The Other Wind
Ursula K. Le Guin
Harcourt, 246 pages
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Ursula K. Le Guin's world of Earthsea is one of fantasy's best-known and best-loved creations. The original
trilogy (A Wizard of Earthsea, The Tombs of Atuan, and The Farthest Shore), was published for young
adults, but has long been accepted into the canon of adult literature. It focuses on the life and exploits of the
wizard Ged, following him from boyhood into the maturity of his magery, and thence to the close of his career (and
the death of his power). While Le Guin never writes conventionally, and these books are distinguished by subtle
characterization and deeply-considered themes, they are squarely in the high fantasy tradition, both in subject
matter and narrative technique. High fantasy isn't self-reflective (the underpinnings of heroic fantasy worlds
are rarely examined). It doesn't much concern itself with the ordinary logistics of daily existence. And its characters
are always larger than life.
Seventeen years after publication of The Farthest Shore, Le Guin returned to Earthsea with Tehanu.
Tehanu continues Ged's story, and also Tenar's (from The Tombs of Atuan)--a tying-up of loose ends
long desired by fans of the series, but which Le Guin approached with a radically changed literary and political
agenda. High fantasy is more or less abandoned in Tehanu, which is mainly about the sort of ordinary life
that epic tales ignore, in all its mundanity, cruelty, and evil. The book ruthlessly cuts its heroic characters
down to human size, and moves beyond self-reflection into deconstruction in its challenging of the underlying assumptions
of the previous novels--from the gender basis of magic, to the nobility of the wizardly path, to the value of power
itself.
This politically-charged re-thinking of an iconic fantasy world was not at all what readers might have expected,
and many hated the book. Yet Le Guin's deconstruction of Earthsea is an impressive feat of imagination in its own
right, and Tehanu is a moving, powerfully-written novel. Ged and Tenar, in their newly fallible humanity,
are no less compelling than they were as larger-than-life heroes; also, they are able to make the emotional and
physical connection that was suggested at the end of The Tombs of Atuan, but would not have been possible
within the structure of the previous books.
Not everything in Tehanu works. The evil mages who capture Tenar and Ged toward the end of the book are
more caricatures than characters, an entirely unsubtle embodiment of Le Guin's feminist agenda. And the recontextualization
of the magic of Earthsea has the ultimate effect of devaluing it, with the result that when high magic abruptly
intrudes upon the plot, in the form of the dragon Kalessin, it's not entirely convincing. In a world where the
very basis of magic can be questioned, in which the power of mages is suspect because it's also the power of men
and Ged's grief for his lost gift is portrayed as self-pity, a dragon no longer really seems to have a place.
Now, a decade after Tehanu, Le Guin has entered the world of Earthsea yet again, with a volume of short
works, Tales From Earthsea, and a new novel, The Other Wind. She hasn't abandoned her revisionist
approach (in Tales from Earthsea, for instance, we learn that Roke, that bastion of male magery, was partly
founded by women). But her concern this time is to explore Earthsea rather than to challenge it--expanding and
enriching its history, following threads and themes left open by previous books. If the first three novels are
pure epic fantasy, in which ordinary life plays little part, and Tehanu is (as much as any fantasy novel
can be) anti-fantasy, in which high magic has become more or less irrelevant, these works exist somewhere at the
midpoint. As Ged himself might say: "Thus is Equilibrium maintained."
While Tales From Earthsea is mostly backstory, filling in a number of gaps in Earthsea's history, The
Other Wind takes Earthsea's story forward. As the novel begins, Alder, a sorcerer of modest ability, comes
seeking Ged, who is living with Tenar in contented retirement on the island of Gont. Alder has been sent by the
Masters of Roke because he has been dreaming strangely of the dry land, the land of the dead. Though Ged no longer
has any power, he knows more about the dry land than any man living, for he entered it long ago to defeat the wizard
Cob, who breached the barrier between death and life in his search for immortality.
Alder tells Ged that he dreamed first of his dead wife Lily, whom he kissed across the low stone wall that divides
the dry land from the world of the living. Such contact is not supposed to be possible, even in dreams. Now Alder
dreams not only of Lily, but of whole armies of the dead, who gather at the wall and whisper to him: Set us
free! He is terrified of his sleep, for he fears that the dead mean somehow to use him to pass into the living
world.
Ged, certain that Alder's dreams portend some great change for Earthsea, sends Alder to the city of Havnor, where
Tenar and Tehanu have gone to offer counsel to the High King, Lebannen. There's another troubling portent of change:
the dragons of Earthsea, which for centuries have kept their promise to abide in their western lands, have suddenly
begun moving east, burning farms and cropland. Also present in Havnor is a Kargish princess, to whom Lebannen is
unwillingly betrothed; she knows legends unfamiliar to the others. Later comes Orm Irian, a dragon who is also
a woman, with word of her people's anger against humans, whom they believe have stolen a part of the dragons' realm.
Piecing together Orm Irian's warning, Alder's dreams, and the princess's legends, Lebannen and the others begin
to perceive a larger unbalancing of the world, which may have its roots in the almost-forgotten agreement by which
dragons and humans, once a single people, divided themselves in two. Together they journey to the mages' island
of Roke. There, in the Immanent Grove that lies at the center of all things, they confront a truth that--as Ged
suspected--has the power to change everything.
The Other Wind focuses on two major themes, and one story thread, from previous Earthsea volumes.
The thread, of course, is Tehanu, the burned and disfigured girl adopted by Tenar and Ged. In the novel Tehanu,
it's revealed that she's the daughter of the dragon Kalessin, and that she has a significant destiny to fulfill.
The Other Wind follows her into that destiny, and a final redemption of her suffering.
As for the themes, the first of them, that humans and dragons were once one people, appeared briefly in Tehanu,
but there wasn't much room in that revisionist fantasy to explore it. Now it is not only explored, but made central
to the history of Earthsea. Human magic, it turns out, is a direct result of a betrayal of the ancient covenant
by which humankind separated itself from dragonkind; as such, it's part of the world's unbalance. Once again Le
Guin calls the foundations of magery into question--but she does so this time not on the basis of an outside political
agenda, but from within Earthsea, on Earthsea's own terms. Humankind (represented as a gathering of men and women
working in concert) isn't simply indicted for its terrible error, but allowed to redeem it.
The second theme is death--or more precisely, the land of the dead, the dry land. The dry land has been a powerful
presence throughout the series; but it has simply been presented, without explanation for why it should be so bleak
and dark, or why the dead should be trapped in so empty an afterlife. These are questions that have surely troubled
many readers, and Le Guin answers them now in full. This cold, blank afterlife, it turns out, is exactly as unnatural
as it seems--it's the result, in fact, of another error of magery. The hows and whys of this retroactive explanation,
as well as the revelation of what kind of freedom the dead are really seeking, beautifully tie together elements
of previous books; and once again, allow for redemption.
(Some reviewers have commented that the ending of The Other Wind recalls the emergence of the dead in Philip
Pullman's The Amber Spyglass. But in my opinion the comparison should go the other way, for I was struck,
when I read Spyglass, by how much Pullman's land of the dead resembles Le Guin's descriptions of the dry
land in The Farthest Shore.)
On a less exalted level, The Other Wind is a continuation of its recurring characters' stories--Ged, Tenar,
Lebannen. It's also Alder's story, and the story of Seserakh, the Kargish princess. Where the other books have
been primarily single-viewpoint narratives, Le Guin here uses a multiple-viewpoint technique, slipping gracefully
in and out of her characters' heads, offering not just different pieces of the tale, but different perspectives
on it. These smaller, personal threads, woven with the larger, sweeping ones, form a narrative that is as intimate
as it is grandly mythic. The ordinariness of things is never neglected: again and again, Le Guin turns from matters
of high fantasy to the small concerns of daily life--picking plums in an orchard, mending a fence, sitting in a
garden, playing cards aboard ship. "Indeed he did not know what weighed more heavily after all, the great
strange things or the small common ones," Alder thinks at one point. In the wider context of the world, the
small common things are as meaningful as the awesome mageries. They too are at stake in the struggle to restore
the balance.
The Other Wind is a challenging, satisfying work--a book that, unlike some other late additions to established
series, really did demand to be written. A working knowledge of Earthsea is required to appreciate it--I wouldn't
recommend, for those who haven't read the other novels, beginning here. Even those already familiar with Earthsea
might consider doing some re-reading, in order to better appreciate the many references to previous books.
Copyright © 2001 Victoria Strauss
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