’s ability to write. The book's downside, and ultimately what made it not quite reach 5 star status for me, was how little dialogue there is. Every time a character spoke, I perked up, but then it would be pages and pages without dialogue - beautifully written pages, no doubt, but I still wanted more conversations between the characters.

I think A Wizard of Earthsea will appeal to readers who enjoy books similar to The Lord of the Rings series, and who appreciate reading slower paced, thoughtful books with less dialogue. For those readers, I highly recommend this! show less

You know how you read things for the adventure and the excitement and the danger? Thrill-seeking, one of the more basic forms of escapism, where you can slip into the adventurer's skin and and experience their wild ride by proxy. I loved that. I was addicted to that. How on earth did I find this, then, and keep going back to it? Obviously I picked it up because it's a fantasy novel and I was all Lord Of The Rings yay! But this... this is a carefully crafted, masterfully controlled piece of literature. It is full of adventures and physical and spiritual dangers, but it's not written as an adventure narrative. Look, this is all my way of saying that after rereading it for the first time in about twenty five years, I found myself on the show more verge of tears every second or third chapter. It is a book full of deeply moving moments, and of profound, human insights and tenderness and friendship and redemption and finding wisdom after folly and hard experience. It's an adventure story, all right. The story of a young man who makes a dreadful mistake and who must confront the mistake before it consumes him. I just don't remember ever before putting the book down when the young men have returned and Yarrow runs to greet them with tears in my eyes. On a Monday morning in the middle of the dismantling of the Electric Picnic, no less. show less

Sweetly told coming-of-age story, that preaches Daoism as much as Daoism may be praught. I loved how it takes a very male story and turns machismo into a self-punishing weakness, but was also troubled by how even Le Guin wrote a story in which the women were all minor characters and very limited in what they could do. I gather later Earthsea books fix that, and look forward to them.