Restoring the Balance

Poor Ged. After seeing him earn his stripes in "A Wizard of Earthsea", watching him confront the Nameless Ones in "The Tombs of Atuan" on a quest to rediscover the Rune of Peace, where do we find him? Well, Roke island, of course. He is no longer simply Sparrowhawk, but Archmage Sparrowhawk. An honor, to be sure, has been bestowed upon him, but the laurels are far too heavy a burden for Ged. As a doer of deeds and restless heart, staying cooped up on Roke Island holds no joy for him. His opportunity to leave, however, comes at the highest of prices.

Once again Le Guin, mindful of her adolescent readership, places a youth at center stage of the book. This time it is Arren, a young prince sent as an emissary to Roke Island to report on the strange loss of magic that has been noticed on his island home. Arren finds that he is not the only delegate to have brought this news to Roke. Reports are coming in from all the Reaches that magic is disappearing. Wizards are simply forgetting their power, losing the true names of things. Indeed, almost as soon as people begin to forget how to do magic, they also begin to doubt that there ever was such a thing. One other nugget of news brought by the various messengers is even more ominous: The phenomenon is spreading, moving ever inward to the center of Earthsea, and if not countered soon, magic will cease to exist altogether.

Seeing this threat, Ged departs with Arren in search of its source. They travel throughout Earthsea meeting many of its folk and tracking down the wizard they know must be behind this disturbance for, as Ged points out, "only man can upset the balance of things." As more and more is revealed, Ged realizes that the responsibility for all that is now transpiring may even be his own. Eventually the pair must do battle with the misguided sorcerer committing these acts, but they must do it in his realm, the realm of the dead.

This book is an echo of, and complement to, the first Earthsea installment in some important ways. In the first volume we see Ged's ascent to manhood, and in this we see it's ultimate fruition. Like the first volume, responsibility for one's own actions is a major theme, as is the idea that every action has effects, sometimes momentous, that we cannot foresee.