The Farthest Shore (1972)
200pp, Fiction
Notes
2019-05-19
Finished reading the third Earthsea book to K. I don’t remember getting to the end of it as a child – though I did, when I re-read in my 30s I remembered the closing chapters. On this 3rd read through I was struck by a couple of things 1. it’s the most standard high-fantasy narrative of the original trilogy 2. Le Guin is already trying to complicate the world giving different versions of events (see also this good essay about historical revisionism in Earthsea) 3. The structure involves a long stretch of nothing in the middle which for K (and I guess me as a child) isn’t that great, but reading as a grown up is a crystalisation of the latent taoism of the cycle and points towards the more anthropological bent of Le Guins later fiction.