Book Review: The Farthest Shore

(Just too late to be A Fair Trade Book. Sad.)

Title: The Farthest Shore

Author: Ursula K. LeGuin

Date: 1972

Publisher: Atheneum

ISBN: 0-689-30054-9

Length: 223 pages

Quote: “Then...my father named the wizard Root to say the spells of increase over the lambs...but he could say only, ‘I have forgotten the words’...and indeed there’s trouble among the flocks this spring, the ewes dying in birth, and many lambs born dead.”

The late Ursula Kroeber LeGuin was not a Christian. The Farthest Shore is a non-Christian, arguably even anti-Christian, parable. (There are actually Protestant churches that might use the view of Life and Death this book presents, but Le Guin's version is non-theistic, and those churches are a minority.) It was both hailed as a classic and purged from public libraries for that reason. Some people believe that children should not have the opportunity to read how non-Christians explain the balance of Life and Death.

The position of this web site is that public libraries, if they should exist, should not censor books like The Farthest Shore—but adults should be cautious about recommending them to children, or calling them children’s books. Because the Earthsea novels are told in classic fairy-tale-and-fantasy manner, and feature wizard, dragons, and a youthful protagonist, they’ve been marketed to children. They’re not for children. The Farthest Shore is not a book even children who’ve enjoyed both the parable-fantasy in A Wrinkle in Time and the bleakness in Anne Frank's Diary are necessarily mature enough to appreciate. Though sex-free, with minimal violence and no foul language, a novel whose basic plot is about the necessity of death is a novel for adults. Some teenagers may like Earthsea; for children I think Old Yeller and Little Women did enough to expose children to mortality.

So this is a parable for adults, in which the senior magician Ged and the student prince Arren sail around the islands of Earthsea, confirming that the wizardry on which their fictional world depends is dying out. Without magic, artisans do sloppy work and whole communities seek refuge in a particularly horrid, addictive drug. Some of the saddest, craziest people in Earthsea are the ones who spout lines that were popular with real people in 1972, about not wanting to escape from “reality” into “lies” about things like magic.

Of course readers already know that Ged and Arren, with help from the friendly dragon, will save their world—in this kind of story this kind of mission always succeeds—and readers can probably guess that Ged, the advocate of death, won’t live very long after seeing that he’s succeeded. They may as well know, also, that LeGuin wrote the Earthsea books before she’d identified as a feminist; although Arren isn’t positive about the dragon’s gender, all the major human characters in the entire trilogy are male. In this book two women get one speaking part in one scene apiece, which was the sort of thing LeGuin would later do so much to change.

The Farthest Shore may appeal to some adults who like Tolkien, some who liked Grendel...only some, not all, people who like Anne McCaffrey and/or Jane Yolen and/or Suzette Haden Elgin and/or Piers Anthony and/or  Frank Peretti like the Earthsea books. Even some people who liked LeGuin’s science fiction or her occasional mainstream fiction don’t like her fantasy-parable books. Time may help. I remember reading the Earthsea trilogy in college and not appreciating it at all. I was probably patient enough and educated enough to appreciate this book before age 50, but between ages 17 and 50 I left it alone. Then again, time may not help; a lot of middle-aged people will say that they already knew death is inevitable, and didn’t need to read 223 pages of fiction that makes that point.

On the other hand, people who just want to read a well-told adventure story may like Earthsea. LeGuin was a fine writer. Earthsea is a world of big and small islands, like the Philippines, in a mostly temperate climate, like the northern Pacific islands off North America only without a mainland. It has a Pacific Coast feeling. If you enjoy visualizing a whole world covered larger and smaller, more northerly or southerly-lying, versions of Vancouver, then Earthsea is for you. LeGuin gave her characters a vividly imagined world that’s worth saving.

Personally, I might have preferred for LeGuin to have written more nonfiction and realistic stories (like Very Far Away from Anywhere Else), more provocative science fiction about what humans would do with new technology if we got it to work (like The Word for World Is Forest), and, if she’d wanted to write fantasies, cute, simple ones like Catwings. 

I can say that because there’s no reason why it should affect your decision to read The Farthest Shore or not. Plenty of people have loved the Earthsea books. It’s because so many other people raved over this series that I’m free to say I consider it overrated; if LeGuin were a new writer I’d probably feel a need to review The Farthest Shore with more faint praise for the dragon. (In 1972 this was a new, unusual dragon. It is now the prototypical fantasy-world dragon, but Le Guin’s dragons were not clichés when written.) People are drawn into other people’s fantasy fiction by individual tastes in common. I don’t happen to have enough for Earthsea to be my very favorite, favorite fantasy world, or even to make my top ten list—but that doesn’t mean it’s not a well written fantasy adventure story, or even that it won’t be your favorite. It might be.

I only wish it weren't too late for this one to be a Fair Trade Book. Lots of editions have been worn out. What I physically own is another first library edition, discarded, not even showing on Amazon any more (the Japanese translation below has the familiar-to-me cover art). You can buy The Farthest Shore here for $5 per book, $5 per package, $1 per online payment, if you're willing to take a pocket-size paperback in which case all six volumes of what was originally the Earthsea Trilogy will fit into one $5 package.