The Tombs of Atuan

"I would put Le Guin beside Tolkien as another great example of what fantasy can be. Le Guin is brief, where Tolkien verges on the prolix. Le Guin writes beautifully clear, well-defined prose. She is a brilliant ethical thinker. I could have chosen almost any of the Earthsea books here. I chose this one just because it’s my favourite. The first book, A Wizard of Earthsea , is the story of the male protagonist Ged, who is proud and has his pride rebuked, and then goes on an island-to-island journey where he is first fleeing from, and then trying to reckon with, a shadow that he has raised. Then you read the second book, The Tombs of Atuan, and you expect it to be the further adventures of Ged… and it is absolutely not that. You are on an island on the edge of the world that you encountered in the first book, and you spend most of the time with a fairly young girl, Tenar, who has been made the high priestess of terrifying underground powers. It’s mainly about her very restricted life in this temple community. And it’s wonderful in a completely different way to the first book, really spooky and worrying. There are points where it verges into genuine horror. But in the end, it’s a hopeful book about the ways that, although our upbringings will never quite leave us, we can move beyond them. Eventually, Ged does wander into the story, but it takes quite a long time, and you stick with Tenar throughout. Like Gormenghast, it’s about a sense of place – although the Tombs are not as big and sprawling as Gormenghast is. This is a tight and defined community, with a very small number of powerful people in it. It’s about intense loneliness, in a lot of ways. Le Guin writes that really well. She’s very good at writing sympathetic, believably adolescent adolescents. Unlike Gormenghast and The Lord of the Rings , it’s a short book. I think it’s always nice to see that you don’t have to have a lot of words to do really good things in fantasy, and Le Guin is a great example of that. I read it very young, and it has haunted me ever since. When I return to it and think I remember it very well, there are always more things in it that I’ve forgotten. Yes – that goes back to the way that genre fantasy relates to the larger sense of fantasy as a form that loves the ability of language to create new things. So in Earthsea , there’s a form of language called the True Speech, which wizards use. If you name something in the True Speech, you have power over it. This becomes more complicated as the series goes on. It’s a power with very definite limits, which has to be used responsibly. It’s tied up with the idea of a balance. One of the interesting things in Tombs of Atuan is that Ged is denied most of his magic for most of the book. Le Guin has spent the whole of the previous book getting him to the point where he can use his power responsibly, but in fact, what he needs to use in Tombs is his capacity for sympathy. The thing that makes him succeed in that book is his ability to reach out to this very scared, very lonely person, and help her rebuild her sense of herself as an individual, rather than as a servant of the powers underground. Le Guin’s wizards aren’t good because they have magic. They’re able to use their magic in good and interesting ways because of the ways they think as people. They build up experiences, and they learn from their mistakes. I think the other brilliant thing about Earthsea as a series is that Le Guin looks back at the first three books later on in her career and realizes, “Hang on, I’ve messed up various things. If I’m building a fantasy world that is equitable in the ways that I want the world to be equitable, I need to acknowledge women’s agency in different ways. I need to think more about what my dragons should be doing…” And then, without invalidating anything in the first three books, she writes two more novels and a short story collection that make Earthsea better and richer."

"So this is my second children’s book-type choice, but when I first read it, I thought that—although it has a young protagonist—the atmosphere and pacing are very adult in some ways. The protagonist, who has been ordained by her religion for a special position, has a very structured life, is in charge of performing certain rituals and so forth. She both has power and has vulnerabilities, in the sense that she has no escape. It’s a weird position to be in. On the one hand, she’s in a very powerful position, and on the other hand, there are some bonds she just cannot step beyond. Then she encounters Ged, who is the protagonist from A Wizard of Earthsea (which is the first book in the Earthsea Cycle ). Ged is her point of epiphany, because once more we have a situation where she starts to question. He’s supposed to be killed by her hand, because he has trespassed where no one is supposed to trespass, but she keeps him alive, and it just begins to unravel from there: she begins to question, and she begins to see the world in different ways. “Epiphanies can be… I don’t quite want to say accidental , but they can be impersonal” The book does not have a perfect YA ending, with the two of them getting together and living happily ever after. Ged says, ‘I’ve got stuff to do, and you’ve got stuff to do, and we can hang out when we can.’ This shows that epiphanies can be… I don’t quite want to say accidental , but they can be impersonal. If someone gives you an epiphany, it’s not a promise or a love bond. They do not necessarily become your master or your mentor, or guide you through this. It could be simply that they are bringing you a new perspective and understanding of the world. If that upends things for you, they may have compassion for you, but they won’t necessarily accept responsibility for it. Ged very firmly declares, ‘I’m not a god. I’m not there to replace the new hole in your life, now that you’ve gotten rid of all this old stuff. You’ll have to do that on your own, and it’s not going to be me to fill that gap.’ I wish everyone would have that courage. Some people would rather be the celebrity, they’d rather be the person to guide you through it. It’s remarkable to be able to say, ‘You know what? I’m glad this was meaningful for you, but now you’re on your journey, and I’ve got things to do.’ Exactly, and how clever of you to slip in the title of the last book."