{"id":1134,"date":"2015-02-06T16:06:37","date_gmt":"2015-02-06T16:06:37","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/arielsheen.com\/?p=1134"},"modified":"2015-02-06T16:06:37","modified_gmt":"2015-02-06T16:06:37","slug":"review-of-a-wizard-of-earthsea","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/arielsheen.com\/index.php\/2015\/02\/06\/review-of-a-wizard-of-earthsea\/","title":{"rendered":"Review of A Wizard of Earthsea"},"content":{"rendered":"

I\u2019d first read Ursula K. LeGuin’s book The Dispossessed<\/a>\u00a0several years ago.\u00a0Though I loved the book, I\u2019d departed from my normal habit – once I\u2019d find an author I like I read all their books \u2013 as I\u2019ve never wholly resonated with fantasy literature. Despite my reservations and with some encouragement, I decided to read A Wizard of Earthsea<\/a>.<\/p>\n

The novella\u00a0is in its essence a variant of the hero\u2019s tale as described by Joseph Campbell as well as a journey story. Le Guin, however, expands upon Campbell\u2019s model by making ingenuity and erudition as components of a heroes\u2019 development. I resonate with this as despite its fantastical setting these are indeed the components required for modern heroes. Super strength, agility and other such brute qualities may make up the majority of the \u201chero\u201d tales of Hollywood cinema, but such an emphasis in cultural production ignores the greater life conditions win by hard and social scientists.<\/p>\n

The plot itself is rather simple. A \u201cspecial\u201d young boy, who earns the nickname Sparrowhawk, attracts the attention of an older, wiser magician following his use of a simple spell to save his village from invaders. He goes off for training due to a number of \u201cinnate qualities\u201d that only the older magician is able to see and despite that latter\u2019s reservations (Star Wars?). After a major accident that disfigures him and kills another, he adopts a new humility and gains a new sense of responsibility (Spiderman?).<\/p>\n

This simple distillation of plot, however, ignores the imaginative descriptions of the various places and peoples that live on the archipelago of the Earthsea. Part of my aversion to fantasy in general was the supernatural elements \u2013 as I prefer social realism and science fiction \u2013 however the magical framework that Le Guin describes has an aura of basic plausibility to it that makes it easy to suspend my normally incredulous disbelief in the bizarre and paranormal.<\/p>\n

One of the components that I enjoyed of the book was the good use of foreshadowing. Long before the main confrontation I\u2019d figured out the symbolic meaning behind the evil that Ged had unleashed. Even prior to that specific incident there are many moments where the narrator make a brief assessment of Ged\u2019s potentially problematic characteristics. Once the significance is revealed the prior instances of struggle \u2013 between Ged and a dragon, between Ged and another magician under the influence of a devious Old Power – take on more clearly moralistic characteristics that echo other instances of temptation.<\/p>\n

I\u2019d read in several reviews of Le Guin\u2019s work that her dragons represent a meaningful divergence and complication of their normal depiction in literature. As I only read one brief exchange between man and dragon here and as I deeply enjoyed the story, the setting and the characters I am now interested in reading the rest of the saga.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

I\u2019d first read Ursula K. LeGuin’s book The Dispossessed\u00a0several years ago.\u00a0Though I loved the book, I\u2019d departed from my normal habit – once I\u2019d find an author I like I read all their books \u2013 as I\u2019ve never wholly resonated with fantasy literature. Despite my reservations and with some encouragement, I decided to read A … Continue reading “Review of A Wizard of Earthsea”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[5,1],"tags":[30,68,69,54,70,71,72],"class_list":["post-1134","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-book-review","category-uncategorized","tag-book-review","tag-fantasy-novel","tag-high-fantasy","tag-literary-criticism","tag-novella","tag-ursual-k-leguin","tag-wizard-of-earthsea"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"acf":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p8e7kf-ii","jetpack-related-posts":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/arielsheen.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1134","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/arielsheen.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/arielsheen.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/arielsheen.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/arielsheen.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1134"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/arielsheen.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1134\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/arielsheen.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1134"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/arielsheen.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1134"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/arielsheen.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1134"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}