the Lord of the Rings: book five

This book is the second half of The Return of the King, the final instalment of J.R.R. Tolkien's The Lord of the Rings trilogy, which as with the rest of the series I've read before (see hence that link going to my prior post about this) but am re-enjoying thanks to dogged YouTuber Tolkien Trash's project to read the series in full, aloud, live, a chapter a week.

the Lord of the Rings: book four

This book is the second part of the second book in J. R.R. Tolkien's The Lord of the Rings trilogy, which I am still very enjoyably reworking my way through by means of TolkienTrash's weekly chapter streams.

the Subtle Knife

This book is the second instalment of Philip Pullman's His Dark Materials trilogy. As I said in my previous post, as I always do for serieses I will be reserving my fuller thoughts on the whole for the final post & here will simply give a rough, spoiler-free sketch of the story's gist.

   Will Parry, a teenage boy from our world, whose chief concern in life is caring for his mentally-ill mother, accidentally kills a man who has broken into the house. Naturally, he leaves his mum with his piano teacher to keep her safe while he runs away - then, almost immediately, he finds a magical window into another world. This other world, called Cittágazze, is a crumbling coastal city, deserted by everyone but children. While exploring, the first other person Will encounters is a girl slightly younger than him who introduces herself as Lyra Silvertongue (aye, the very same heroine from the first book - she was renamed by Iorek Byrnison), who tells him that great things are afoot. Together they start travelling back and forth between Will's universe & Cittágazze as Lyra searches for her father for clues as to where her path leads & Will in turn seeks his own father, an explorer who went missing on a mission in the far north when Will was a baby. Their hunt soon leads them into contact with a pair of notable adults - the seemingly helpful museum-enthusiast Sir Charles Latrom & the bewildered dark-matter research scientist Dr Mary Malone; mysteries begin to resolve somewhat into focus & conspiracies continue to plod inexorably along, and soon the duo find themselves seeking the eponymous subtle knife, an item of immense cosmic power that people from many worlds would kill to possess. I will discuss it along with the alethiometer (and Dust! I haven't mentioned Dust in either post yet, oops) in the post about the final book in the trilogy, coming soon. Oh, forgot to mention, Lee Scoresby is still hanging about looking for a shaman, and Serafina Pekkala (a witch-queen) is here too.

Northern Lights

This book is a children's fantasy novel by Philip Pullman, standing as the first book in his His Dark Materials trilogy, which I've never read before & intend to finish over the next week or so. As is my wont with serieses, I'll reserve my commentary and reflections on characters, overall plot, themes, etc until the post about the last book and here concern myself only with providing a quick spoiler-free sketch of the story so far.

   The novel opens in Jordan College, Oxford, albeit not in our universe but in an alternate reality where all humans are perpetually accompanied by their daemons - animal-form embodiments of their humans' souls. We are introduced to Lyra Belacqua & her daemon Pantalaimon, as her uncle Lord Asriel returns to Jordan from an expedition in the far north. It becomes clear that conspiracy is afoot, and after an unexpected gain (the Master of Jordan gives Lyra one of the only existing alethiometers; a curious arcane instrument which I will discuss in more depth in my final post about the trilogy) followed by an unexpected loss (Lyra's best friend Roger goes missing; she presumes he has been taken by a nefarious mysterious group nicknamed "the Gobblers"), Lyra is sent away from Jordan to live as the assistant to a glamourous & powerful woman named Mrs Coulter. However - just as she's starting to adjust to the high-class lifestyle, Lyra notices that the tendrils of conspiracy don't even leave her safe here - so she runs away, ending up in the company of the gyptians (a community of people largely comparable to gypsies in our universe, only with barges instead of caravans), who she urges to go north to track down the Gobblers & rescue Roger (along with the many other children, some of them gyptians, who have been taken). The icy wastes of the far North then play background to a rollercoaster of captures & escapes, near misses & fatal mistakes - we meet Iorek Byrnison, an armoured bear, and Lee Scoresby, a Texan aeronaut, and Lyra & the gyptians do their best to muddle through the deepening dangers of the conspiracy they're uncovering, including whatever roles in it Lord Asriel & Mrs Coulter seem to be playing.

   I read this in two big sittings. Pullman writes extremely well & I found this a highly compelling page-turner - as an adult! Had I been exposed more fully to these books when I was of their target audience age (say, ten to thirteenish maybe) I'm confident they would have displaced The Franchise That Must Not Be Named as my go-to rereads. Strongly recommended. Stand by for posts about books two & three.

the Lord of the Rings: book three

This book is the third part of J. R. R. Tolkien's timeless classic The Lord of the Rings series. As with previous more recent posts about these books, these are ones I've read before, so please dig into my blog history through category tags or the dated archive to see my fuller thoughts and/or summaries on the themes/plots of this story - I experienced this again through the ongoing mission of YouTuber Tolkien Trash to read the whole trilogy to her audience a chapter a week, a task which I have to say she is performing excellently.

the Lord of the Rings: book two

This book by J.R.R. Tolkien is one I've read for this blog in the last few years, hence the link going back to that post - I'm re-experiencing the series in audio form read a chapter a week by the delightful Tolkien Trash, which I'm still very much enjoying. Check out her channel for some of the best Tolkien-related content YouTube has to offer.

Artemis Fowl

This book is a novel for younger readers by Eoin Colfer - the first in a very long-running series that I have no intention of reading the rest of, as I have too much else to read. That said it is a very fun book. Without wanting to spoil the story, a potted summary would be: twelve-year-old Artemis Fowl, our eponymous criminal mastermind, may have bitten off more than even he can chew after he successfully kidnaps a fairy. If I'd been aware of this series when I was within its target audience range (of probably sevenish to fourteenish) I would have absolutely devoured it - as an adult reader it still has a lot going for it, Colfer is a witty and deftly skilled writer, the characters are well-sketched and interesting, the worldbuilding is colourful and original, and the plot ticks along at a very consistently exciting pace. Highly recommended for children who like a bit more of a wry, punchy tone to their fantasy.

the Lord of the Rings: book one

This book (which I've read before recently, hence that link simply going to my earlier post about it) I've been re-experiencing in audio form, thanks to YouTuber Tolkien Trash, who is committed to the admirable & entertaining work of reading out the whole trilogy a chapter a week on live-stream. You can check out her back-catalogue here if you want to listen along with me and her other followers. She has a soothing yet stimulating voice for reading & the occasional asides to the chat (or just because she's laughing about something in the text) add a funny level of intimate performativity to the streams.

the Island of the Immortals

This short story (available from that link online) by Ursula K. Le Guin goes hard. In it, a traveller visits an island where, it is claimed, there are immortal people living after thousands of years of uninterrupted life. Only immortality might not be all it's cracked up to be - simply not dying doesn't guarantee anything about bodily integrity or quality of life. I won't spoil it - just go and read the thing, it's pretty short, and is a startling and disturbing angle on the theme.

the Book of Merlyn

This book is the final instalment of T.H. White's The Once and Future King series - it was published much later than the rest, because, you know, World War Two provided a bit of an interruption to smoothness on the deadline front. As you remember we last left Arthur mulling over the failure of his life's efforts in his tent outside the siege of Mordred's castle; we re-enter the scene exactly where we left off, and *surprise* - the unknown person entering is in fact his old tutor Merlyn, back from a conspicuous long absence with Nimue, and keenly reintroducing himself to Arthur's life to prod the old King back into liveliness and hopefulness with a continuation of his adolescent education. So, on the eve of battle, Arthur follows Merlyn away to an underground room where many of the animals he met when he was turned into their kind are present to offer wisdom, fellowship, encouragement and insight. The passages from the first book in which Arthur is turned into an ant and a goose* are included in this book too, because of editorial changes made during the complicated publication timeline, but here these parts are couched in a much more philosophical and less comic context. Merlyn is very deliberately trying to educate Arthur in the nature of political power, freedom, conformity, authority and whatnot. As such, much of this book consists of rambling speculative dialogue about the nature of these concepts, how well they can be realised in human society, whether there can ever truly be a "cure" for war and violence, etc. It's a very thought-provoking sequence in which Arthur's experience and Merlyn's wise insight play into each other perfectly. (Not sure where else to mention this but it's niggling at me - in this book White fully breaks the fourth wall at a couple of points, obviously via Merlyn, which I found very entertainingly in-character.) Finally, Arthur accepts his fate and his legacy, and returns to the battlefield, where he later offers Mordred a truce in exchange for half his kingdom. The book closes with a series of loose sketches about the ultimate fates of Arthur, Guinevere and Lancelot.

   So, that's The Once and Future King! Five books in one! Plus the five-in-one volume that I've been linking these posts to includes an afterword by Sylvia Townsend Warner about the fraught publication history of this series by way of explanation as to why this final book was so late that it was actually posthumous to the author. But anyway, here we go with some reflections.

   On the whole, I really enjoyed this series. I've never myself read Malory's Morte d'Arthur so I can't speak to how well this series expresses the style (I'd be surprised) or themes (perhaps I wouldn't) of the work which inspired it, but the general vibe of medieval romance is captured to wondrous heights in these novels while still being believable and inventive - I think anyone with any fondness for the Arthurian mythos** will find a lot to recognise as well as a lot to be pleasantly surprised by in them. While magic only really plays a substantive role in the first book when Arthur is being transformed into animals (and also a little bit in the second book, because of Morgan le Fay and the Questing Beast - as well as in this, the final book for the same reasons as the first) I have classified all five as fantasy novels because the Arthurian mythos kind of has that as part of its cultural identity - this is far from historical fiction. Which - on that note, one thing that did irk me throughout was the errant nature of the past setting; if Arthur was a real historical figure, he lived in the sixth century CE, whereas these stories are set vaguely between the twelfth and fourteenth. I can forgive that though as Arthur in the mythic form is an essentially timeless character and it was during that pre-Renaissance time period that romances of his life and knights etc were doing the round of England and France the most thoroughly. What added to this temporal irk was the numerous anachronisms of both Merlyn and the omniscient narration - I know with Merlyn this is explained by his "living through history backwards" (a quirk that I really kind of dislike, as it just doesn't make narrative sense, and only exists so that the wizard can quickly reference later historical events rather than having to concisely describe sets of circumstances) and with narration it's explained by the fact that this was, of course, written in the 20th century with access to a whole heap of knowledge and realities that were future-alien to the characters in the story, but in both cases these did take me out of the immersion somewhat. Having said that, I really like the writing style - White slips idiosyncratically between medieval knightly court-speak and dialect-heavy realistic speech in his dialogue, while the third-person narration is consistently direct, sure of itself, and largely sympathetic. If there is one final closing gripe I'd have with these books, it's that Arthur and Merlyn aren't in them enough, especially the second and third instalments. But Lancelot and the other knights (and King Pellinore - what a brilliant character) are thoroughly enjoyable in their own right, so I won't decry this too much. Overall a great series.

   I know I mentioned in my first post that I was reading this series as inspiration-fodder for a series of novels about Arthur and Merlin that I'm working on myself - and to be honest I didn't get a huge amount out of them for that end. I certainly got a few sharp realisations of things that I definitely did or didn't want to happen to Arthur, and ways of being that I definitely did or didn't want Merlin to embody, but overall I think the setting and trajectory of my own Arthurian stories is different enough to White's that I can just be grateful for having read and loved an intriguing original take on the mythos without having to kowtow to it much in my own work.

* Albeit in this re-inclusion the goose chapters go on a bit further - there's even a tragicomic subplot in which Arthur falls in love with a female goose, only to be yanked back to humanity by Merlyn just as this is realised.

** I will freely admit that before reading these my only exposure to it was through the old film Excalibur, the BBC series Merlin, the Netflix series about Nimue called Cursed, and the early 2000's cartoon King Arthur's Disasters. Not necessarily in that order either chronologically or in terms of impact.

the Candle in the Wind

This book is the fourth in T.H. White's The Once and Future King series. And boy, here is where the drama really kicks off. Knights of the Round Table Agravaine and Mordred are stewing in their bitter grudges against Lancelot and Arthur respectively, and hatch a plot to bring down the reputations of these two most chivalrous of men by exposing Lancelot's love affair with Guinevere - they kind of vaguely succeed, and the kingdom is thrown into civil war as knights of the realm as well as other regional rulers from around the country piecemeal take sides. Arthur is utterly dismayed as his ideals of righteousness and chivalry are trampled upon and shown to be worthless in the face of genuine unrest, and the Round Table falls apart. The novel ends with the King alone in his tent outside the siege of Mordred's fort, wallowing in regretful what-iffery, until right at the end he is stirred by an unknown figure entering his tent - he assumes, Mordred, come to kill him. But we have to wait for the next book to find out.

the Ill-Made Knight

This book is the third in T.H. White's The Once and Future King series. Again, Arthur and Merlyn are hardly featured - instead we follow perhaps the third-most famous character from the mythos - that being the inimitable Sir Lancelot, as he attains knighthood, gains renown, wins a ton of tournaments and jousts, partakes in the Round Table (which is by now well-established) and its quixotic quest to find the Holy Grail, and falls, ill-fatedly, in love with Queen Guinevere. Despite being the longest instalment in the series perhaps the least of overall plot import happens in this one - it's a lot of fun nonethless.

the Witch in the Wood

This book is the second of T.H. White's The Once and Future King series. Arthur and Merlyn are barely in this one - instead, we largely follow two ongoing largely comic threads: in one, the errant King Pellinore continues to search for the Questing Beast; in the other, Arthur's nephews (Agravaine, Gawaine, Gaheris and Gareth) jostle for status as they await adulthood. Meanwhile, in the background, the King is working on plans to establish some means of promoting chivalry and righteousness throughout the land, by way of an egalitarian ideal embodied in the Round Table. to which he starts calling chivalrous and righteous knights to promote his ethic. The eponymous "witch in the wood" is Morgan le Fay, who shows up briefly - also, right at the end, Arthur's half-sister Morgause seduces him by way of nefarious magics to conceive with him an incest-baby who will grow up to the be prophetically-ominous/tragic Mordred.

the Sword in the Stone

This book is the first in T.H. White's The Once and Future King series - a modern retelling of the Arthurian mythos loosely based on Thomas Malory's Morte d'Arthur. I'm planning to blitz through all five books in the next week or so because I'm actually working on a series of novels involving King Arthur and this looks like great inspiration-fodder. As usual for a series, I will be restricting these posts to brief outlines of story for each post up until the final book where I will then finally offer some deeper reflections on the series as a whole.

   Anyway - in this book we are introduced to a kid nicknamed "the Wart", who is growing up in a medieval castle, undergoing rigorous diverse education in matters intellectual and military, and is bottom of his social pecking order. Then the Wart meets a mad-seeming old man called Merlyn, who rips himself away from his hermit-life to become Wart's tutor - only these new kinds of lessons are education of a completely different style to what might have been expected. Merlyn's lessons comprise partly of lectures in the need for and difficulties of getting people to live morally, and partly of turning Wart into various animals* to see how they experience life. After a few years of this, we learn that the realm is in political turmoil due to the lack of a clear successor for king, but there is a rumour abroad that whoever can pull a mysterious sword out of a stone will be divinely bestowed with such rights. Anyone who knows the story can guess who manages to pull it out - and thus, Wart's derogatory nickname is left in the dust, and a young King Arthur starts to assume his life's work.

* Including a fish, a hawk, an owl, an ant, a goose, and a beaver - the implication is that there were probably many more such lessons that didn't get covered in the book itself. The ant and goose chapters are particularly genius feats of natural imagination.

Tales of Earthsea

This book by Ursula K. Le Guin is the fifth in the Earthsea series, so it technically comes before The Other Wind, but I've already read and blogged that one, so this post culminates the series and therefore I'll be making my reflections here.

   This book comprises five short stories and an essay - I will deal with each in turn.

• First up we have The Finder, in which a young sorcerer called Medra (also known as Otter or Tern at points in his life) grows in power and wisdom and ends up founding the wizard school on Roke. This longish short story is a brilliant view into the dim hazy past of the world Le Guin has created, and lends a potent depth to the reader's understanding of the interrelations between magic and wisdom necessary to be a good wizard.
• Next is Darkrose and Diamond, in which a young sorcerer called Diamond falls in love with a young witch called Rose, and forgoes life as a wizard to pursue this romance. This is a delicate, lovely little story.
• Then we move onto The Bones of the Earth, in which a young Ogion (the sorcerer who initially trained Ged in the first book) teams up with his tutor in the hope of preventing a catastrophic earthquake. Strong themes of trust and humility.
• Next we have On the High Marsh, in which we are treated to a glimpse of Ged at the height of his career as Archmage - only he isn't doing grand world-saving stuff, he's on a remote island curing cattle. Again, strong themes of humility, as well as kindness, and power.
• Finally, Dragonfly - in which Irian (who you may remember from the sixth book) visits the school of wizards on Roke to provocatively question the masters of magic why such learning is forbidden to women and girls. This story provides a perfect stepping stone into the final book in the series.

   Finally, the essay at the end of the book goes into elucidatory detail about the peoples, languages, history and magic system of Earthsea - for me it didn't really add a huge amount of insight into the books, as I've read all six so closely together and so had much of the lore in my medium-term memory pretty well already, but for people reading the books more spaced out it would be a really helpful appendix. Not to mention it simply shows a masterclass in thoughtful worldbuilding, much like Tolkien's appendices.

   All five stories in the book are moving, thought-provoking, immersive, deceptively simple, and immaculately well-written. If you have read any of the other Earthsea books and enjoyed them this is an addition you can't leave out - in fact, just read the whole series. Speaking of the six as a whole, I think anyone who appreciates good fantasy will absolutely love them - I do in actual fact think these books seriously rival The Lord of the Rings as my favourite fantasy literature now, though it's hard to compare as the writing styles are so different and thematically and in scope the works are trying to achieve very different things. Good job I don't have to pick favourites on this blog.

   I said I'd be making reflections on the series as a whole - the fact is I don't have much to say. I just loved the experience of reading these superb stories, and know I will definitely be revisiting them for a re-read in the future, probably many times. The characters are well-drawn enough to be believable and lovable or hateable as the plot intends and each realised with psychological complexities of their own; the themes are deep to the point of profundity and are perfectly entwined and expressed through character and plot; the world is obviously immensely well-developed and lived-in; and the overall story arc across these six books is hugely satisfying while never feeling like an ultimate solution - the story ends on a note of potential and promise rather than a statically final resolution. If J.R.R. Tolkien can make you dream wistfully of being a hobbit, Ursula K. Le Guin will show you dizzying visions of being a dragon.

the Other Wind

This book is the sixth and last in Ursula K. Le Guin's Earthsea series (and yes, I know, I've skipped the fifth one, Tales of Earthsea, but I don't have it yet - it's ordered and will be lumped up on here once I've read it, but my reflections on the series as a whole will be reserved for that one). In this instalment we follow Alder, a young sorcerer of mending from the island of Taon, who keeps having dreams in which his dead wife reaches out to him from the realms of those who have passed over the wall on the hill which separates the living from the not. He is drawn to Gont to question the ex-Archmage Ged about this, but Ged, now powerless but still wise, shunts Alder off to the capital island Havnor to consult with Tenar and Tehanu, who are over there to visit the recently installed king Lebannen (aka Arren from the third one). Tenar and Tehanu, as well as a number of other wizards from Roke who happened to be on Havnor at the time, and in short order also a dragon who can take the form of a woman called Irian, all find Alder's plight deeply troubling, the experienced mages taking it as a sign of a worsening in the balance that Ged had tried so hard fifteen years earlier to heal. Taking along with them a princess from the Kargad Lands who has been sent as a gifted bride to Lebannen, all concerned persons make their way to Roke, to hold council between humans and dragons in the Immanent Grove, a magical forest that forms the spiritual and arguably literal centre of all Earthsea, in the hope that they may find in their shared wisdom some way of restoring rest and reincarnation to the dead that the living may rest and live in hope and ease. I hope that it goes without saying that this perfunctory plot summary of mine by no means spoils the story, as the magic is in the fabric of the telling. But reflections further than that will have to wait for my post about the fifth book which I've accidentally skipped. So stick around.

Tehanu

This book is the fourth Earthsea novel by Ursula K. Le Guin, and I honestly was not prepared for how much of a sharp turn this one took. The first three had all been fairly standard-fare fantasy adventure mystery stories; this is more of a domestic drama, set entirely on Ged's home island Gont. We follow Tenar (who since escaping Atuan now goes by her original name), now a middle-aged woman, and Therru, a young girl who has survived horrific childhood abuse, as the pair simply try to live life on the land. Ged arrives home on the back of a dragon named Kalessin about a quarter of the way through, and this complicates matters for Tenar and her care of Therru, but Ged is stripped of his magic and simply wishes to hide and recuperate. I hope it doesn't sound like a complaint but very little of import happens in the majority of this novel; it is simply the story of Tenar struggling to raise a complex and hurt child in a land that she knows well but is ultimately foreign to her. Then it all kicks off in the last ten pages, but I won't spoil that - except to drop the tantalising hint that Therru comes to learn her true name in epic fashion.

the Farthest Shore

This book is the third of Ursula K. Le Guin's Earthsea series. We follow Arren, a young man of noble birth from the island Enlad, who has been sent to the Masters of Roke with unsettling news: magic seems to be failing. First from the far reaches of the western isles and increasingly closer to home, mages are forgetting their words and acts of power, and things long-depended-on for the sustaining of common livelihood are passing out of being. The Archmage Ged opts to accompany Arren on a hunch-led and eventful journey to the far south and eventually the far west (as far as Selidor, the eponymous island of dragons) to see if they can unravel this grim mystery. They do discover ultimately that it is the work of an errant wizard who has tried to break down the walls between the realms of the living and the dead, and thus severely harmed the balance; Ged has to expend the fullness of his power to reseal the breach in the world. That may be something of a spoiler but it's the way this story is told that really lends it its magic, so you can't decry me for that. Anyway, I am reading my way through this whole series but reserving my deeper thoughts and critiques for the final post, so keep watching this space.

the Tombs of Atuan

This book is the second of Ursula K. Le Guin's Earthsea series (see, told you I was going through all of them). In it we are introduced to Tenar, a young girl on the island Atuan, where at an early age she is decided to be the reincarnation of the First Priestess of the Namesless Ones (mysterious primordial powers of death and darkness, chaos and madness) and hence renamed Arha, "the Eaten One". She is raised to full knowledge of the tomb complex around which her habitation community is built, including the depths and complexities of the Labyrinth beneath it. Then one day she sees a strange foreign man in the caverns, who gives his name as Sparrowhawk (spoiler alert - it's Ged, now Archmage of Roke, and on a quest of his own). Without giving too much away the pair help each other find (in both a mystical personal and literal directional sense) their way out of the tomb complexes of Atuan, and onward to hopefully brighter futures. Stay tuned for the post on the next one as we are now entering territory of Earthsea books that I haven't read yet.

A Wizard of Earthsea

This book (which I've read before on this blog so the link there goes to my original post about it - this time though I'm determined to get through the whole series) is the first in Ursula K. Le Guin's seminal fantasy series set in the world of Earthsea.

   We are initially introduced to Duny, a goatherd child on the island of Gont, who proves to have some knack for the magical arts. When he comes of age he is given his true name, Ged, by the local wizard Ogion, and tutored by him for a time; though when his powers prove too great for Ogion to teach satisfactorily Ged is sent to the School of Wizards on the island of Roke. However, ambition and teen angst conspire together and in an attempt to show off Ged accidentally summons a nameless being from the dark realms. The rest of the story is of Ged's efforts to escape, then finally confront, this being.

   I will say nothing of the solution to the plot for want of not spoiling an incredible story; nor will I here divulge my thoughts on the book as a whole, as I stated I fully intend to read the whole series and so will save those reflections for the last post. Stay tuned.