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4.15 AVERAGE
4.15 AVERAGE
A great followup to [b:A Wizard of Earthsea|59920|A Wizard of Earthsea (Earthsea Cycle, #1)|Ursula K. Le Guin|https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1170537240l/59920._SY75_.jpg|113603], we follow this time a young girl named Tenar stripped of her name from the age of five, and made to be the reincarnation of the First Priestess of the Dark Ones.
She doesn't understand anything at first, as she is five. She learns the rituals, at first for interest, then she firmly believing believe her to be the ruler of her domain, only answering to her unheard Masters.
She learns everything about her "self" (the Priestess), and her Labyrinth (the drawing of which is included, like the map of Earthsea in the last book). A world of darkness, "where no light ever shone".
And we see the politics of the land, as they are teaching the girl a history she "already knows," how the temples to the male gods were usurped by the erstwhile kings, then Godkings, but her women-only temple remains untouched.
An interesting type of Character that I'd like to see again: though Tenar is an individual herself, just born the same night within searching distance when the previous priestess died, she is raised to be the same woman : "this is your bedroom, don't you remember?" from a young age so that she believes it herself. This has been done for this Priestess title since time immemorial, the same indoctrination by attendants who teach their attendants. In short, while each priestess is individual, the Individual of the High Priestess has a continuance since the beginning of the temple. It sort of reminds me of Doctor Who in that manner, except that the memories of previous incarnations are given to her, taught to her as if they were her own. This has a great implication for plasticity of the mind and the power of religious organizations to manipulate reality, even when they have no clear concept of 'why'.
And then one day she meets the Sparrowhawk.
Though an Archmage of the West, these white folk don't have wizards and Tenar's cloistered life hasn't seen them, or even the sea. When she escapes that world (minor spoiler but it's an inevitable plotline) he reassures her telling her she is now free. Which relates to me for the difficult transition to a world post-religion, leaving the cults of theistic thoughts, dumping all you know, which amounts to nothing more than a map of a crummy labyrinth and some ceremonial dances.
But oh, the Brave new world / That hath such people in't... the fact that she's racially cloistered as well (pretty much only the Kardish lands have white people on this ... planet? world? I'm pretty sure it's at least flat if not non-continuous-- you can't reach east by going west...) more reminders of growing up on the prairies especially in Catholic schools in the 80s-90s..
Anyway, I do like Le Guin's magic, which is even rare in this book, but much more naturalistic than hocus pocus wave a wand. Illusion is easy, especially for the uninitiated, you can make a burlap sack pretend to look like an evening gown (As a church can make mental diversity look like sin). But if you want to change something, you have to change its essence and its relationship to all other things. To know a thing's true name gives you power over a thing. Ged can command a rabbit to come to him, but to use that power to get an easy meal for the night is wrong, simply because it is a breach of trust; not because some cosmic entity or Dark Ones or Magical Ministry will punish him.
Anyway first few chapters are slow ish but it gets good fast in the last couple.
She doesn't understand anything at first, as she is five. She learns the rituals, at first for interest, then she firmly believing believe her to be the ruler of her domain, only answering to her unheard Masters.
She learns everything about her "self" (the Priestess), and her Labyrinth (the drawing of which is included, like the map of Earthsea in the last book). A world of darkness, "where no light ever shone".
And we see the politics of the land, as they are teaching the girl a history she "already knows," how the temples to the male gods were usurped by the erstwhile kings, then Godkings, but her women-only temple remains untouched.
An interesting type of Character that I'd like to see again: though Tenar is an individual herself, just born the same night within searching distance when the previous priestess died, she is raised to be the same woman : "this is your bedroom, don't you remember?" from a young age so that she believes it herself. This has been done for this Priestess title since time immemorial, the same indoctrination by attendants who teach their attendants. In short, while each priestess is individual, the Individual of the High Priestess has a continuance since the beginning of the temple. It sort of reminds me of Doctor Who in that manner, except that the memories of previous incarnations are given to her, taught to her as if they were her own. This has a great implication for plasticity of the mind and the power of religious organizations to manipulate reality, even when they have no clear concept of 'why'.
And then one day she meets the Sparrowhawk.
Though an Archmage of the West, these white folk don't have wizards and Tenar's cloistered life hasn't seen them, or even the sea. When she escapes that world (minor spoiler but it's an inevitable plotline) he reassures her telling her she is now free. Which relates to me for the difficult transition to a world post-religion, leaving the cults of theistic thoughts, dumping all you know, which amounts to nothing more than a map of a crummy labyrinth and some ceremonial dances.
But oh, the Brave new world / That hath such people in't... the fact that she's racially cloistered as well (pretty much only the Kardish lands have white people on this ... planet? world? I'm pretty sure it's at least flat if not non-continuous-- you can't reach east by going west...) more reminders of growing up on the prairies especially in Catholic schools in the 80s-90s..
Anyway, I do like Le Guin's magic, which is even rare in this book, but much more naturalistic than hocus pocus wave a wand. Illusion is easy, especially for the uninitiated, you can make a burlap sack pretend to look like an evening gown (As a church can make mental diversity look like sin). But if you want to change something, you have to change its essence and its relationship to all other things. To know a thing's true name gives you power over a thing. Ged can command a rabbit to come to him, but to use that power to get an easy meal for the night is wrong, simply because it is a breach of trust; not because some cosmic entity or Dark Ones or Magical Ministry will punish him.
Anyway first few chapters are slow ish but it gets good fast in the last couple.
Something about this book really fascinated me. I think it's the idea of being a secret-keeper, the one person who is privy to something remarkable and special. I found the resolution a little heartbreaking for this reason, though the deeper themes of the dangers of such secrecy are also very interesting.
A young girl becomes High Priestess to the Nameless Ones whose power is in the dark labyrinth under their temple. Her life changes when a wizard comes to steal from the great treasure. What will she do with the trespasser? And how while this change her life?
An interesting book, where we find out more about the history/folklore of Earthsea, all while our protagonists find their own place in that history/folklore. It's more a 3.5, but am going to round up to 4 stars.
An interesting book, where we find out more about the history/folklore of Earthsea, all while our protagonists find their own place in that history/folklore. It's more a 3.5, but am going to round up to 4 stars.
*As always, this review is intended for others who have already read the novel, so there are plenty of spoilers ahead.*
This is my first time reading through the Earthsea cycle, and I’m ordering the books as I go, one at a time. When I got halfway through The Tombs of Atuan, I went to Amazon to order the next book, The Farthest Shore (because, sadly, our library doesn’t carry it). I’ve seen excited posts in the last week or two about the new illustrated collected volume of the Earthsea books, a thousand-page, hardbound edition full of quality illustrations. So I considered getting that instead of buying the 2012 rereleases that I have been getting. But I didn’t, in part because I didn’t want an artist’s interpretation of the texts coming between me and what I was reading for the first time. The illustrations are really fantastic, and on second readings, I would love to see them to see how they align with my own mental pictures. But the real reason I’m sticking with the editions I’m reading is that they include an afterword written by Le Guin herself in 2012. As I said in my review of A Wizard of Earthsea, no other artist can evaluate her own work like Le Guin, and these afterwards, though only 8 pages or so, are full of insight and humor and top-notch analysis of both the intellectual and artistic variety. Ann and I had dinner a few nights ago before finishing The Tombs of Atuan, and a lot of the observations we brought up in our conversation about the book over that meal Le Guin includes in her afterword, only more sharply observed and more eloquently phrased.
I will add a few observations of my own, but let me included for you some of what she says here.
“[W]hen I started The Tombs of Atuan, I saw it, as well as I can recall, simply as a sequel.
“And a change of gender. Ged would play a part in it, but the person whose story it was would be a girl. A girl who lived far from the cities of the Archipelago, in a remote desert land. A girl who could not seek power, as young Ged could, or find training in the use of it as he did, but who had power forced upon her. A girl whose name was not given to her by a kind teacher, but taken from her by a masked executioner.
“The boy Ged, offered wisdom, refused it through his own pride and willfulness; the girl Tenar, given the arbitrary power of a goddess, was taught nothing about living her life as a human being.
“When I was writing the story in 1969, I knew of no women heroes of heroic fantasy since those in the works of Ariosto and Tasso in the Renaissance. These days there are plenty, though I wonder about some of them. The women warriors of current fantasy epics – ruthless swordswomen with no domestic or sexual responsibility who gallop about slaughtering baddies – to me they look less like women than like boys in women’s bodies in men’s armor.
“Be that as it may, when I wrote the book, it took more imagination than I had to create a girl character who, offered great power, could accept it as her right and due. Such a situation didn’t then seem plausible to me. But since I was writing about the people who in most societies have not been given much power – women – it seemed perfectly plausible to place my heroine in a situation that led her to question the nature and value of power itself.
“The word power has two different meanings. There is power to: strength, gift, skill, art, the mastery of a craft, the authority of knowledge. And there is power over: rule, dominion, supremacy, might, mastery of slaves, authority over others.
“Ged was offered both kinds of power. Tenar was offered one.
“Heroic fantasy descends to us from an archaic world. I hadn’t yet thought much about that archaism. My story took place in the old hierarchy of society, the pyramidal power structure, probably military in origin, in which orders are given from above, with a single figure at the top. This is the world of power over, in which women have always been ranked low.
“In such a world, I could put a girl at the heart of my story, but I couldn’t giver her a man’s freedom, or chances equal to a man’s chances. She couldn’t be a hero in the hero-tale sense. Not even in a fantasy? No. Because to me, fantasy isn’t wishful thinking, but a way of reflecting, and reflecting on reality. After all, even in a democracy, in the second decade of the twenty-first century, after forty years of feminist striving, the reality is that we live in a top-down power structure that was shaped by, and is still dominated by, men. Back in 1969, that reality seemed almost unshakeable.
“So I gave Tenar power over – dominion, even godhead – but it was a gift of which little good could come. The dark side of the world was what she had to learn, as Ged had to learn the darkness in his own heart” (215-218)
And this:
“In The Tombs of Atuan, the Old Powers, the Nameless Ones, appear as mysterious, ominous, and yet inactive. Arha/Tenar is their priestess, the greatest of all priestesses, whom the Godking himself is supposed to obey. But what is her realm? A prison in the desert. Women guarded by eunuchs. Ancient tombstones, a half-ruined temple, an empty throne. A fearful underground labyrinth where prisoners are left to die of starvation and thirst, where only she can walk the maze, where light must never come. She rules a dark, empty, useless realm. Her power imprisons her” (218-219).
And this:
“She is only able to escape when Ged becomes her prisoner. She, for the first time, exerts her power to – her freedom of choice. She chooses to let him live. So she gives herself the chance to see that, if she can free him, she can free herself.
“Some people have read the story as supporting the idea that a woman needs a man in order to do anything at all (some nodded approvingly, others growled and hissed). Certainly Arha/Tenar would better satisfy feminist idealists if she did everything all by herself. But the truth as I saw it, and as I established it in the novel, was that she couldn’t. My imagination wouldn’t provide a scenario where she could, because my heart told me incontrovertibly that neither gender could go far without the other. So, in my story, neither the woman nor the man can get free without the other. Not in that trap. Each has to ask for the other’s help and learn to trust and depend on the other. A large lesson, a new knowledge for both these strong, willful, lonely souls.
“Reading the book, more than forty years after I wrote it, I wonder about many of its elements. It was the first book I wrote with a woman as the true central character. Tenar’s character and the events of the story came from deep within me, so deep that the subterranean and labyrinthine imagery, and a certain volcanic quality, are hardly to be wondered at. But the darkness, the cruelty, the vengefulness . . . After all, I could have just let them go free – why did I destroy the whole Place of the Tombs with an earthquake? It’s a kind of huge suicide, the Nameless Ones annihilating their temple in a vast spasm of rage. Maybe it was the whole primitive, hateful idea of the feminine as dark, blind, weak, and evil that I saw shaking itself to pieces, imploding, crumbling into wreckage on the desert ground. And I rejoiced to see it fall. I still do” (219-220).
Yeah, that’s better than I could have said.
So over that dinner the other night, Ann and I agreed that something about writing a young adult novel did cool things for Le Guin’s style. The need to be straightforward with a clearly directed plot makes for sharper storylines than her earlier work. (Note: I love the way Le Guin lets her plots unfold and meander, so I’m not knocking that at all.) At the same time, she doesn’t let that need for direct storylines affect her ability to tell the kinds of leisurely plots that she is inclined to write. We see this is in A Wizard of Earthsea once Ged is in pursuit of the shadow. As I said in my review of that book, the pursuit of the shadow is when the book really starts to feel like a Le Guin novel. That feeling is amplified and extended, to my mind, in The Tombs of Atuan. Though it’s a much shorter novel, it reads more slowly and moves more quietly than A Wizard. Plenty happens on the island of Atuan, but it’s a novel that is concerned with the interior life of Arha/Tenar.
We see all the classic Le Guin themes at play in this novel: the coming together of opposed cultures; the negotiating and “marriage” of them as some synthesis occurs, creating something entirely new; the meaningful bonds formed between two thoughtful and opinionated minds. If I were to make a study of the book, I would love to go through the novel again and see how Le Guin weaves together plot and personal reflection. The novel never drags and never wanders off into onanistic philosophizing, and I’d love to see how she strikes this wonderful balance.
Another amazing talent Le Guin possesses is the ability to stay focused on a main character. There are so side plots or diversions away from Arha’s journey. Another author could easily have made a side story about of Arha’s relationship with Penthe or Manan. Another author could easily have made a cartoon villain out of Kossil as well. There are a thousand ways to have messed with this story in I think detrimental ways, and Le Guin steers through all the dangers true, like Ged with his mage wind.
As much as I like A Wizard of Earthsea, The Tombs of Atuan is the book I think I’m most likely to reread and revisit going forward.
This is my first time reading through the Earthsea cycle, and I’m ordering the books as I go, one at a time. When I got halfway through The Tombs of Atuan, I went to Amazon to order the next book, The Farthest Shore (because, sadly, our library doesn’t carry it). I’ve seen excited posts in the last week or two about the new illustrated collected volume of the Earthsea books, a thousand-page, hardbound edition full of quality illustrations. So I considered getting that instead of buying the 2012 rereleases that I have been getting. But I didn’t, in part because I didn’t want an artist’s interpretation of the texts coming between me and what I was reading for the first time. The illustrations are really fantastic, and on second readings, I would love to see them to see how they align with my own mental pictures. But the real reason I’m sticking with the editions I’m reading is that they include an afterword written by Le Guin herself in 2012. As I said in my review of A Wizard of Earthsea, no other artist can evaluate her own work like Le Guin, and these afterwards, though only 8 pages or so, are full of insight and humor and top-notch analysis of both the intellectual and artistic variety. Ann and I had dinner a few nights ago before finishing The Tombs of Atuan, and a lot of the observations we brought up in our conversation about the book over that meal Le Guin includes in her afterword, only more sharply observed and more eloquently phrased.
I will add a few observations of my own, but let me included for you some of what she says here.
“[W]hen I started The Tombs of Atuan, I saw it, as well as I can recall, simply as a sequel.
“And a change of gender. Ged would play a part in it, but the person whose story it was would be a girl. A girl who lived far from the cities of the Archipelago, in a remote desert land. A girl who could not seek power, as young Ged could, or find training in the use of it as he did, but who had power forced upon her. A girl whose name was not given to her by a kind teacher, but taken from her by a masked executioner.
“The boy Ged, offered wisdom, refused it through his own pride and willfulness; the girl Tenar, given the arbitrary power of a goddess, was taught nothing about living her life as a human being.
“When I was writing the story in 1969, I knew of no women heroes of heroic fantasy since those in the works of Ariosto and Tasso in the Renaissance. These days there are plenty, though I wonder about some of them. The women warriors of current fantasy epics – ruthless swordswomen with no domestic or sexual responsibility who gallop about slaughtering baddies – to me they look less like women than like boys in women’s bodies in men’s armor.
“Be that as it may, when I wrote the book, it took more imagination than I had to create a girl character who, offered great power, could accept it as her right and due. Such a situation didn’t then seem plausible to me. But since I was writing about the people who in most societies have not been given much power – women – it seemed perfectly plausible to place my heroine in a situation that led her to question the nature and value of power itself.
“The word power has two different meanings. There is power to: strength, gift, skill, art, the mastery of a craft, the authority of knowledge. And there is power over: rule, dominion, supremacy, might, mastery of slaves, authority over others.
“Ged was offered both kinds of power. Tenar was offered one.
“Heroic fantasy descends to us from an archaic world. I hadn’t yet thought much about that archaism. My story took place in the old hierarchy of society, the pyramidal power structure, probably military in origin, in which orders are given from above, with a single figure at the top. This is the world of power over, in which women have always been ranked low.
“In such a world, I could put a girl at the heart of my story, but I couldn’t giver her a man’s freedom, or chances equal to a man’s chances. She couldn’t be a hero in the hero-tale sense. Not even in a fantasy? No. Because to me, fantasy isn’t wishful thinking, but a way of reflecting, and reflecting on reality. After all, even in a democracy, in the second decade of the twenty-first century, after forty years of feminist striving, the reality is that we live in a top-down power structure that was shaped by, and is still dominated by, men. Back in 1969, that reality seemed almost unshakeable.
“So I gave Tenar power over – dominion, even godhead – but it was a gift of which little good could come. The dark side of the world was what she had to learn, as Ged had to learn the darkness in his own heart” (215-218)
And this:
“In The Tombs of Atuan, the Old Powers, the Nameless Ones, appear as mysterious, ominous, and yet inactive. Arha/Tenar is their priestess, the greatest of all priestesses, whom the Godking himself is supposed to obey. But what is her realm? A prison in the desert. Women guarded by eunuchs. Ancient tombstones, a half-ruined temple, an empty throne. A fearful underground labyrinth where prisoners are left to die of starvation and thirst, where only she can walk the maze, where light must never come. She rules a dark, empty, useless realm. Her power imprisons her” (218-219).
And this:
“She is only able to escape when Ged becomes her prisoner. She, for the first time, exerts her power to – her freedom of choice. She chooses to let him live. So she gives herself the chance to see that, if she can free him, she can free herself.
“Some people have read the story as supporting the idea that a woman needs a man in order to do anything at all (some nodded approvingly, others growled and hissed). Certainly Arha/Tenar would better satisfy feminist idealists if she did everything all by herself. But the truth as I saw it, and as I established it in the novel, was that she couldn’t. My imagination wouldn’t provide a scenario where she could, because my heart told me incontrovertibly that neither gender could go far without the other. So, in my story, neither the woman nor the man can get free without the other. Not in that trap. Each has to ask for the other’s help and learn to trust and depend on the other. A large lesson, a new knowledge for both these strong, willful, lonely souls.
“Reading the book, more than forty years after I wrote it, I wonder about many of its elements. It was the first book I wrote with a woman as the true central character. Tenar’s character and the events of the story came from deep within me, so deep that the subterranean and labyrinthine imagery, and a certain volcanic quality, are hardly to be wondered at. But the darkness, the cruelty, the vengefulness . . . After all, I could have just let them go free – why did I destroy the whole Place of the Tombs with an earthquake? It’s a kind of huge suicide, the Nameless Ones annihilating their temple in a vast spasm of rage. Maybe it was the whole primitive, hateful idea of the feminine as dark, blind, weak, and evil that I saw shaking itself to pieces, imploding, crumbling into wreckage on the desert ground. And I rejoiced to see it fall. I still do” (219-220).
Yeah, that’s better than I could have said.
So over that dinner the other night, Ann and I agreed that something about writing a young adult novel did cool things for Le Guin’s style. The need to be straightforward with a clearly directed plot makes for sharper storylines than her earlier work. (Note: I love the way Le Guin lets her plots unfold and meander, so I’m not knocking that at all.) At the same time, she doesn’t let that need for direct storylines affect her ability to tell the kinds of leisurely plots that she is inclined to write. We see this is in A Wizard of Earthsea once Ged is in pursuit of the shadow. As I said in my review of that book, the pursuit of the shadow is when the book really starts to feel like a Le Guin novel. That feeling is amplified and extended, to my mind, in The Tombs of Atuan. Though it’s a much shorter novel, it reads more slowly and moves more quietly than A Wizard. Plenty happens on the island of Atuan, but it’s a novel that is concerned with the interior life of Arha/Tenar.
We see all the classic Le Guin themes at play in this novel: the coming together of opposed cultures; the negotiating and “marriage” of them as some synthesis occurs, creating something entirely new; the meaningful bonds formed between two thoughtful and opinionated minds. If I were to make a study of the book, I would love to go through the novel again and see how Le Guin weaves together plot and personal reflection. The novel never drags and never wanders off into onanistic philosophizing, and I’d love to see how she strikes this wonderful balance.
Another amazing talent Le Guin possesses is the ability to stay focused on a main character. There are so side plots or diversions away from Arha’s journey. Another author could easily have made a side story about of Arha’s relationship with Penthe or Manan. Another author could easily have made a cartoon villain out of Kossil as well. There are a thousand ways to have messed with this story in I think detrimental ways, and Le Guin steers through all the dangers true, like Ged with his mage wind.
As much as I like A Wizard of Earthsea, The Tombs of Atuan is the book I think I’m most likely to reread and revisit going forward.
adventurous
reflective
slow-paced
Plot or Character Driven:
Character
Strong character development:
Yes
Loveable characters:
Yes
Diverse cast of characters:
No
Flaws of characters a main focus:
Yes
به اندازهی کتاب اول دوستش نداشتم. آدیوبوکش رو هم یه نفر دیگه میخوند:(
یکی از جاهایی از کتاب که دوست داشتم( but also a HEAVY spoiler )
:
She did feel it. A dark hand had let go its lifelong hold upon her heart. But she did not feel joy, as she had in the mountains. She put her head down in her arms and cried, and her cheeks were salt and wet. She cried for the waste of her years in bondage to a useless evil. She wept in pain, because she was free.
What she had begun to learn was the weight of liberty. Freedom is a heavy load, a great and strange burden for the spirit to undertake. It is not easy. It is not a gift given, but a choice made, and the choice may be a hard one. The road goes upward towards the light; but the laden traveler may never reach the end of it.
یکی از جاهایی از کتاب که دوست داشتم( but also a HEAVY spoiler )
:
She did feel it. A dark hand had let go its lifelong hold upon her heart. But she did not feel joy, as she had in the mountains. She put her head down in her arms and cried, and her cheeks were salt and wet. She cried for the waste of her years in bondage to a useless evil. She wept in pain, because she was free.
What she had begun to learn was the weight of liberty. Freedom is a heavy load, a great and strange burden for the spirit to undertake. It is not easy. It is not a gift given, but a choice made, and the choice may be a hard one. The road goes upward towards the light; but the laden traveler may never reach the end of it.
I liked the themes and some of the writing in the second half, but I didn’t like the setting, the main character (there’s character development, but I didn’t really care for her), and the tone of the story was a lot different than the first book (which is one of my favorite books of all time). However, I read that the next books go back to the first book’s tone, so I’m not too upset.
ged sparrowhawk i will always love you
edit: updating this review bc i can’t stop thinking about what a warm feeling this book gave me? maybe my platonic ideal for high fantasy. look how much it accomplishes while also knowing when to cut itself off to be concise. in a modern fantasy book this would maybe comprise the first 4 out of 60 chapters lmao
edit: updating this review bc i can’t stop thinking about what a warm feeling this book gave me? maybe my platonic ideal for high fantasy. look how much it accomplishes while also knowing when to cut itself off to be concise. in a modern fantasy book this would maybe comprise the first 4 out of 60 chapters lmao
Once again, had I read this in grade school, I probably would have loved it. As an adult, it was a bit dull.