The Tombs of Atuan

I reread this because I hadn’t loved it as a child. Happy with Tolkien and Lewis, Susan Cooper, and Rosemary Sutcliffe, I didn’t warm to Ursula Le Guin’s Earthsea series in the same way and especially not to this second volume in (what was then) a trilogy.

Frankly, I can see why. The prose is spare, sharp, and unsparing. The pacing is delicate, and the action really rather limited. This time around, I found it wonderful: moving and extraordinarily well-crafted. What she’s able to conjure with so few words is utterly exceptional.

There is an almost exquisite sense of confinement… show more.

The second of LeGuin’s Earthsea books is a story made of fantasy, adventure, horror, mystery, and myth. 

Tenar, the high priestess must choose between her lifelong training and her unexpected compassion for a thief named Ged, who she must execute in the Tombs of Atuan. Tenar leads Ged through darkness and terror to a place where she decides who she will become.

LeGuin’s prose is direct, evocative, and compelling. Read out loud, the story is spellbinding. It stays with me even though it’s years since my first reading. Each time I return to the fantastic yet entirely believable world she… show more.

I encountered this book in the library, where I was trying to avoid a harassing classmate. Arha is the Eaten One, believed to be the reincarnation of a dark priestess. As a child she was taken from her family and dedicated to the service of the nameless gods who dwell in a subterranean labyrinth. Trapped in a round of obscure rituals, Arha discovers an intruder in the maze. She must defy a group of rival priestesses in order to escape with him.  

The setting of this book just blew me away. It is a world of darkness, where Arha moves… show more.

This book (and the series it’s a part of) utterly changed my understanding of fantasy writing. I realized that fantasy could take on big issues – and contemporary ones – by describing made-up worlds and fairly narrow lives. The “secret” in this story, stretching a bit, is the world itself, which is kept secret from the book’s protagonist, Tenar. The labyrinth that she lives in is her destined place, but she has the wisdom and grace to not only save someone who has landed in it, but to find her way out of it herself. 

The Tombs of Atuan is a wonderfully haunting and deeply memorable tale. The story follows a girl called Tenar, born into servitude to the Nameless Ones, destined to live out her days in a dark underground world; she is the epitome of self-reliant. When she first meets the wizard Ged, she thinks he is a thief. But instead of leaving him to die, as she should do, she starts to consider the world outside, and to question everything she has been brought up to believe. The truth shatters everything she thought she knew. Tenar leaves behind everything that is safe… show more.