BRAVE NEW WORLDS
As Ursula K Le Guin’s groundbreaking Earthsea novels are reissued, Erica Wagner recalls how the fantasy writer’s unique universes enthralled her as a child
In front of me is a new – and beautifully illustrated – edition of Ursula K Le Guin’s A Wizard of Earthsea. I’ve pulled out the battered paperback copy I’ve had since I was 11 years old and set them side by side on my desk. The old book, which tells the story of a great sorcerer discovering his power, remains my talisman – a tale that opened a new world for me, one in which magic springs from the power of words. Like everything by its extraordinary author, who died last year at the age of 88, A Wizard of Earthsea is evergreen.
‘The island of Gont, a single mountain that lifts its peak a mile above the storm-racked Northeast Sea, is a land famous for wizards.’ The novel, first published in 1968, invites us to enter another reality – the fictional archipelago of Earthsea – with its clear, rhythmic opening sentence. Its protagonist is the humble goatherd Sparrowhawk, who, on discovering that he possesses magical skills, is sent off to Roke Island to learn the ways of the true sorcerers. (Le Guin was, of course, in the vanguard with the idea of a school for wizards, paving the way for JK Rowling and many others.) Sparrowhawk’s story unfolds further in the next two books of the original Earthsea trilogy – The Tombs of Atuan and The Farthest Shore – which followed in the early 1970s.
A Wizard of Earthsea may be a boy’s story, but like all great works of literature, its message is universal, speaking of self-discovery and how we must all fight the demons within us. Le Guin’s ability to enter the minds of her male characters is a quality that is in itself inspiring for both readers and writers – a reminder that there are no limits to creative thinking, that empathy can cross what seem like insurmountable barriers of gender and culture. When readers discover work that speaks to them, they will make enormous imaginative leaps to cover the distance between themselves and the characters with whom they identify. I didn’t read about Sparrowhawk; I was Sparrowhawk. When he discovers his ‘true name’ is Ged, I discovered my true name was Ged. Le Guin’s father, Alfred Kroeber, was an anthropologist; she was raised to question how societies functioned, and why some differ from others. Her work asks us to consider: what if the way we live now is not the only way? What else might we imagine? What happens when we enter the worlds of those who are not as we are?
Science fiction and fantasy writing was very much a male preserve when Le Guin entered the fray, and liable to be regarded as a sideline to ‘real’ literature. The critical acclaim she received proved this was not so: Le Guin was showered with awards, including the National Book Foundation Medal for Distinguished Contribution to American Letters in 2014, and in 2016 she joined the short list of authors to be published in their lifetimes by the Library of America. Many of her books now seem extraordinarily prescient: The Left Hand of Darkness, published in 1969, imagines a planet whose inhabitants are ambisexual, slipping easily between male and female, while 1972’s The Word for World is Forest remains a powerful ecological and anticolonial fable.
Le Guin was a fascinating and straight-talking woman, too: Arwen Curry’s documentary Worlds of Ursula K Le Guin, which appeared last year, was a fine tribute, with contributions from Neil Gaiman, David Mitchell, Margaret Atwood and Michael Chabon. The range of authors to which her work appealed is striking, a mark of her versatility and power. ‘She was one of the giants,’ said the novelist George RR Martin when she died. So she was, and so she still is: this is true magic.
‘A Wizard of Earthsea’ by Ursula K Le Guin, with illustrations by Charles Vess (£14.99, Gollancz), is published on 27 June.