Ursula LeGuin: Earthsea

[Dave101]

Does anyone remember Ursula LeGuin's Earthsea Trilogy?
The original Earthsea Trilogy was published in the 60's, chronicling the adventures of the wizard Ged, from boyhood to middle age. Based primarily on a Taoist worldview the three novels, A Wizard of Earthsea, The Tombs of Atuan and The Farthest Shore were in my view among the very best fantasies written for children (or indeed anyone) and made a deep impression on me as a child.
Decades later LeGuin continued the Earthsea saga with Tehanu, followed by Tales of Earthsea and concluding with The Other Wind. These later books have sharply divided fans of the original Trilogy and in my opinion were not of the same quality. It seems she had been harshly criticised by feminists for making the original Earthsea too patriarchal and in later books she deconstructs it, seemingly abandoning the Taoist principles that made the first three books so distinctive.
Of course as the author she had the right to do as she pleased with her own creation, but it's not a particularly gratifying experience for those who loved the original books for what they were.

[Courtenay]

Hi Dave,

Yes, I remember them! I read the original trilogy when I was 11 and really enjoyed the first book, thought the second was pretty good and was disappointed with the third for some reason, I can't quite remember why. Tehanu I read a couple of years later and it didn't grab me either. I don't remember it being particularly more "feminist" than the earlier ones except that it focussed mainly on Tenar, who'd already been the central character in The Tombs of Atuan, but now she was older and looking after a young girl who'd been badly disfigured by burns. There was something supposedly special about the girl, but I can't remember what it was and I don't remember her actually doing anything important, disappointingly — the story just didn't seem to have much of a plot compared to the earlier books.

What I do remember picking up as very forward-thinking for her time was Ursula Le Guin's decision to make the (mainly) good characters in Earthsea dark-skinned — well, "red-brown" and some of them "black-brown" — and their enemies white-skinned. That would have been a pretty radical idea in the late 1960s / early '70s and I recall very clearly that the Puffin paperback edition of A Wizard of Earthsea, which I was reading as an 11-year-old, had a cover illustration depicting the characters as white, presumably because the publishers were scared that a book with "coloured people" on the cover wouldn't sell. (Shame on you, Penguin!!)

I was only vaguely aware that Le Guin had written other Earthsea stories after Tehanu, but that one had already put me off and I'm not surprised to hear that some fans think she should have left it at the first three. It's annoying when an author spins a series out for too long and the later books are of lower quality than the earlier ones (well, some would say Enid Blyton did the same with the Famous Five in particular), and yet one has to accept them as "canon" because they're still the original author's work. As C.S. Lewis said at some stage — I'm having to paraphrase him, because I can't find this quote online and I don't remember where I read it: "There are two points at which you can stop doing something. One is before everyone is tired of it — and the other is after."

[Dave101]

Hi Courtney
I actually liked the third book best of all!

I think the problem goes beyond just spinning out a series too long. It's the large gap in time between the writing of Tehanu and the original trilogy. With such a long gap a writer's literary style will probably have changed and so will his/her worldview, sometimes quite drastically. The same thing happened with Alan Garner's Cheshire Edge series. The original two books,The Weirdstone of Brisingamen and The Moon of Gomrath were very much fantasies in the Lewis/Tolkien tradition. The third book Boneland, written decades later is in a completely different style and seems to deconstruct the first two books, even hinting that the events in them did not actually happen.
Once at least a decade has passed without a series being continued it's probably better not to carry on with it, as it's very likely to disappoint fans of the original books

[Courtenay]

Yes, that's a good point about the gap in time between the writing of books in a series. I was just trying to think of another series I know where that happened and remembered the Silver Brumby series by Elyne Mitchell — probably not so well known outside Australia, where I come from, but they're about a wild horse (brumby) and his descendants living in the Australian high country. The first four books in the series are absolutely brilliant — I discovered them when I was about 11 and avidly lapped them up. Then I was surprised to discover that the fifth and sixth books felt totally different — some of the same characters, but written in a much more vague and dreamy kind of style in which very little actually happened plot-wise, unlike the earlier books.

I checked the publication dates and found that there was a gap between the fourth (1966) and fifth (1973) — only seven years, but obviously long enough for the author's style to change. I later found out that she'd written another book in that interim, also about brumbies, but in this much more mystical and less action-driven style, with some characters that then appeared in the fifth Silver Brumby book. Obviously she decided a few years later to revive her earlier series and tie this newer book in with it, but apparently not noticing (or not caring) that she was now writing in a very different way from how she wrote her earlier books.

Then at about the time I was reading the series — the early to mid-1990s — Mitchell published several more books under the "Silver Brumby series" tag, which I tried reading and soon found they were even more vague and plotless and even less satisfying to fans (like myself) of the original four! Reminding myself of them makes me want to collect and read them again, but only those first four, thank you very much...