In this story, Sparrowhawk has become the Archmage of Roke. There are tales of magic going wrong and Prince Arren is sent by his father to Roke to discover more.
*****SPOILERS*****
Three aspects of this story were potent.
Sparrowhawk says a
rowan tree can’t bear a crown (the leaves/branches) if it has shallow roots.
Arren’s true name Lebannen means ‘Rowan’. So is Sparrowhawk taking Arren on the
journey so that his roots are no longer shallow and thus he can bear a crown?
The pair spend time
with the raft people who live their whole lives on the ocean sea. Seeing this
culture was fascinating. They tie their babies to posts which is such a cute
image.
They come across Cob
who creates a portal into the Dry Land, the place of the dead. Dead people ‘were
healed of pain, and of life.’ This line hit me hard.
Throughout, we see how the negative effects
on wizardry are coupled with negative thought patterns, both people being in dark
places and coming to incorrect conclusions.
A wizard lost his
power by trading it for something else, saying he doesn’t need names where he’s
going. An old lady said ‘wizard stuff’ keeps people from life which is why she
lost it, words and names.
Without death, there
is no renewal which is affecting the Balance. Magic is meant to uphold the
Balance so it’s reasonable that, if the Balance is out of sorts, so would
magic.
Roke’s students of
wizardry have started to doubt wizardry because they think if wizards had
power, they’d live forever. Seeing as wizards are taught about the Balance,
this shows how bad the negative feelings spreading across the archipelago are
becoming.
Dragons have lost the
Old Speech. Considering Sparrowhawk once described dragons are the Old Speech
itself, being its living form, this is quite serious.
Arren decides magic
is just trickery because there’s no mastery over death. This logic doesn’t
follow. At no point is magic been considered to be so. Magic is about Balance,
and no death means no Balance.
There were more grammar and formatting
mistakes in this book than the other three.
‘So if I am needed,
therefore I am here.’ This is a very odd sentence. One can pass odd sentence
structures off as part of the individual’s speech pattern if it’s a regular
occurrence. In this case, it’s not.
Regularly, different
speakers are put in the same paragraph. This creates unnecessary confusion.
Sparrowhawk says, ‘I
prefer to save talking till I know what I’m talking about.’ As with a previous
Earthsea critiques, this should be ‘until’ or ‘’til’.
There’s a lack of
speech marks to denote the start of speech when ‘he whispered, I found the
hole… It burned!”’
One paragraph was
from Sparrowhawkw’s perspective and the next one was from perspectives on the
far-away Roke. If there had been an empty line between the paragraphs, that
would have been fine. But to switch the perspective with just an indent,
especially when the perspectives aren’t within the same area (and hence not perceiving
the same stimuli), isn’t enough of a distinction.
‘He has done with
doing.’ A better choice would’ve been ‘was’ because the sentence in its current
form is weird. The only suitable way to have ‘has’ in this sentence whilst
retaining its meaning would be something like, ‘He has finished doing.’
The characters often display faulty thought
processes, proving a distraction from the plot.
People are said to be
uncaring about the world. This is described as denying death so people are
acting like they will live forever. But this explanation doesn’t match the
behaviour. Why would someone value the world less if they’re immortal? Wouldn’t
they value it more because they’d be spending much more time there?
The Masters of Roke
think that the archipelago not having one king is the thing from which the
problems stem. There are two reasons why this is not so. One: the magical problems
are magical in nature so the source must be magical in nature, too. Two: the
assumption that a lack of a single authority would cause any societal problems
is without justification. In fact, throughout history, bigger kingdoms and
empires are more difficult to control so everyone being under a single rule
would most likely make things worse. So the Masters reaching their conclusion
falls flat.
Sparrowhawk rescues
Arren from slavers. Arren asks why Sparrowhawk didn’t free the other slaves,
who replies that he didn’t want to make their choices for them. Um, they’re
slaves, so they don’t have a choice. Also, he made Arren’s ‘choice’, so why not
make the ‘choice’ for the others?
Two things were blaringly obvious as false
when comparing them with the earlier books.
Arren is shocked that
someone with the low status of a goatherd could gain the high status of an
archmage. This observation is fine. Yet Sparrowhawk has spent most of his life
as a mage and, in his time before learning magic, he spent most of his time
helping his dad as a smith. The status is still low so the point of the
observation remains intact, even if the information of the observation is
incorrect.
Sparrowhawk is
described as short in this book yet in the first book as tall. Either this is
an inconsistency or Arren is taller than Sparrowhawk. But if it were necessary
to note how tall Sparrowhawk was, surely it would be necessary to note
characters that were even taller?
Several things just didn’t make sense.
The pair spend a
whole day swimming in the sea. Breaks are fine, but a whole day? That seems a
waste, especially when the whole world is falling apart. If Sparrowhawk is
trying to fix the Balance, why would he waste time?
When Sparrowhawk
punished Cob all those years ago, it drove Cob to find a spell for immortality,
to get back from death. (These aren’t the same things!) As a consequence, life
is being drawn to Cob in the land of the dead. He needed to give up his name
and identity for it to work. (If you no longer have an identity, you’re not
immortal because you don’t exist anymore. Surely that’s worse than
death?)
Back in the world of
the living, Arren is naked bar ‘his sword-belt and sword’. The author tries to
explain this by saying he was as naked as he was the day he was born, which is
nice symbolism. But if his clothes were lost then his sword stuff should’ve
been, too. Why this happened I can’t fathom but it’s a funny image nonetheless.
Arren’s father is termed ‘Ruling Prince’.
There’s nothing wrong with this per se but four options (Sovereign Prince,
Archprince, Grand Prince and Great Prince) already exist to describe a prince
that rules as the highest authority in their country. There’s no reason to
crowd this with another synonym unless it adds something (which ‘Ruling’
doesn’t).
This is the worst book of the quartet. If not
for the raft people, I would have forgotten the story existed at all. There
were too many problems to ignore. The fact that Sparrowhawk and Cob’s final
showdown wasn’t that impressive was utterly disappointing Especially, I must
say, as the book’s slow, meandering pace should have finished with a bang, just
to give it a little bit of life.
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