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 - A Brilliant end to a Brilliant Trilogy!My favourite part in the book apart from Ged telling Hob that all he can offer him is death, is that we get to meet Erreth-Akbe greatest of the Wizards of Earthsea. Great use by Le guin to demonstrate to Ged and the readers just how powerful his enemy is truly. I found this book to be interesting not only in it's depiction of the key characters but power itself, it's emptiness in it's totality. The enemy has ultimate power yet the truth is he has none because he lost himself to it's unreasoning hunger. A great book with something for eveyone, adventure and a message somewhat deeper than you'd expect yet not pretentitious in it's exercution. Enjoy people, alot of the todays endless epic writing hacks and you know who you are could learn alot from this trilogy especially about getting to the point. Rating:  - A nice story, but not very enthralling.This is the third volume in the Earthsea quartet (following A Wizard of Earthsea and The Tombs of Atuan, and followed by Tehanu). The Farthest Shore, set some fifteen or twenty years after the events of The Tombs of Atuan, tells the story of Ged, now an Archmage, and Arren, a young prince, and their voyage around the world of Earthsea in search of the Unmaker, who is responsible for the disappearence of magic and of the balance of the world. Compared to The Tombs of Atuan, I found this third part rather disapointing and lacking in action. Ged and Arren are just travelling from one island to the next, and nothing really happens. The evolution of their friendship is interesting, though, and that's what kept me reading. But as a whole, I found the series rather boring, although well written if you like old-fashioned style, and will only read Tehanu for the sake of it. Rating: - Becoming WholeLeGuin's third book in her Earthsea series is her most ambitious. Her thesis: you can only become whole by facing and accepting death, the darkest shadow. Lifted straight from Jungian psychology, this is the hardest and the important part of being whole. Sparrowhawk knows most of this truth already: remember the climax to Wizard of Earthsea. Arren, the young prince who accompanies Sparrowhawk on the epic voyages of this third book, has not yet learned this harsh lesson. You don't need to know anything about Carl Jung to read and enjoy this book. At one level, this is a children's tale. But this book has many levels. Consider: the last king, Maharrion, had prophesied that there would be no king to succeed him until one appeared who had crossed the farthest shore. I'm not giving anything away by telling you that the farthest shore is physical - the western shore of the westernmost isle of Earthsea and metaphysical - death. And readers of earlier books know that for the wizards of Earthasea, there is a low stone fence that separates the living from the dead. There is another wizard - humiliated by a younger Sparrowhawk - who has both great power and a terror of death. And he has worked a spell that will devastate the world, by denying and avoiding death. But by denying death, he has denied life, and magic, song, joy, reason and even life are draining out of the world. That spell must be undone before it is too late. And that task falls to Sparowhawk and Arren. Arren must learn to understand and accept that death is necessary. Not just in the abstract but personally. He must cross that low stonewall with no hope of returning. He must cross the final shore. This story has dragons, despair, joy, loss, discovery and marvelous surprises. Like all of the Earthsea books, it is sparely but beautifully told. The deepest of the first three books, it is an absolute joy. And for a thoughtful, reflecting reader, it might be even more. This is a book that can change a reader's life. Rating: - Die to live again. And again. And again. And again.A Wizard of Earthsea was about identity. Tombs of Atuan was about liberty. The Farthest Shore is the most philosophical, and probably the hardest to stomach of the three. It is about destiny. Things go sour in Earthsea. Colors aren't quite as vivid as before, and life has lost its crisp edge. Dark, envious thoughts brew in the minds of men. Melody, beauty, magic are all vanishing - the True Speech no longer rings true, and singers stop in mid-word, for their songs become meaningless. And all because a man of dark ambition has crippled the Equilibrium - making life and death as one, unleashing Undeath upon the world... Unlike the two previous books, "The Farthest Shore" has a viewpoint character - untried Prince Arren, who accompinies an aging Sparrowhawk on his long journey to find the root of evil. LeGuin does this in order to draw a sharp contrast between the noble Archmage and the mad people - though at times it is irritating to wait for Ged to repeat everything he says in wizardspeak in a tongue Arren can understand. Through Ged, Le Guin formulates her philosophy in much clearer and heavy-handed fashion than she does in previous volumes. Overall, she seems to lean towards a transcendentalist policy, advocating contemplation in favor of action, and seeing man as a mere component of the grand scheme of life. While the reader may feel uncomfortable with LeGuin's blatant didactics, the book quickly acquires a great emotional value as it becomes obvious that Ged won't be able to eradicate the threat easily. I would like to agree with the previous reviewers that some scenes in the book are written in a fashion that is both vague and awkward: among these is the trance scene in Hort Town and Sopli's drowning, which I had to read several times in order to actually understand what happened. Nevertheless, most of the book is lucidly written and the narrative flows very well. The villain is clearly not central to the author's message, and the heroes' meeting with him is anticlimactic. Similarly, the actual climax is not up to par with the rest of the book. "The Farthest Shore" provides a grand finish to Ged's saga, though LeGuin did re-open the setting later to write a fourth book. Excellent, profound reading. Rating: - A Classic of YA FictionHaving recently re-read all of the volumes of the original trilogy, I feel comfortable in saying that "The Farthest Shore" is the masterwork of the set. After a somewhat disappointing volume 2 ("Tombs of Atuan"), LeGuin writes a fantasy classic about a magical world that is having its magic mysteriously disappear. Like "Tombs," the hero of the trilogy, Sparrowhawk/Ged, is not the main focus of the novel. In this case, though, our focal point is an interesting and heroic character in his own right. The book is not without weaknesses, however. The villain is never very well defined, and though the threat of losing magic is very real, the figure behind the threat is less compelling. Even with this weakness, though, I wouldn't hesitate to recommend this book to a young reader--or even an adult afficionado--of fantasy literature. In association with Amazon.com | |