A WIZARD OF EARTHSEA
by Ursula le Guin
Long before Harry Potter came along, Ursula
le Guin’s A Wizard of Earthsea imagined what a school
for wizards would be like. Ged, its hero, will become the
Archmage of a world in which magic is as common as electricity
but this is a tale from before that time. Ged, a poor smith’s
son, is born with huge talent that he uses to save his village
from invaders, but his gifts make him arrogant and impatient.
At wizard- school he makes one friend and one enemy, and in
a duel summons a monster that scars him and sends him on a
deadly quest across the lonely seas full of peril. With the
moral, intellectual and supernatural power to outwit dragons,
resist evil, change weather and transform himself into a hawk,
he is apparently defenceless against an enemy who increasingly
takes on his appearance to trick or kill him. How he defeats
his enemy is wholly unexpected, yet completely right because
like all great quests it involves confronting the dark side
of the hero’s nature. “Only in silence the word,/Only
in dark the light.” Throughout my life, I have drawn
on this, particularly when suffering from depression. I think
many children suffer much more than has been generally recognised,
but if you’re given a story in which you’re made
to see that you can only find light in the heart of darkness,
you find hope and healing.
Ged is a great hero, and one loves everything
about him, from his fiery pride and profound courage to his
dark skin and fierce pet rat. Interestingly, le Guin, who
became a noted feminist initially confines wizardry to boys
and men, with witches being mistrusted as weak and wicked.
One effect of this is that the bond between Ged and his friend
Estarriol is as passionate as it is unadorned by sexuality
(she explored this later in her great, baroque SF novel, The
Left Hand of Darkness). Estarriol follows Ged unquestioningly
to “death’s dry kingdom”, and he’s
prepared to kill them both if Ged fails in his battle with
his shadow-beast.
The most thrilling, wise and beautiful children’s
novel ever, it is written in prose as taut and clean as a
ship’s sail. Every word is perfect, like the spells
Ged has to master. It poses the deep questions about life,
death, power and responsibility that children need answering.
Both story and language lie at its heart, for it contains
allusions to fragmented legends about the tragedies of heroes
and heroines, and the world of Earthsea itself was summoned
by speech. This gives le Guin’s world the mysterious
depths of Tolkien’s, but without his tiresome back-stories
and versifying.
Nobody has ever described the wonder and terror
of dragons, dancing on the wind “like a vast black bat,
thin-winged and spiny-backed” with such conviction.
Although many children will identify with Ged’s angry
arrogance, I particularly love it, because it enacts the journey
that every true artist must travel. It’s not enough
to be born with talent: you have to learn the craft and humility
by which it can be used to create, heal and protect rather
than mangle, corrupt and destroy. That’s what Ged does,
with great pain but to resounding triumph.
Amanda Craig’s fifth novel, Love in Idleness
is published by Little, Brown £12.99
The Guardian September 2003
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