Skip to main content

Drawing Atuan: The Platypus Reads Part CCXCII

Inspired by my students, I picked up a pack of Prismacolor brush tip markers on Saturday. To the left is my first attempt to get a feel for these new tools and what they can do. The image is from Yvonne Gilbert's cover for the 1984 paperback of The Tombs of Atuan by Ursula K. Le Guin. It's the book my wife and I happen to be reading right now.

I didn't discover Ursula Le Guin until I was almost out of college. It's a pity. These are the books I should have been reading back in junior high instead of wasting all that time on "The Re-Reads of Shannara". Oh well. Each thing has its season.

What stands out to me about Le Guin's Earthsea, and The Tombs of Atuan in particular, is her strict minimalism. Not only is her word count and vocabulary perfectly restrained -not a word more than is needed- but her world and its characters are too. That's nothing short of phenomenal in a genre where over-writing is par for the course. Le Guin allows her characters to emerge from inference. We learn about them slowly, imperceptibly, by a what is said and what is not said, by what is done and what is not done. We learn about Earthsea and the Kargad Lands in the same way. There are no in-depth explanations, no authorial detours into mythology or politics. Unlike the works of Terry Brooks, however, it is not because these elements are not there. We know instinctively that Earthsea has the depth and reality of Middle Earth. Le Guin has simply mastered the art of only revealing the elements of her invented world that are absolutely necessary for the plot leaving the reader to infer the rest.

My wife pointed out a further stroke of genius that hadn't occurred to me before: Tenar, The Tombs of Atuan's lead character, is unlikable. This will be my forth or fifth trek through the novel, and I'd never thought about that; if I met Tenar in the real world, I wouldn't like her at all. Yet Le Guin, as a master fantasist keeps us reading page after angst-ridden page of Tenar's desert life. How does she do that? The answer seems to be two fold. As in Garth Nix's Clariel, Le Guin sets the reader a mystery and plays off of our desire to learn more. As in Clariel, but with a greater degree of mastery, The Tombs of Atuan also presents us with a sympathetic explanation of why the lead character is the way that she is. We understand that in the same circumstance we would be pushed toward becoming the same sort of person.

Comments

Joi said…
Tombs of Atuan may be one of the most beautiful books I've ever read. LeGuin's prose is spectacular, and it's spareness only enhances that quality. Her books are like perfect jewel-like watercolor paintings.
James said…
Yes, that's a great way to put it. They're like the Narnia books without the intentional "precious" element that gives Lewis'Narnia its peculiar flavor. Le Guin's minature worlds belong to Myth and Folklore while Lewis' "cameos" artfully combine the Bastables with Arthurian Romance to achieve their effects.

Popular posts from this blog

The Platypus Reads Part XXVII

Thoughts after reading the "Iliad" to prepare a Greece unit for my students: -Hector is a jerk until he's dead. He even advocates the exposure of Achaean corpses and then has the cheek to turn around and ask Achilles to spare his. He rudely ignores Polydamas' prophecies and fights outside the gate to save his pride knowing full well what it will cost his family and city. After he's dead, he becomes a martyr for the cause. -Agamemnon has several moments of true leadership to balance out his pettiness. In this way, he's a haunting foil to Achilles: the two men are more alike than they want to acknowledge. -We see that Achilles is the better man at the funeral games of Patroclos. His lordliness, tact, and generosity there give us a window into Achilles before his fight with Agamemnon and the death of Patroclos consumed him. -Nestor is a boring, rambling, old man who's better days are far behind him, and yet every Achaean treats him with the upmo...

Tolkien's Dark Tower: The Platypus Reads Part CLXXXVI

Tom Shippey points out in his Road to Middle Earth that the germ of Barad Dur, Sauron's Stronghold, comes from a scrap of Chaucer where the poet makes an offhand reference to a knight and his approach to "the dark tower."  Chaucer expected that everyone knew that story, but somehow in the intervening centuries it has become lost.  Using his imagination, Tolkien tried to delve back into the mine of story and imagine what this Dark Tower might have been.  We see several tries at this image, or several "accounts" in Tolkien's corpus.  The first is Thangorodrim, Morgoth's "dark tower," where he sits "on hate enthroned."  The second, and like unto it, is Sauron's original keep at Tol Sirion.  This is the dark tower before which Luthien, in all her frailty, stands and lays the deepest pits bare with her song (an image oddly reminiscent of protestant poets like Spenser, Bunyan, and Wesley).  Building on these two images, Tolkien constru...

Platypus Past: Bachelor Cooking

Having been married for several years now, I can begin looking on my bachelor past with an "outsiders" perspective. One of the interesting things I've noticed while being married is the different approach my wife and I have to cooking. My wife actually learned How To Cook is quite good at it. Give her a recipe and she can make just about anything. I had to pick up bits and pieces as I went along. I call my style of cooking "bachelor cooking," and the first rule is that there are no recipes. The main goal of the bachelor cook is to get filling food on the table quickly and in a way that elevates him above the mere ramen-and-t-bell-forever caveman. This goal often has to be achieved in the context of a communal environment with other bachelors where what food is available at any given time may vary widely. This means that formal recipes are out. Instead, the bachelor cook needs to adopt a more open and creative approach to food. A bachelor cook sees a mea...