I think I was 10-12 years old when I first read this book (Le Guin 1968). I remember if fondly, especially for its emphasis on the power of someone’s “true name”
Well, in my new habit of re-reading books whose details (99%) I’ve forgotten — Moby Dick, Small is Beautiful, Tom Sawyer, Brave New World, Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance — I decided to read this one again. I’m so happy I did, as the book is fantastic. It’s basically a bildungsroman (coming of age story) about Sparrowhawk (true name: Ged), a boy who journeys to become a man. I’ll leave the details for you to discover, but here are a few excerpts to illustrate Le Guin’s talents:
- “You want to work spells,” Ogion said presently, striding along. “You’ve drawn too much water from that well. Wait. Manhood is patience. Mastery is nine times patience.
- Then with a dozen other lads he would practice with the Master Windkey at arts of wind and weather. Whole bright days of spring and early summer they spent out in Roke Bay in light catboats, practising steering by word, and stilling waves, and speaking to the world’s wind, and raising up the magewind. These are very intricate skills, and frequently Ged’s head got whacked by the swinging boom as the boat jibed under a wind suddenly blowing backwards, or his boat and another collided though they had the whole bay to navigate in, or all three boys in his boat went swimming unexpectedly as the boat was swamped by a huge, unintended wave.
- Illusion fools the beholder’s senses; it makes him see and hear and feel that the thing is changed. But it does not change the thing. To change this rock into a jewel, you must change its true name. And to do that, my son, even to so small a scrap of the world, is to change the world. It can be done. Indeed it can be done. It is the art of the Master Changer, and you will learn it, when you are ready to learn it. But you must not change one thing, one pebble, one grain of sand, until you know what good and evil will follow on that act. The world is in balance, in Equilibrium. A wizard’s power of Changing and of Summoning can shake the balance of the world. It is dangerous, that power. It is most perilous. It must follow knowledge, and serve need. To light a candle is to cast a shadow…”
- You will find out. You must find out, or die, and worse than die…” He spoke softly and his eyes were somber as he looked at Ged. “You thought, as a boy, that a mage is one who can do anything. So I thought, once. So did we all. And the truth is that as a man’s real power grows and his knowledge widens, ever the way he can follow grows narrower: until at last he chooses nothing, but does only and wholly what he must do…’
- Out of the sea there rise storms and monsters, but no evil powers: evil is of earth. And there is no sea, no running of river or spring, in the dark land where once Ged had gone. Death is the dry place. Though the sea itself was a danger to him in the hard weather of the season, that danger and change and instability seemed to him a defense and chance.
- And he began to see the truth, that Ged had neither lost nor won but, naming the shadow of his death with his own name, had made himself whole: a man: who, knowing his whole true self, cannot be used or possessed by any power other than himself, and whose life therefore is lived for life’s sake and never in the service of ruin, or pain, or hatred, or the dark.
FIVE STARS. Next up, The Tombs of Atuan!
Addendum (May 4): I’ve read Tombs, which is another Bildungsroman… this time for a girl/priest who traps Ged but then releases him so he can rescue her: She looked from the horror of earthquake to the man beside her, whose face she had never seen by daylight. “You held it back,” she said, and her voice piped like the wind in a reed, after that mighty bellowing and crying of the earth. “You held back the earthquake, the anger of the dark.” “We must go on,” he said, turning away from the sunrise and the ruined Tombs. “I am tired, I am cold…” He stumbled as they went, and she took his arm.