Earthsea

Up late on a Sunday night reading 'A Wizard of Earthsea.' Now I really do wish I'd read it and added it to my favourites-for-rereading back when I was a teen. Maybe it would have gone somewhere between Narnia and Alan Garner and David Eddings's The Belgariad. That would have been the perfect spot, I think.

What I'm most surprised and pleased about is its darkness. The whole idea of summoning a nasty spirit and then having it pursue you from home to home, always looking for a means to break out into your world and attack you... that's quite heavy stuff. The way she always calls it a 'clot of darkness', too - gives me the shivers. There's something about Le Guin's voice that makes this story seem like it's a folk tale, loaded with inevitability and fate. It's all so long ago and there's nothing we can do about it: these things are the stuff of legend. But she brings us so close to the action, too - we know this boy and his mistakes and the way he brings about disasters, through hubris, self-defence and showing off. When he elects to conjure spirits we know it's all going to go to the bad.

I thought I didn't even like Epic Fantasy anymore. I thought I was cheesed off with dragons and fed up with bloody wizards. Especially bloody kids learning to be bloody wizards. I'd had enough of sword fights and hexes and mountains and made-up names for countries I wasn't bothered about visiting. But Le Guin goes about these things with such zest and - here's the crucial bit - economy.