The Farthest Shore (1972)

(read originally in the 80's)

Scope Review: Earthsea Trilogy.

“Only in silence the word,
Only in dark the light,
Only in dying life:
Bright the hawk’s flight
On the empty sky”

Yin & Yang?

I honestly don't remember a time when I wasn't obsessed with reading and collecting books. I'd define childhood as a never-ending vacation. A weekend without a week following and reading-time everlasting. I still remember the never-ending days of my childhood. My first date. My first kiss. My first endless book infatuations. One of my favourite childhood memory was when I was twelve years old with my Grandmother Glória at home and me reading to her "O Feiticeiro de Terramar" ("A Wizard of Earthsea").

It was with some trepidation that I've re-read one of my childhood favourites... Forget Harry Potter and its look-alikes. This is how it all began for me.

I’ve always had a problem with Fantasy, especially with the one being produced nowadays. The usual Fantasy fodder does not stimulate me. Fantasy, like myth and dream, should assume the existence of a world of being beyond or underneath perceived, empirical reality, and it should also reproduce that other world by means of symbolism and literary prototypes: kingdoms, wizards, shadows, dragons, good, evil, and sword are some of them that should reverberate with ethical and aesthetic meaning.

I’ve never being particularly fond of coming-of-age stories. I’ve always believed that a good coming-of-age story should be a journey that it’s not only psychic, but also moral. My archtype bildungsroman, should trace the development of a young person’s awareness of self, society, and nature. Le Guin’s was able to do this by balancing all the powers in her fictionalized world, supported on the recognition that every act affects self, society, and world.

Ged (God?), acknowledges the presence of good and evil in himself and transforms himself psychologically to fit into the Earthsea World. In the last pages of the first volume, light and shadow mingle, and there was no longer two beings but only one. That Le Guin was able to achieve this effect in only a handful of pages was quite astonishing (compare with the final chapter of the book “Blood Song” by Anthony Ryan to check on how it shouldn’t be done - My review).

Each volume of Earthsea tells us a different story about the Erwachsenwerden process. When read together (which I didn’t in the translations in Portuguese), the trilogy gave me an overall perspective of Ged’s journey, which was also a story of the epic hero who successfully deals with the forces that threatened Earthsea.
" ( )

2012 Review:
Definitely much slower, more esoteric and less action'y than the previous books.
Hints of prophecy and greatness while focusing on the mortality of humanity.


2005 Review:
Ged is old, and fulfills prophecy and saves the world. But it isn’t action, more ideas. ( )

This reads like an author forced to do a sequel who, out of spite or frustration, uses the sequel to destroy the world of the story.

Not recommended. ( )

Set in the fantasy world of Earthsea, this final book of the trilogy, won the National Book Award. Series can run out of steam, this trilogy just gets better. ( )

On average, I would say I enjoyed this book about as much as I had enjoyed the previous two books, but maybe less in some ways, and more in other ways.

In the very beginning of book one, we were told Ged would eventually be an Archmage. At the beginning of this book, we find that this has come to pass and Ged is now the Archmage at the school on Roke. Prince Arren, a teenager introduced in this book, has traveled to Roke to tell the wizards that people seem to be losing their ability to work magic. Ged and Arren then travel together to try to discover the source of the problem.

Ged and Arren had nearly equal “page time”, and I was happy to see more of Ged than I had in the second book. I also liked the character of Arren, and Arren’s hero worship of Ged and Ged’s affection toward Arren was very nice to read about. The story started off quite interesting, although I think the second book had the strongest story of the three. In this book, particularly in the second half, some of the plot points and character decisions became a bit too nebulous. Our characters sometimes did things because they felt right, not because there was any solid, logical reason for doing them. I do think most of that was explained or at least explainable by the end, though.

This book was published 18 years before the next book in the series, and it has a very definite “this is the end of the story” feel to it. It would be easy to stop here and be satisfied, and some people have in fact suggested doing just that, but there may have been a cat somewhere in my distant ancestry because I’m too curious to stop here. The mixed opinions about the later books have me curious to see what I’ll think, and I’m also curious to see what the author’s later writing style is like, and I’m curious to see how she chose to continue the series. So I plan to move on to book four, and then decide from there whether or not to continue. ( )