The Farthest Shore

The Earthsea Cycle, Book 3

By: Ursula K. Le Guin

Narrated by: Rob Inglis

Return to Earthsea with Ged, the brash young wizard who survived the enchanted labyrinth of The Tombs of Atuan. In the third episode of this brilliant fantasy saga, a much older Ged sets off on a harrowing quest for the source of a terrible darkness that is taking the magic out of Earthsea.

©1972 Ursula K. Le Guin (P)1994 Recorded Books, LLC

Critic reviews

• Winner, National Book Award, 1973

The most poignantly esoteric of fantasy writers, sailing with the full force of the mage-winds of Earthsea!

This is a wonderful work of fantasy writing by an author who has influenced many other writers in the genre, such as Terry Pratchett. This book has some wonderful esoteric passages and weaves together plots from the previous stories. The narrator, who also did the unabridged recordings of JRR Tolkien's Hobbit and Lord of the Rings, is the perfect choice to do this book justice - if only Rob Inglis could have been persuaded to all the books in the Earthsea Cycle!

#MythologyInspired #Fables #Inspiring #Magical #Earthsea #tagsgiving #sweepstakes

Beautiful story

I enjoyed feeling how strongly Gedd values life. His defence of it, and of death, and of the cycle that is the equilibrium was really moving. Finished the book on a plane and felt like I couldn’t do or read anything else for the next hour as I thought about it.

Lovely voice

Would you recommend this audiobook to a friend? If so, why?

This is my first audiobook: I bought it by accident! But a real treat in the evening to listen quietly with my eyes closed and imagine the magical world. I read the 1st book (also terrific) but this was so relaxing, even better than watching TV ( although it will take some doing to convince my husband!).

Which character – as performed by Rob Inglis – was your favorite?

Mr Inglis did all of the characters quite well-- he has a beautiful voice--but I imagined Sparrowhawk a bit younger ( but the sexiness was in there!)

Any additional comments?

Very nice experience for my first audiobook!

beautiful, profound, poetic prose, timeless wisdom

beautiful, profound, poetic prose, timeless wisdom, heart wisdom, ancient lore, fantastic alternate universe, dragons n mages n apprentices and heirs to great responsibility

Thoroughly enjoyed this one.

My favorite in the series. The reader does a good job.
I recommend it as you continue your adventure to Earthsea.

Deep and Wonderful.

Loved this world and didn't want to leave it again. A hero's journey, good vs evil.

Hard At First. You Won't Regret It

Any additional comments?

Right off the bat I thought to myself. Did I just make a big mistake? I loved Robert Inglis in the Lord of The Rings and The Hobbit so I purchased all three Earthsea books in a row and figured they would have to be good because the Narrator was good. I was a little confused at first but she has a unique writing style that will grow on you. This is one of those books that you really can't casually listen too. You really have to pay attention otherwise you are going to be lost. After finishing all the books I purchased the last two she wrote in this series. The Other Wind and The Last Book of Earthsea. There's just something magical about this place and her writing style and the characters. I would def give it a shot but expect a more serious book rather than some laughs like Harry Potter or Lord of The Rings even. I'd still highly recommend it and don't regret listening to it.

A Perfect Conclusion to a Great Trilogy

The concluding book of Ursula K. Le Guin’s first Earthsea Trilogy, The Farthest Shore (1972), begins with Arren, son of the prince of Enlad, gone to Roke, Isle of the Wise, there to get counsel at the famous School for Wizards for the troubles in his home island: magic is dying, joy fading, luck failing, and disease spreading. Arren is a boy not quite yet a man, not exactly a pampered prince, but thus far in his life a facile player of games. But Arren’s name means sword, and he’s descended from the legendary Morred and Elfarran, and when he meets the middle-aged Archmage Ged, the most powerful man in Earthsea, he takes “the first step out of childhood… without looking before or behind, without caution, and with nothing held in reserve,” falling in (hero-worship) love with the Archmage. And when, “awkward, radiant, obedient,” he offers his service to Ged, we sense that some important destiny has been set in motion for the long-kingless archipelago.

Because the disturbing situation on Arren’s home island has been occurring throughout Earthsea, Ged decides to take the youth on a voyage to seek the cause of the draining of the magic from life and world. Told from the point of view of Arren (as A Wizard of Earthsea is told from that of Ged and The Tombs of Atuan from that of Tenar), The Farthest Shore becomes an increasingly metaphysical sea-road story, as Ged and Arren visit a series of islands (including a trade island, a craft island, a hostile island, a raft island, and a remote island) in their attempt to locate the source of what’s wrong with Earthsea.

For the reader, Arren is a perfect travel companion for Ged, being eager, brave, and ignorant--providing opportunities for the older man to dispense Le Guin’s gnomic wisdom, about balance and imbalance, being and doing, life and death, good and evil, nature and humanity, and more, as in the following exchange:

“Nature is not unnatural. This is not a righting of the balance but an upsetting of it. There is only one creature who can do that.”
“A man,” Arren said, tentative.
“We men.”
“How?”
“By an unmeasured desire for life.”
“For life? But it isn’t wrong to want to live?”
“No. But when we crave power over life—endless wealth, unassailable safety, immortality—then desire becomes greed. And if knowledge allies itself to that greed, then comes evil. Then the balance of the world is swayed, and ruin weighs heavy in the scale.”

Such stern lessons wax poetic and bracing:

“To refuse death is to refuse life”

“Lebannen, this is. And thou art. There is no safety, and there is no end. The word must be heard in silence; there must be darkness to see the stars. The dance is always danced above the hollow place, above the terrible abyss.’”

“That there is only one power that is real and worth the having. And that is the power, not to take, but to accept.”

And Arren learns: “I have given my love to what is worthy of love. Is that not the kingdom and the unperishing spring?”

The pair’s journey is not easy. There are dangers: slavers, madmen, drugs, dragons, and above all, the tall man in Arren’s dreams, the king of shadows, the great enemy standing in the dark and beckoning with a pearl of light. There are devastating developments, as when Arren becomes estranged from Ged, or when Ged realizes that something he did when younger is responsible for the current draining of magic and life from Earthsea. Set in the dry land across the wall, the last chapters comprise a harrowing sequence. Arren poignantly becomes the leader and Ged the follower: “I use your love as a man burns a candle, to light his way. And we must go on.” The climactic “boss” confrontation is less surprising than that in A Wizard of Earthsea but is just as sublime and more shocking in its ramifications (developed in Tehanu: The Fourth Book of Earthsea).

As the first novel in the trilogy is about accepting our light and dark parts so that we may mature and live good lives, and the second is about choosing the light and life rather than the dark and death, this third one is about being fully aware of life and death and accepting both. Moreover, because the releasing of Ged’s shadow into Earthsea in A Wizard of Earthsea and the opening of the hole in Earthsea in The Farthest Shore both derive from Ged’s having acted in anger and vanity, the third novel bookends the first, and by extending the effects of such ill actions from Ged’s self to his world, it perfectly concludes the original trilogy, which as a whole expresses the idea that our actions influence our lives and world in unexpected ways.

Despite being a quest novel, The Farthest Shore demonstrates that being is superior to doing and that even young people—who have much to do and must learn from their mistakes and should achieve big things—should understand that fully aware being is the “greater kingdom.” Or “Dragons do not do. They are.” The book also says that life is wonderful because it ends, that the price we pay for life is death, “That selfhood which is our torment, and our treasure, and our humanity, does not endure. It changes; it is gone, a wave on the sea,” and that we have sufficient immortality in being part of the natural cycles of the world.

The audiobook reader, Rob Inglis, is prime, but I can’t help but feel that he’s reading The Lord of the Rings, with, for instance, Ged talking like Gandalf, and I wish that they’d found an equally fine American reader for the book, like George Guidall or Jonathan Davis.

Like all of the Earthsea books, this one is marked by concise, vivid, poetic prose, with each word and each sentence being just right, like this:

“The living splendor that was revealed about them in the silent, desolate land, as if by a power of enchantment surpassing any other, in every blade of the wind-bowed grass, every shadow, every stone. So when one stands in a cherished place for the last time before a voyage without return, he sees it all whole, and real, and dear, as he has never seen it before and never will see it again.”

wizard fantasy at its best

Worthy conclusion to a classic trilogy that has helped define the genre for over forty years, expertly rendered by Rob Ingliss.

The first in my favorite series of books

Beautifully performed. There's no way I can review the writing, it has haunted me since the book was printed and I first read it as a teenager. Unforgettable.