James Nicoll Reviews

1972’s The Farthest Shore is the third novel in Ursula K. le Guin’s Earthsea Cycle.

Having survived sundry adventures as a young man, the elderly Ged is now the wizened archmage on Roke, the island of the mages. Despite being old beyond all imagining, the forty- or fifty-year-old has one final quest waiting.

A prince arrives at Roke with dire news.

The prince introduces himself to Ged as Arren of the Principality of Enlad. Unlike most young people who make their way to Roke, he has not come to study magic. Arren has no magical talent of which he is aware. Arren has come to beg assistance from Ged.

A peculiar malaise is spreading from island to island. Those affected forget their skills, including magical skills. They lose all passion and willingness to work. Some might call them sleepwalkers. Only their pulse distinguishes them from walking dead.

Correctly seeing the issue as one demanding his personal attention, Ged sets out with Arren across the sea to investigate. Arriving at one of the affected areas, they discover that matters are even worse than they were told. People are not only forgetting magic and other arts. In some cases, they deny the arts ever existed. They denounce practitioners as frauds.

Ged and Arren nearly perish. They are saved thanks to the Raft People. However, the Raft People are not immune to the illness, only slightly farther from its source. Soon they too fall prey to the soul-draining amnesia.

Enter the great dragon Orm Embar. Orm Embar reveals that the malaise is the creation of a dark wizard and that the dark wizard is on the island of Selidor. Even the dragons have been unable to stop the dark wizard. Can a mortal archmage succeed where the nearly-divine dragons failed?

~oOo~

I have used the cover art from the edition I own because that is the correct cover art. Other people may incorrectly prefer other covers and I celebrate their right to be wrong. One detail about the cover that may puzzle modern readers: ​“3 in the Earthsea trilogy”. The Farthest Shore was the final book in the sequence until 1990’s Tehanu¹.

Le Guin felt that fantasy prose should be formal, hence the people of Earthsea don’t use slang. They’re also, for the most part, enormously snobbish, setting store in lineage and kings to a degree that would impress Aragorn. That said, Roke, the magical academy, seems to be a meritocracy², possibly because it’s hard to fake knowing and doing magic.

Early in the novel, Arren and a boy from Roke discuss Ged:

And he’s quite old now.”

“Old? How old?”

“Oh, forty or fifty.” 

By one of those peculiar coincidences, Le Guin was herself about forty when this novel was published. It is possible that the exchange could have been inspired by overhearing young people marveling at how some forty-or-fifty-year-old had not yet collapsed into dust, was still, at least in some sense, alive. Even mobile.

That said, perhaps Le Guin’s advanced years affected her perspective. Mortality is one of the main themes of the novel. Magic can accomplish marvels but life extension is not among them. Mages live no longer than fishermen. Ged has come to terms with the looming inevitability of death. The dark wizard rejects death. His bid for immortality is the cause of the great calamity sweeping Earthsea.

By modern standards, The Farthest Shore is a novella. Nevertheless, it delivers a novel’s worth of delight, and provides a fitting resolution to Ged’s story.

The Farthest Shore is available here (Amazon US), here (Amazon Canada), here (Amazon UK), here (Apple Books), here (Barnes & Noble), here (Chapters-Indigo), and here (Words Worth Books).

1: I have not reread Tehanu since it came out. What narrative purpose did it serve to justify extending the trilogy by one book? I suspect that it was about re-examining the role of women in Earthsea, but I will need to reread it to see if that’s right. To be honest, all I remember is that some people very vocally hated it.

2: Roke is a meritocracy that excludes women. The Earthsea trilogy’s treatment of women deserves a longer discussion than it is going to get here. How many Polly Olivers have snuck their way onto Roke? Yes, I know Pratchett wrote that novel.