Ursula Le Guin, _The Other Wind_
Oct. 18th, 2001 05:13 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
eubThis is her new Earthsea novel. It continues the revisionist project that _Tehanu_ started, but I found it less preachy. It's really very clever in its finding cracks in the world that the trilogy set forth, and placing things of importance within them -- think of it like Tim Powers.
This book is a close companion to _The Farthest Shore_; they're both about death, and the denial of death. _TOW_ digs deeper into the background, how death works in Earthsea, and why. We meet Ged again, but spend more time with the king, with Tenar, and with a village sorcerer in whose dreams the wall of stones is crumbling.
Her technique is impeccable. Well, not quite impeccable; the unfolding of the situation was driven a bit much by opportune recollection of old folk tales, hyperinformative old folk tales.
But the prose is beautiful, precise, and unobtrusive, and the slipping from head to head within an omniscient POV is as graceful as I've ever seen.
The Summoner is the speaker for wizardry and against death, and I'm not satisfied with the words the author puts in his mouth; I'm not convinced she's inhabited the character. For him to say he brought a dead man back "because he had the power to do it" smells to me of authorial meddling; in fact the entire death and revival seems gratuitous, or at least confusing.
I should reread _TFS_ now to compare the workings of death and magic, and maybe I should try rereading the entire series in reverse order.
I don't have a copy of _Tales_, though.
You have to wonder why, after the Rune Makers walled off the land and it turned dry and dismal, they didn't notice and take steps. To try to repair or rethink their work; in the end to undo it, rather than leaving it flawed. Or are we to believe that they feared the end of experience so greatly that they preferred this eternal unlife?
Quibble: it sounds like people take their true names into the dry land; names are unique for all time. How many words of the Old Speech _are_ there? I'm thinking people ought to be driven by now to Entesque names (maybe named after one bend in an inlet of a bay in one sea of the ocean). Some hundreds of thousands of words in a human tongue. Naming has been done since "a thousand years before the first kings of Enlad": a minimum of 40 generations, more likely 100. A Hardic population of 10,000 would then mean a million words. Okay, I can maybe buy this after all.
This book is a close companion to _The Farthest Shore_; they're both about death, and the denial of death. _TOW_ digs deeper into the background, how death works in Earthsea, and why. We meet Ged again, but spend more time with the king, with Tenar, and with a village sorcerer in whose dreams the wall of stones is crumbling.
Her technique is impeccable. Well, not quite impeccable; the unfolding of the situation was driven a bit much by opportune recollection of old folk tales, hyperinformative old folk tales.
But the prose is beautiful, precise, and unobtrusive, and the slipping from head to head within an omniscient POV is as graceful as I've ever seen.
The Summoner is the speaker for wizardry and against death, and I'm not satisfied with the words the author puts in his mouth; I'm not convinced she's inhabited the character. For him to say he brought a dead man back "because he had the power to do it" smells to me of authorial meddling; in fact the entire death and revival seems gratuitous, or at least confusing.
I should reread _TFS_ now to compare the workings of death and magic, and maybe I should try rereading the entire series in reverse order.
I don't have a copy of _Tales_, though.
You have to wonder why, after the Rune Makers walled off the land and it turned dry and dismal, they didn't notice and take steps. To try to repair or rethink their work; in the end to undo it, rather than leaving it flawed. Or are we to believe that they feared the end of experience so greatly that they preferred this eternal unlife?
Quibble: it sounds like people take their true names into the dry land; names are unique for all time. How many words of the Old Speech _are_ there? I'm thinking people ought to be driven by now to Entesque names (maybe named after one bend in an inlet of a bay in one sea of the ocean). Some hundreds of thousands of words in a human tongue. Naming has been done since "a thousand years before the first kings of Enlad": a minimum of 40 generations, more likely 100. A Hardic population of 10,000 would then mean a million words. Okay, I can maybe buy this after all.
