The Other Wind: An Earthsea Novel (Hardcover)

All the Earthsea books I've rediscovered concern the painful relationship between the living and the Dry Land - our human fear and grief at the thought of dying and giving up everything here - and the destructive results of trying to avoid that fate. The Other Wind contains a redemption of sorts, and a redeemer. It is very interesting to draw parallels between this and Christian myths of redemption and death, because while Le Guin creates a salvation story of sorts, she rejects the dream of an afterlife of the type we are used to from the world religions.

Le Guin's narrative is such that these kinds of thoughts arise almost incidentally while reading the interesting, exciting, well-characterised tale (dragons!). The questions dealt with are large, the choices unforgiving, but theses are always tied to the personal dilemma of a character. This ensures that ideas never float around in the abstract and it becomes very easy to take the questions on personally.

The Earthsea world is as always deftly and evocatively described, and the language is so smooth and powerful that you can be transported even on a ten-minute bus journey. After I finished the book, its mood and ideas remained with me: a kind of sadness at the inevitable choices we face: freedom or possession; "to fly or to dwell", to give up what you love.

You can see this anger in the earlier stories of 'Tales from Earthsea', but the final story, 'Dragonfly', which is the prelude to this book, is a rediscovery of what Earthsea was about.

The single most important motif in the original Earthsea stories was the wall of stones which divides the living from the dead, and the effects of unwise traffic across that wall. Two subsidiary motifs were dragons and the old powers of the earth. LeGuin recaptures and develops the importance of these in 'The Other Wind' in a way which she failed to do in 'Tehanu'. This story is a story about what would happen if the wall of stones itself came under attack - if the dead, from their side, began to pull it down. The theme is powerful, and readily captures the imagination.

What this book doesn't recapture is the way the original Earthsea stories were put together - and the reason why they were so successful as children's stories to read and re-read. A Wizard of Earthsea, The Tombs of Atuan and The Farthest Shore are stories about growing up, about how children become adults. The first two are significant achievements in the genre. To achieve this, they are written through one set of eyes.

'The Other Wind' loses both the simplicity of a single narratorial point of view, and, crucially, contains no children. Here we meet our favourite characters again - Ged, Tenar, Lebannin, Tehanu and Orm Irian, but we do not spend enough time to ground the tale in their consciousness.

This is a good book, but a minor one. It is a story about Earthsea philosophy and rationale. What it lacks is the Aristotelean focus of 'what happens next?'

It does, though, open the door for more Earthsea books which we want to read, and which a child of any age could read. This was a door that Tehanu closed.

Intriguingly, the former wizard Ged dreams of a time _after_ the time he lost his power. Above all things, we would like to read another novel about Ged as wizard.