Here be dragons
TALES FROM EARTHSEA by Ursula Le Guin Orion, £10.99, pp, 311, ISBN 1842552066 THE OTHER WIND by Ursula Le Gumn Orion, £10.99, pp. 246. ISBN 1842552058 In his excellent book about Tolkien, Tom Shippey makes the general claim that the most important fiction written in English since the war falls into the bookshop category of 'fantasy'. It's a daring thing to say, but one worth taking seriously. Perhaps, 100 years from now, the great novels of our generation won't be what we assume they are. It is perfectly plausible to imagine a postwar canon that runs something like Mervyn Peake, Nineteen Eighty-four, Tolkien, Philip K. Dick, Robert Heinlein, J. G. Ballard, Russell Hoban's Riddley Walker and on, up to and including Philip Pullman, Douglas Adams and lain M. Banks's splendid science fiction novels. It doesn't seem at all unlikely to me that in the end the exuberantly perverse science fiction that Angela Carter was writing in the 1960s might come to seem her chief claim on greatness; or to find that Doris Lessing survives mainly on the basis of her stupendous Shikasta cycle and Memoirs of a Survivor. Literary critics have been suspicious of a lot of these books, but it is increasingly difficult to deny the imaginative energy of novels like The Two Towers, Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? or even The Hitch-Hiker's Guide to the Galaxy. Novels in apparently marginal genres don't always remain marginal; think of Frankenstein, the Sherlock Holmes stories, Greenmantle. Wells's science fiction or The Man Who Was Thursday. When we stop being patronising about postwar fantasy, I'm convinced that, along with the best of Ballard, Titus Groan and The Infernal Desire Machines of Doctor Hoffmann, Ursula Le Guin will be at the front of any literary person's consciousness.
She has written a series of extraordinarily powerful novels for adults, most notably The Left Hand of Darkness; it is a beautifully dense creation of a world of winter, a society of beings who change sex with the season and mate indifferently according to their present state. The full complexity of the society is so concisely suggested that one puts the book down and starts to imagine one unwritten adventure after another; in a very brief span, her chaste, dry prose has implied a world of high technology and mediaeval taboos. You feel, as with Tolkien or the Invisible Cities of Calvin°, that the author knows a great deal more about her world than she has chosen to tell us.
She is quite a prolific author, and worth reading in bulk. Her best-known books, and perhaps also her best ones, are the series to which these two belong, the Earthsea cycle. They have had an interesting publishing history. I read the first three
when I was a child, and they were presented as books for children. Since then, boundaries have shifted somewhat, and when she returned to the subject with Teharitt, and then with these two books, there was no suggestion that they were anything but serious, adult reading. Returning to the first books, A Wizard of Earthsea, The Caves of Atuan and The Farthest Shore, it seems clear that they were never anything else. They are remarkable books, nutritious and fecund.
They are set in an imaginary realm called Earthsea. It is a vast archipelago, about the size of Europe, inhabited by a number of quite distinct societies. Dragons are occasionally seen in the sky; human lives are guided by a sort of pantheism, and some of the more sinister societies worship and sacrifice to the Old Powers of the earth, terrifying, hungry gods. Magic is more ordinary than reading; every village has a simple witch who can cast a spell to mend a kettle or call a lost sheep back from the mountains. At a higher level, there are many wise and philosophical magicians, whose magic serves the deeper ends of 'equilibrium'. Magic works through the power of naming; here, all things and all people have both an ordinary, everyday name and a secret one in the Old Speech of the dragons. It is an ancient tradition of folklore that to name an object or person is to assert power over it, as in the Grimm brothers' story of Rurnpelstiltskin. Here, in the long and episodic story of the life of the magician and Archmage Ged, Le Guin teases that old belief out into an entire imaginary philosophy.
The world of wizards and fantastical beings like dragons has been much imitated since A Wizard of Earthsea, in which Ged goes to the school for wizards on the island of Roke. These books are far more satisfying and far more serious in intent because Le Guin knows the limits and rules of her world, and they seem to bear some kind of relationship to the world we actually live in. The duel between prentice wizards in A Wizard of Earthsea is in deadly earnest, because it breaks a cardinal rule, and the boys don't anticipate the horrific consequences of their feud; the one in the first of the Harry Potter books is trivial, because it has no kind of imagined philosophy underlying it, and just breaks an arbitrary and unexplained school rule.
The best of the books is the second. The Tombs of Atuan, in which Ged infiltrates the catacombs and treasuries of a black cult in search of a great lost treasure. The middle section, in which Ged and the apostate high priestess find their way through a treacherous underground maze in complete blackness, with the old powers of the earth howling for their blood, is a feat of the imagination which would be remarkable in any literary form. In a fantasy intended for children. it is all but unique.
These two volumes are the fifth and sixth in the series, and have a grave, valedictory beauty. Tales of Earthsea is a miscellaneous collection of stories from different times. One, 'On the High Marsh', is a story of redemption; another, -Darkrose and Diamond' is a most beautiful narrative of love and renunciation, comparable to the story of Beren and Luthien at the heart of The Silmarillion and of Tolkien's literary work. Only one. 'The Bones of the Earth', seems rather slight, the story of a clever piece of magic rather than a philosophical illumination expressed through a fable.
In the last of the stories, 'Dragonfly', the dragons return. They play an important, awesome role in the whole series whenever they appear, and one of the transfixing things about the books is that their nature is only slowly explained. The later books make clear what the relationship between men and dragons actually is. Illusory though it is, since we are only talking about an invented fantasy, there is a seductive sense of understanding steadily deepening as the books go on. The Other Wind is a grand and hierarchical drama of metamorphosis and benediction. It turns on conversations between men and dragons, and beings who exist in an intermediate state. The atmosphere is, as in all Le Guin's books, immediately compelling, and nowhere more so than in the marvellous passages at sea; it has a beautifully yearning quality, as the dragons wheel in great gyres in the summer sky, their voices, 'like a sea of cymbals' unforgettably rendered.
They look, in part, like children's books, and serious-minded people may be tempted to avoid any books which are about dragons, magic and wizards, but it would be a great mistake. They are noble books, and though one cannot say exactly what they are saying about the world we actually live in, there is an unmistakable air of truth about them, not just the spinning of tall stories. They speak to us.
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