You could use the basic Earthsea premise to write some kind of wizard/pirate tale.
I'm not entirely sure why I write these. It's a good way to keep track of what a book is about and what my reaction is, but I've got a little diary that I've been keeping for that purpose, whenever I can find it. It can also keep track of when I read something, but I have both that diary and my Books page-I don't usually go for Facebook applications, but this one is useful.
So, I'm forced conclude I'm probably just writing this for the sake of having something to write about.
Anyway.
Over the past couple weeks, I've read three novels by Ursula K. Le Guin: A Wizard of Earthsea, The Tombs of Atuan, and The Farthest Shore. Three books in two weeks. Sounds pretty good, right?
Until we consider that they're 1. Children's novels which are 2. two-hundred and twenty three pages at the longest. I have, we know, nothing but love for kid's books, books that the Man thinks I should have "outgrown"; last summer, I read through all of Prydain and Westmark, and I'd already read through all of Harry Potter this summer. But, in general, one would expect them to go... well faster than an adult novel of a superficially similar length.
Which is where we get to the first thing I noticed on rereading A Wizard of Earthsea for the first time since tenth grade: it's slow. It's fast as well, in that large swaths of time are leapt over, more blatantly somehow than equally long stretches are in (say) Great Expectations. But while the pace is quick, the prose itself is languid. There might be a connection to the two; I'm not sure. There's just something minimalist and odd about her prose. I like her prose, don't get me wrong: Le Guin clearly has a skill with words. Her characters say things worth saying, things which have the ring of truth, of wisdom to them. And
The other thing I like is Earthsea itself. The rhythm of the world, the flow of magic, the philosophical cleanness of it-Le Guin has an obsession with interconnected dualities that's practically taoist. It's different than the Wizarding world, which is fundamentally a rewrite of our own, or even Middle Earth, which is in theory Europe in ages past. There's a level of... not quite surrealism; perhaps "subjectivist" is a better way of putting it. Things don't feel real in Earthsea; they feel "right." When The Farthest Shore takes on one of my favorite themes-the end of the world-there is... Actually, I'm going to make this a new paragraph.
I've talked before about this idea. Back when I was lambasting The Tower of Shadows, I talked about how hard it is to truly threaten the world's existence:
One must first establish the rhythms of the world, make us love the characters and the civilization, make us care. Only then can they be disrupted, have the Forces of Good discover the nature of the Villanous Blighters, and then (after much struggle) win. That's a lot to accomplish in short pages. Some writers could manage to get it done. Drew Browning cannot.
Clearly, the first part has been fulfilled: while (as we'll discuss later) my love for Ged is less than total, he's engaging. Arren proves likable. Earthsea, as we've established, is utterly engaging. (I love a book, almost any book, that starts you out with a nice map of the places the story may take you, but I think Earthsea's may be one of my favorite simply because of how most of the map doesn't matter at all. That sentence may not fit here, but it had to go somewhere). The nature of the Villanous Blighter and the struggle between good and evil are also very much in Le Guin's style: a civilian acting entirely out of fear and the inability to control his own nature; a final showdown that is a subdued, staring-contest-with-philosophical-undertones sorts of affair. But it's the disruption itself which is truly remarkable. Because it isn't something overt. No dark riders or sudden marauding bands of shadowspawn or prowling dragons; indeed, the state of affairs is that there are troubling few dragons.
This is the way the world ends
This is the way the world ends
This is the way the world ends
Not with a bang but a whimper.
There is no dark plot, no hosts riding to war, no barbarians at the gates. The Balance has been severed, the spirits of men slowly draining away from within, and no one is raging against the dying of the light. No one has even noticed it. It's a brilliant idea, and Le Guin executes the seemingly inexplicable bleakening of the world flawlessly.
The thing is, though, that the Earthsea stories are fine stories, stories about freedom and fate and the balance of the world and the acceptance of our own mortality. But, somehow, I didn't find them all that compelling. I never really felt attached to Ged this time around, who goes from Harry Potter to Albus Dumbledore a trifle quickly and who honestly never really gels for me, and that might have been a part of it. And it might have been that Harry Potter was so emotionally exhausting that the next book would need to be a complete departure to really capture me, and there are a lot of similarities between the two.
It could just be my state of mind, of course, but we get nowhere by psychoanalyzing me. I'm crazy; there, that just saved us both a lot of time
There's two other actual Earthsea novels, as well as a book of short stories. I don't think I'll pursue them any time soon. Because they're beautiful books, but I can appreciate a specific beauty while acknowledging that it's not my up of tea.