I listened to the first 2 Earthsea books in audiobook form over the last week. ATTN @Tulpa who recommended them to me
The first book starts a bit slow by the standards of modern fantasy but the story really takes off when the evil shadow is released. From that point on it’s impossible to forget there is a clock ticking and a menace lurking in even mundane, peaceful scenes. Around the same point, the narration switches from a rather distant third-person to a very close identification with Ged’s mood.
Like other foundational 60s/70s fantasy like Dune, it’s impossible to read this nowadays without realizing it’s one of the origins of a lot of culture I already liked. The seafaring-in-a-tiny-sailboat fantasy is extrapolated in Wind Waker, and its more dangerous and resource-constained aspect in games like Sunless Sea. The outline of the shadow story is largely replicated in the first Prince of Persia, and more generally it’s a stock enemy in probably hundreds of games, although the familiarity didn’t lessen the horror of the thing in its original incarnation. Going backward I detect influence from The Old Man and the Sea on the novel, and surely I’m oblivious of many of the other influences.
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The second book surprised me by resetting the perspective character to a new child protagonist (and hearing the first 5 minutes of the third book, I guess the entire Earthsea series does this). It develops the “Tombs of Atuan” quest tersely mentioned in the first book into something much more interesting than I expected.
I was impressed by how the descriptions of the cave system build up a mental map of a pitch black space in the reader at the same time as in the protagonist’s. And I loved how the book does not end at what seems like the natural ending but goes on for 3 more chapters, each of them expanding the meaning of the story just as they expand Tenar’s life experience. It made it remember how it felt for me when I realized that what I loved and mastered is not what I actually want to spend the rest of my life on. The true terror was never the darkness, but the idea of starting from square one on something new.
I’m not as sure whether it was literally an influence on Tombs of Atuan, but much of it reminded me of Kafka’s The Burrow.