Book vs film: Warm Bodies by Isaac Marion

The Book Corner season 5: Book vs film. Episode 7: The Colour Out Of Space by HP Lovecraft.

Hold on to your sanity for 1927’s The Colour Out Of Space by HP Lovecraft, and its 2019 adaptation starring Nicolas Cage.

The Colour Out Of Space: the story

The Colour Out Of Space: a writer’s review

The Color Out Of Space: the film

The Book Corner

The Book Corner is a regular break from critiquing for the writing group of my former MA colleagues. We work out a theme and everyone chooses a book that we’ll read and discuss. Previous themes have included literary genre award winners and books that shaped our writing journeys. So far this year, I’m just about keeping up with the schedule as we read them.

As usual, it’s an odd mix with a skew towards SF and fantasy. Catch up with Warm Bodies by Isaac Marion, The Dark Tower vol 1 — The Gunslinger by Stephen King and The Lightning Thief by Rick Riordan, A Wizard of Earthsea by Ursula Le Guin vs Tales from Earthsea by Goro Miyazaki, Never Let Me Go by Kazuo Ishiguro and The Lovely Bones by Alice Sebold. Coming up: Howl’s Moving Castle by Diana Wynn Jones.

The Colour Out Of Space: the story

Our unnamed narrator is a surveyor for a reservoir in land west of Arkham, Massachusetts, in the mid-1920s. He discovers a land known to locals as the “blasted heath”, poisoned fifty years earlier by a strange meteor. The narrator hints that after what he’s learned, he wouldn’t drink the local water.

The locals won’t talk about what happened there, but he learns of an allegedly crazy old loner, Ammi Pierce. Pierce tells him the story of Nahum Gardner, a farmer who lived on the heath with his family.

The colour, which resembled some of the bands in the meteor’s strange spectrum, was almost impossible to describe; and it was only by analogy that they called it colour at all.
HP Lovecraft, The Colour Out of Space

The meteor defies analysis by scientists from Arkham’s Miskatonic University, but they uncover a ‘globule’ that emits a mysterious colour. One of them hits the globule and it disintegrates. Overnight, bolts of lightning strike the meteor and it disappears.

Nahum enjoys a bumper harvest in the next following season but the unnaturally large crops are inedible. Over a year, the problem spreads, mutating both plants and animals. His crops turn grey and brittle, and the livestock’s meat is also unfit to eat.

The thing from another world

Ammi Pierce becomes the increasingly-isolated the family’s only contact with the world. He learns that Nahum’s wife went mad, so she was locked in the attic. The same fate soon follows for Nahum’s son, Thaddeus. Ammi advises Nahum to dig a new well because his water is poisoned, but the advice is refused. Thaddeus dies in the attic and Merwin, another of Nahum’s sons, disappears while drawing water from the well.

After weeks with no contact, Ammi visits, and Nahum claims that Zenas, his third son, is living in the well. Mrs Gardner is still in the attic but she is horribly changed, and Ammi hints that he killed her in an act of mercy. When he returned downstairs, Nahum was also deformed and dying. Before his death, Nahum tells Ammi that the colour from the meteorite is pulling the life out of the land.

Ammi returns with six men, and they find Merwin’s and Zenas’s skeletons in the well. The colour begins to pour from the well and take over the farmstead, convulsing the trees. They flee to the house but the colour consumes it too, and they escape out of the back. The colour runs into the sky, but only Ammi sees some of it fall back before there’s a blinding explosion. When they return the next day, the farmstead has become the desolate, blasted heath.

Most of the neighbours move away but Ammi stays, though his sanity never recovers. It’s clear that the colour didn’t come from outer space, but from somewhere beyond reality. It no more understood what it was doing to the Gardners than they were capable of understanding what it was, and it didn’t care.

The Colour Out Of Space: a writer’s review

Original 1927 art from Amazing Stories magazine for The Colour Out Of Space.

It’s an understatement to say that HP Lovecraft is a controversial figure. In spite of this, he’s also enormously influential in horror and science fiction, almost single-handedly creating the genre known today as “cosmic horror”.

Before I knew anything about Lovecraft himself, I was a 1980s teenager fascinated by the Call of Cthulhu RPG. Unlike most RPGs, in CoC your heroes faced mind-boggling creatures that were as likely to drive them mad as dismember them. Gaming magazines like White Dwarf often contained discussions of the literature, and I dove into the mythos with youthful verve.

Along the way, I learned about Lovecraft’s use of literary structure and linguistic techniques to disassociate readers from reality. His tales tried to communicate the horror of humans confronted with ancient, unimaginable and implacably hostile creatures of godlike power. It’s a nihilistic universe in which the light of humanity is desperately feeble — as Generation X as you can get!

One thing I enjoy about the mythos is that many contemporary writers suvert Lovercraft’s nihilism. They use his universe to lean into the importance of defending human warmth, liberty, democracy and diversity against a universe which sees us as little more than a psychic snack. The author is dead, as Barthes said, and his vile opinions with him.

Thirty years later, I was curious to find out what middle-aged me thought of Lovecraft’s prose.

Worlds beyond words

The Colour Out Of Space is experimental fiction: an attempt to create a truly alien entity. Most contemporary SF featured aliens that looked very human (no change there) and he wanted to challenge the status quo.

Lovecraft was also an early proponent of stories set in a shared universe. Here, we find the fictional Massachusetts city of Arkham and its Miskatonic University. The learned narrator who finds something that’s beyond his comprehension is also a familiar figure.

The Massachusetts countryside, another common setting, becomes otherworldly and forbidding. The narrotor not only hints that it’s an empty and remote, but that “the immigrants” — meaning recent arrivals in America — don’t want to settle there.

Fundamentally, it’s a shaggy dog story that you might hear from a well-oiled regular in the local pub. The colour and many of the changes it brings are beyond description, so they remain beyond comprehension. This has nothing to do with class or education, as the learned men of Arkham and the simple country folk are equally confounded.

There ares only so many times you can substitute “indescribable” for a genuine adjective, but the trick survives the length of a short story. As someone who’s read a lot of Lovecraftian fiction, I know that it slips easily into a cliché through overuse.

You could almost call it a pastoral horror. The alien force creeps gently over the Gardners, in time with the seasons of farming life. They succumb gradually, driven mad, mutated or drawn into the well. It’s only at the climax that the pace accelerates in a day of mounting terror.

The Color Out Of Space: the film

The Colour Out Of Space has been adapted numerous times since Boris Karloff starred in 1965’s Die, Monster, Die! For me, the lure of Nicolas Cage’s 2019 leading role had an unearthly power that was impossible to resist.

In many ways it’s a faithful adaptation, with Cage’s character escaping the city to realise his dream of farming alpacas. His family are given personalities and Nahum’s teenage daughter is often the narrative focus. Ammi becomes a conspiracy theory loner and the narrator is still a surveyor, albeit one who becomes entwined in the Gardner family’s descent.

The fundamental question has to be: how does a film depict things that are intentionally beyond description? Writer/director Richard Stanley tackles this challenge by using that most unnatural colour: purple.

He also draws on a sense that film can’t capture — smell. Cage repeatedly notes a smell that he can’t describe, until it’s revealed to be the smell of his wife’s cancer. The analogy of cancer to a relentless alien invader should bring a terrifying human dimension to the story. Somehow it misses the mark, either through the script or Cage’s erratic delivery.

The poster art tells you everything you need to know about The Color Out Of Space.

For most of the film, Cage’s gonzo style is at odds with the naturalism of the rest of the cast. It’s only when the world becomes truly insane in the final act that he’s the perfect choice. Joely Richardson’s prosthetics are undeniably influenced by John Carpenter’s The Thing, and it’s impossible not to compare the two films. Unfortunately, where Carpenter’s animatronics are terrifying and dynamic, Stanley’s feel like passive exhibits in a horrific theme park.

Stanely isn’t happy to analogise the strangeness of the colour. We briefly witness a dimension of crawling tentacles and horned creatures which has become almost visual shorthand for Cthulhoid terror.

While it doesn’t have a long running time, The Color Out Of Space drags through the first act. It doesn’t find a consistent tone or pace until the latter stages. All the same, it’s won a generous 86% on Rotten Tomatoes and 70% from Metacritic.

What’s better, book or film? Lovecraft’s short story broke new ground and doesn’t out-stay its welcome. It’s hard to say the same for the film.

The Book Corner season 5, episode 8: Howl’s Moving Castle by Diana Wynn Jones

The Book vs Film season closes with a children’s favourite of page and screen. Howl’s Moving Castle has won classic status since it was first published in 1986, no doubt assisted by an animated adaptation in 2004 by Hayao Miyazaki.

The Book Corner season 5: Book vs film. Episode 5: Never Let Me Go by Kazuo Ishiguro

Ishiguro’s sixth novel was published in 2005 and its film adaptation, scripted by Alex Garland, was released in 2010. Read on, and I’ll explain why this is a great example of bad storytelling.

The Book Corner

The Book Corner is a regular break from critiquing with the writing group of my former MA colleagues. We work out a theme and everyone chooses a book that we’ll read and discuss. Previous themes have included literary genre award winners and books that shaped our writing journeys. This year, my goal is to review the books as we read them.

As usual, it’s an odd mix with a skew towards SF and fantasy, and in this season we’re comparing books to their screen adaptations. Catch up with Warm Bodies by Isaac Marion, The Dark Tower vol 1 — The Gunslinger by Stephen King, The Lightning Thief by Rick Riordan, and A Wizard of Earthsea by Ursula Le Guin vs Tales from Earthsea by Goro Miyazaki.

Coming up: The Lovely Bones by Alice Sebold, The Colour Out Of Space by HP Lovecraft (vs the bonkers Nicholas Cage adap.) and Howl’s Moving Castle by Diana Wynn Jones.

Never Let Me Go: the story

I don’t usually give a detailed synopsis, but this critique requires it, so skip on if you want to avoid spoilers.

In the 1950s, human cloning is established for the purpose of supplying live organ donors. In the 1990s, the narrator Kathy H is a carer who looks after organ donors until they ‘complete’ — a euphemism for dying as their organs are removed. She looks back on her childhood at Hailsham, a boarding school for innocent young clones.

The students are taught to live healthy lives and receive a basic education from teachers known as Guardians. They don’t know about their fate, and their lessons include role-playing for adult lives in the outside world. The Guardians encourage them to create art for a visitor known as Madame, who selects pieces for her gallery. Kathy develops close friendships with two students: Ruth and Tommy. Other students bully Tommy because of his strange art and comically short temper, but Kathy’s friendship helps him to control his temper. Kathy develops a crush but she’s disappointed when Ruth and Tommy form a relationship. This lasts throughout their youth, but the trio remain friends.

The students are allowed to buy goods from the outside world at events called ‘the exchanges’. Teenage Kathy acquires a cassette tape that includes a saccharine ballad: Never Let Me Go. She often dances to it while alone, and on one occasion she notices the headmistress, Miss Emily, watching her.

When a sympathetic new Guardian arrives, she tells the students that they were created to be organ donors. Miss Lucy is swiftly removed from the school.

The world beyond

At 16, Kathy, Ruth and Tommy move to the Cottages, a former farm. They meet other clones and can visit the outside world. They mostly stay together, play games, walk in the countryside and have sex. Two older housemates invite Ruth on a trip to Cromer in Norfolk, where they have seen a woman who might be her ‘possible’. The clones have developed a myth about finding the people from whom they were copied, but the woman looks only superficially like Ruth. Afterwards, she angrily confesses her fear that they were all cloned from ‘human trash’.

The older housemates reveal that they’ve heard a rumour about Hailsham students: any couple who can prove they are in love can apply for a deferral of their donations. The Hailsham students don’t know anything about deferrals, but the rumour lives on.

Ruth goes off with the other housemates, so Kathy and Tommy visit second hand shops around Cromer, looking for a copy of the tape with Never Let Me Go, which Kathy has lost. They find the tape and he buys it for Kathy, giving away his affection for her. They agree not to tell Ruth about the tape, and Tommy suggests that the Madame’s gallery was to reveal their souls if they ever ask for a deferral. Tommy’s scared that he never produced any art that Madame liked.

When Ruth finds out about the tape, she becomes jealous. She spitefully tells Kathy that Tommy could never find her attractive because she’s had sex with too many other men. Kathy applies to become a carer so that she can leave the Cottages, and loses contact with her friends.

Til death us do part

Some 10 years later, Kathy accidentally encounters Ruth after her first donation and in deteriorating health. She becomes her carer and they reunite with Tommy, who has made two donations but is still in good health. Ruth confesses her regret for keeping Kathy and Tommy apart, and offers to make amends by giving them Madame’s address so that they can apply for a deferral. Soon after, Ruth makes her second donation and completes. Kathy becomes Tommy’s carer and lover.

They visit the Madame and find Miss Emily with her. The older women reveal that Hailsham was an experiment to convince people that clones are normal humans with a soul, who deserve better treatment. Nobody cared, Hailsham closed and clones are now treated worse than before. Deferrals were always a myth.

Tommy’s childhood temper returns and he berates Kathy for working as a carer. She resigns as his carer but visits before he completes at his third donation. The novel ends with Kathy in Norfolk, reminiscing about her life and the friends she has lost. Her donations will come soon.

Never Let Me Go: a writer’s review

There are two stories in Never Let Me Go: a strong love triangle and a weak alternative history.

The love triangle between Kathy, Tommy and Ruth could exist in any number of isolated mundane settings. It’s not an original love story: Ruth is a stereotypical mean girl frenemy, Kathy is weak and depends on her friend, while Tommy bounces like a puppy to whoever offers him the most affection.

The dystopian SF elements are irrelevant to this triangle. Ruth’s jealousy could force them apart in any circumstance and the pressure which brings them together could be any illness.

Ishiguro’s prose is beautiful, and it’s the secret sauce that makes his novel readable despite its multiple failures. Hailsham is a fascinating environment: the exchanges, the rumours of a terrifying world beyond the gates, Madame’s gallery and the detached caring of the Guardians set up an introduction to a fascinating world.

Yet it feels like Ishiguro is far more invested in Hailsham than the rest of his world. His notion of England and the English character appears to be rooted in a monotone postwar sensibility. It’s out of time and out of place.

Alt history, without the alt

Alternative history is like throwing a pebble into the pond of time and seeing how the ripples spread out. Ishiguro’s alt-history isn’t weak because it fails to explain how the cloning-donor technology works, although when he stumbles into the science, he fails hard. It’s weak because of a basic inattention to the social and human effects of the world he creates. In this two-dimensional history, society is utterly unchanged by the existence of clones or an endless supply of acquiescent donors.

There are ways to get around this. Isolating the narrator from society is the easiest, and that’s why the Hailsham section works far better than the second and third acts in the outside world. If you acknowledge the implications of your world, it’s both possible and often necessary to hand-wave some of them away with cursory explanations. Ishiguro barely attempts this level of plausibility.

The most difficult route is to follow the ripples. As time moves away from your initial change, they will bounce off the real world and interact with each other. Most authors choose to follow the ripples that interest them and hand-wave the rest, but for Ishiguro, the world is a static setting of no consequence. His protagonists aren’t isolated from the world; they’re simply unaffected by anything beyond their tiny bubble.

Harvest-friendly humans

This bizarre lack of affect infects everyone.

Miss Lucy tells a class full of teenagers that they will be harvested for their organs. No one cries. No one is angry. No one is scared.

Ruth almost meets her Possible, and when it turns into a false hope she’s briefly angry that she might have come from “human trash”. This revelation doesn’t seem to go anywhere except mistreating her best friend. When their lovestruck housemates in the Cottages learn that deferrals are just another rumour, they shrug and fade into the background, narrative function completed.

As a carer, Kathy watches her donors experience slow, painful vivisection, and it makes her a bit sad, but never enough to question the programme. When Tommy discovers that the deferrals are a myth, his anger flares and evaporates before he submits to harvesting.

Death becomes them

The donors’ acquiescence confused the hell out of me. History shows you can make people do terrible things to each other and to themselves. Yet Ishiguro makes no attempt to show how his donors become so willing to die or why they never question their fate.

They’re not coerced, brainwashed, bullied, indoctrinated, terrorised or emotionally manipulated. There doesn’t seem to be any reason why they would agree to have their organs removed, again and again. No one in the wider world seems grateful for this sacrifice, or even aware of it.

It’s like 1984 without the Three Minute Hate, the Big Brother cult, the ubiquitous surveillance or the constant rewriting of history. Even Madame and Miss Emily, when they reveal the failure of their Hailsham experiment, don’t seem horrified by the world they live in. Kathy and Tommy’s arrival is an inconvenience to Madame’s imminent furniture delivery, and her sickness hints that she’s likely to benefit from the donor system.

Kathy: the angel of death

Kathy is an even more contradictory and unsympathetic creation. After the donors learn that they’re incapable of having children, the titular song inspires a moment of teenage wistfulness and desire for motherhood. This never goes anywhere, unless her maternal instinct sublimes into her success as a carer — but Isiguro never makes the connection.

This is a classic opportunity for an SF analogy to contemporary social questions. These women (and men) are denied basic reproductive rights, but it never earns a second thought.

As a carer, Kathy spends her life ensuring that the system extracts maximum value from the donors with the least trouble. She’s an angel of death at best, at worst she’s a Holocaust internee volunteering to help Dr Mengele. Her actions make her far more evil than Ruth’s petty jealousy.

Never let Me Go has been described as a horror story, but Ishiguro hews too tightly to the euphemisms of ‘donation’ and ‘completion’. Kathy never describes the suffering of her donors, even when they’re her own friends and lovers. I came to assume that what actually made her suitable as a carer was a psychopathic lack of affect.

Kathy completes the novel with lines of philosophy so vacuous that they can’t be taken at face value. They only make sense as evidence of someone incapable of comprehending the level to which she has been abused by the state.

“We should run away and live free.” “Sorry, can’t, I’ve got an appointment to be murdered tomorrow and it would be rude to cancel at short notice.”

Don’t mention the facts

As for the world beyond its protagonists, Ishiguro’s attempt to dismiss it is laughably bad. I referenced the Holocaust because the alternative history in this story begins in the shadow of that atrocity. The West was generally against large scale human slaughter for a few decades after World War 2 but in this history, Britain has industrialised murder without any of those nasty concentration camps.

It doesn’t feel unreasonable to wonder how religions or other nations have reacted to the British cloning programme. There’s a fleeting mention of debate around cloning and souls, but Ishiguro shies from it as though philosophy might dirty his pages.

Ishiguro said that he wanted cloning in this history to have the impact that nuclear power has had in our own. Yet there’s no equivalent of Greenpeace or CND. All debate has been settled. Clones are useful, disposable unpeople, and everyone’s happy about it.

When Madame and Miss Emily reference the ailments that the donor programme has banished, it’s almost as if Ishiguro is trolling any reader with a morsel of medical knowledge. Motor neurone disease is a progressive illness that would require whole brain transplants. Cancer is notoriously cancerous and the challenge isn’t transplants, it’s metastasis.

It’s all about the feels

Fans of this novel might object that it’s about “the feels” of its insipid protagonists. Even their emotions seem entirely separated from their existence, as though they’re in a different story.

Never Let Me Go stayed with me, but in the worst way possible. There’s far more humanity in Philip K Dick’s doomed replicants and better worldbuilding in thirty seconds of Monty Python’s live organ donor sketch.

Ishiguro might claim that he wrote a novel about cloning, but he didn’t. Science aside, he deals competently with neither the social nor the personal implications of his alternative history.

Never Let Me Go is an insult to every literary dystopian who has not flinched at the consequences of their creations: Mary Shelley, EM Forster, Aldous Huxley, George Orwell, Daniel Keyes, Philip K Dick, Margaret Atwood, Colson Whitehead and Charlie Brooker to name a few.

There is a good story in here, but Kazuo Ishiguro did not deliver it. And he should be able to deliver. Remains Of The Day is all about a man so bound by society and his upbringing that denies himself happiness. Those pressures surround the protagonists of Never Let Me Go, but they never emerge to fulfil the promise of the premise.

I’m aware that this is a dissenting opinion on a text which is highly-regarded among the literati. I was relieved to discover that Christopher Priest, author of The Prestige, found a similar failure to deliver in Ishiguro’s novel about AI, Klara and the Sun.

Never Let Me Go: the film

Alex Garland’s script follows the original story, but it’s aware of the novel’s shortcomings and makes some attempts to address them in its depiction of the donors’ lives.

The children at Hailsham are shown taking drugs which might plausibly affect their behaviour, and the donors have to tap some sort of implanted tag when they enter and leave their homes. The exchanges are full of broken toys instead of luxuries, and their clothes at the Cottages are all second-hand. An elderly couple in Cromer look at the clones as though they shouldn’t be seen in public.

The visual medium gives director Mark Romanek no way to avoid the ugliness of the donation process, and we witness donors with missing eyes and huge scars, debilitated and struggling after their organs are harvested. Kiera Knightley brings a fragility to Ruth’s bitchiness, Carey Mulligan’s emotional detachment is suitably psychotic and Andrew Garfield is a perfectly puppyish and temperamental Tommy.

Unfortunately, the film can’t paper over the fundamental flaws of the novel with a beautiful cast and homely Englishness. Tommy’s energy makes his ultimate acceptance of being murdered for his organs even more difficult to accept. The scene with a washed-up boat only highlights how unlikely it is that they never consider running away.

Casting Irish actors as the lovestruck housemates at the Cottages only reminded me of the world beyond this myopic story, and that no matter how great the tyranny, people will always resist or escape.

The Book Corner season 5, episode 6: The Lovely Bones by Alice Sebold

Alice Sebold’s 2002 novel The Lovely Bones recounts a horrific murder and its consequences from the victim’s perspective. Peter Jackson took on the challenge of adapting it for his 2009 movie, with a heavyweight cast including Saoirse Ronan, Mark Wahlberg, Stanley Tucci and Susan Sarandon.
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The Book Corner season 5: Book vs film. Episode 4: A Wizard of Earthsea by Ursula Le Guin vs Tales from Earthsea by Goro Miyazaki

The 1975 Bantam books cover of Ursula Le Guin’s A Wizard of Earthsea, created by Pauline Ellison

A Wizard of Earthsea became an instant classic of children’s fantasy when it arrived in 1968. It launched six novels exploring the wizards, peoples, lands and creatures of the Earthsea archipelago. In 2006, Studio Ghibli delivered Tales from Earthsea, an animated feature based on Le Guin’s works. It’s a very different beast.

The Book Corner

The Book Corner is a regular break from critiquing for the writing group of my former MA colleagues. We work out a theme and each of us chooses a book to read and discuss. Previous themes have included literary genre award winners and books that shaped our writing journeys. So far this year, I’m just about keeping up with the schedule as we read them.

As usual, it’s an odd mix with a skew towards SF and fantasy. Catch up with Warm Bodies by Isaac Marion, The Dark Tower vol 1 — The Gunslinger by Stephen King and The Lightning Thief by Rick Riordan. Coming up: Never Let Me Go by Kazuo Ishiguro, The Lovely Bones by Alice Sebold, The Colour Out Of Space by HP Lovecraft (vs the bonkers Nicholas Cage adap.) and Howl’s Moving Castle by Diana Wynn Jones.

A Wizard of Earthsea: the story

Ged is a magically gifted peasant boy living on the isle of Gont, where he’s also known as Sparrowhawk. (No one reveals their true names in Earthsea, except to their most trusted confidantes.)

He foils a barbarian attack on his village, displaying his abilities. The village witch sends Ged to the island’s grand wizard, Ogion, but in his impatience, Ged summons a strange shadow. Ogion banishes the shadow but encourages Ged to realise his potential. He must sail to Roke, the wizard’s school on an island at the heart of Earthsea.

Ged’s talent impresses his teachers and he develops a deep friendship with older student Vetch. However, his arrogance leads to a rivalry with Jasper, another talented student. When they compete to best each other, Ged attempts to summon the dead, but instead releases the shadow creature.

The Archmage Nemmerle sacrifices himself to banish the shadow, and Ged is badly scarred. The new Archmage, Gensher, warns that the shadow is a nameless ancient evil. It wants to possess Ged and will continue to seek him out.

A wizard in Earthsea

Ged graduates from Roke and becomes wizard to the distant Ninety Isles. There he negotiates peace with the dragon who rules a neighbouring island.

The shadow returns and Ged flees to the isle of Osskil, seeking the stone of the Terrenon. He believes that it will help him to defeat the shadow, and seeks refuge in the Court of Terrenon. Ged discovers that the stone imprisons an evil Old Power which offers to help him if he sets it free.

He refuses, and escapes the court by transforming into a falcon that outflies the stone’s creatures. His long flight back to Ogion almost traps Ged in the bird’s form. Ogion is convinced that the shadow has a name and that it can be controlled. Ged faces the shadow and it flees from him.

Ged’s flight becomes a pursuit across Earthsea. He reunites with his old friend Vetch and ultimately confronts the shadow. Ged recognises his own darkness and merges with the shadow. He is whole for the first time since Roke.

Ruth Robbins’s woodcut-style map of Earthsea from the 1968 first edition of A Wizard of Earthsea, by Ursula Le Guin

A Wizard of Earthsea: a writer’s review

I first read A Wizard of Earthsea at school in the early 1980s, and I don’t remember enjoying it. Very likely that came down to two things: I didn’t like being told what to read and I was comparing it to the D&D-style fantasy I was reading at the time.

Books like the Dragonlance Chronicles were full of Tolkienesque ‘proper’ fantasy creatures. They had magical battles between well-defined good and evil forces, and epic confrontations that fit a typical Hero’s Journey plot.

It’s a shame that I didn’t find the Earthsea stories on my own. Le Guin has a wonderfully lyrical prose and she doesn’t dumb down her style for children; she just happens to be writing about a young man. Ged doesn’t throw fireballs, he gets a lot wrong and he’s not a likeable hero or fun to travel with. He solves problems through negotiation, he resists temptation, and his spiritual victory is about as far as you can get from a spectacular conquest of his enemy. I can see why teachers and adults are fond of the sympathetic road to humility on which Le Guin takes her protagonist, and why it didn’t win me over.

As a writer, I’m now beginning to question dominance of the Hero’s Journey. It’s become a cultural straitjacket upon modern storytelling, most obviously in genre fiction. Le Guin plots her own course and refuses to conform to the monomyth.

She uses intriguing Taoist themes within her worldbuilding and introduced original conceits like the power of true names. Her dismissal of conflict to resolve problems is as challenging to the status quo now as it was almost 40 years ago.

Earthsea, the original

Earthsea is a creation that Le Guin had clearly developed in painstaking detail. Yet she doesn’t overwhelm the reader with background and history. Instead, she merely hints at untold stories that enrich the world without derailing the main narrative. One drawback is that she often mentions Ged’s future adventures, so there’s no doubt that he will survive his trials. It expands the epic scale but reduces the tension.

One surprising aspect of A Wizard of Earthsea is how little it connects to Le Guin’s reputation as a feminist writer of science fiction and fantasy who often challenged tropes of a male-dominated genre. As a Black hero in a world where the only white characters are dangerous barbarian invaders, Ged is revolutionary for a novel published in 1968.

Yet female characters are almost insignificant in this instalment of the Earthsea chronicles. There are no female wizards on Roke, and the background presents women as wives and servants in a male-dominated society. The audience for children’s fantasy literature was thought to be almost exclusively male at this time, so perhaps either Le Guin or her publisher thought that female wizards would be too much for them.

Tales from Earthsea by Goro Miyazaki

Screen adaptations haven’t been kind to Earthsea, but this one is better than the 2004 Sci Fi Channel series which whitewashed Ged, among other crimes. Tales from Earthsea was the younger Miyazaki’s debut feature for Studio Ghibli, and Le Guin reportedly believed that Hayao Miyazaki would be in charge. It bears no relation to the eponymous 2001 collection of Le Guin’s short stories and essays.

This film combines elements of several Earthsea books into a new story, so that several characters and events don’t make sense. It showcases the best and worst of the Ghibli style: stunning background art populated by flat characters with limited expressions, and dialogue that’s often clichéd and expository — the exception being a gorgeous dragon. The story resolves in a traditional battle that’s out of character for an Earthsea tale.

Tales from Earthsea is probably best seen by Ghibli completists and best avoided by fans of Le Guin’s own stories. If you want to see a good Ghibli, we’ll be doing Howl’s Moving Castle in a few months’ time.

The Book Corner season 5, episode 5: Never Let Me Go by Kazuo Ishiguro

Nobel laureate, anglophile and SF dilettante Kazuo Ishiguro took on cloning in his 2005 novel, which Alex Garland adapted into a film starring Carey Mulligan, Keira Knightley and Andrew Garfield in 2010.
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