David Mitchell on Le Guin's Earthsea

I've written briefly several times about my love for Ursula Le Guin's A Wizard of Earthsea books (see here and here). They were my Harry Potter and played a prominent role in developing my interest in SFF.

Recently, David Mitchell, the author of Cloud Atlas and The Bone Clocks wrote a lovely tribute to these books for The Guardian: David Mitchell on Earthsea – a rival to Tolkien and George RR Martin.

For Mitchell, Earthsea was instrumental in making him want to become a writer:

Growing up, I adored A Wizard of Earthsea, Le Guin’s slim but muscular 1968 novel, which I read and reread until my ratty old paperback copy required emergency surgery, and I still have a precious memory of getting to the last page for the umpteenth time, staring at the final line – “and Yarrow ran to meet them, crying with joy” – and realising with a giddy clarity that being a goalkeeper or inventor or forester was yesterday’s news, and that I had to be a writer and nothing else would do. I yearned to do to other people what A Wizard of Earthsea had just done to me – even if I couldn’t articulate exactly what that was.

Mitchell does a great job articulating what it was about Earthsea that resonated for so many of us. Unlike many earlier magical fantasies, where the wizard was some version of Merlin, "a Caucasian scholarly aristocrat amongst sorcerers, who appears fully formed and with little room for character development," the protagonist of Earthsea is Ged, who starts as a young lad from a tiny island, transforms into a brash student, and grows to become a powerful wizard. This makes him understandable to anyone who has gone through adolescence.

The world of Earthsea is also rich and, thankfully, free of many of the worst Tolkien clichés:

Earthsea is a fantasy world, and proud of it, mapped by its creator in 1966–7 on a large sheet of butcher’s paper with crayons in a house full of young children. Earthsea has magic, dragons, its own myths and prehistory; but its magic is weighted with metaphysics, its dragons are psychodragons of air and mind, more akin to dangerous Chinese sages than Tolkien’s Smaug; and Earthsea is so human a world – with trade-routes, local politics, class hierarchies, infant mortality, abuse, addiction and slavery – that its fantastical elements feel almost quotidian. Even Earthsea’s islands, with names such as Atnini, Komokome, Selidor and the Isle of the Ear, have a habit of morphing into islands in each reader’s memory: the Hebrides, the Cyclades, the islands of the Seto Inland Sea, or Hawaii.

 It is also free of the worst of Tolkien's racial styereotypes:

In contrast to Tolkien’s Middle-earth, where what is western and white is good, Earthsea’s Arians, the Kargad raiders, are “a savage people, white-skinned, yellow-haired, and fierce, liking the sight of blood and the smell of burning towns”. Ged’s skin is copper-brown, “like most Gontishmen”; his friend Vetch would pass as a sub-Saharan African; and in the third book of Earthsea, The Farthest Shore, Ged will owe his life to a “floating tribe” of raft people in the Southern Reach whose Polynesian-inflected folkways match their complexions.

The books are also more cerebral than many epic fantasies.

Chief among its concerns are morality, identity and power. In The Farthest Shore the Master Patterner on Roke will ask Ged, “What is evil?” and be answered, “A web we men weave,” but the seed of this theme is germinating in A Wizard of Earthsea. From Beowulf to Tolkien, to countless formulaic fantasy movies at a multiplex near you, the genre generates two-dimensional Manichaean struggles between Good and Evil, in which morality’s shades of grey are reduced to one black and one white. The real world, as most of us know (if not all presidents and prime ministers), is rarely so monochromatic, and neither is Earthsea. Ged’s quest is not to take down a Lord of Darkness but to learn the nature of the shadow that his vanity, anger and hatred set loose – to master it, by learning its nature and its name. “All my acts have their echo in it,” says Ged of his shadow; “it is my creature.” The climax of A Wizard of Earthsea is not the magical shootout that lesser novels would have ended with, but the high-risk enactment of a process Jung called “individuation”, in which the warring parts of the psyche integrate into a wiser, stronger whole. To quote Le Guin again: “In serious fantasy, the real battle is moral or internal … To do good, heroes must know or learn that the ‘axis of evil’ is within them.”

Lastly, Mitchell also points out the difficulty of writing fantasy fiction well:

Style and voice are the Scylla and Charybdis of fantasy novels, where many authors of duller literary gifts than Le Guin’s come undone. Quality writing within genre is harder, not easier, because the ground is so mined with cliche. A cod-historic narratorial voice in a fantasy novel feels like being locked inside a medieval theme park; neologisms will jar – one use of “totally awesome” will puncture a fantasy world; but a studied neutrality of style tastes like clingfilm. What is needed is a high-wire balancing act, which Le Guin pulls off with deceptive effortlessness. Ged’s story is told with the calm authority of an age-old Icelandic saga, yet stitched here and there with passages of pure beauty for its own sake.

I think Mitchell does a masterful job explaining what it is that we love about these books; far better than I could have done myself. All in all, this is a fitting tribute to Le Guin just days after her 86th birthday.