In the Werelight of Wizardry

Illustration for The Tombs of Atuan. Source: Kazeli

All this past week, I’ve been spellbound by Ursula K. Le Guin’s A Wizard of Earthsea series, which I’m listening to on Audible. I’m listening to it in every spare moment. I always begin my day with a session of yoga, but as soon as I get up out of savasana, I stopper in my earbuds and press play, so that I can take advantage of even those few moments during which I’m rolling up my mat and peeling off my leggings. During the workday, every time I get up from my computer to fetch a glass of water from the kitchen, I descend the stairs accompanied by the sound of narrator Kobna Holdbrook-Smith’s husky voice. I look forward to long bus journeys—an hour here on Earth could mean a month in Earthsea time!

On Sunday, I boarded the ferry at Parramatta—now a leafy Sydney suburb, once the closest place to the Europeans’ landfall where the brackish water of the harbour turned into the sweet water of a winding river, allowing them to set up the first farms. And as I slid along gazing out of the prow of the Rivercat, which travels at a walking place in that first stretch of its journey, between the buoys that mark the eponymous river’s narrow navigable channel, in my mind I was on board a tiny boat, accompanied by a wizard and a madman, sailing out into the open seas of the Western Reach, beyond every island, to the ends of the world, where the sky is awhirl with dragons.

It’s very unusual for me to be able to remain immersed in an audiobook for so long. My mind wanders easily. I’m an inveterate daydreamer. I already live more than one life: detouring off from the main route of my real-life existence into a thousand fantasies, imagining as I walk the Sydney streets what it would be like to live in each of the houses I pass, to be married to each of the men I encounter, to be, instead of a passenger, the bus driver, my bottom growing numb on the faux leather of the wide seat, my palm rapidly pressing the horn at a wayward motorist clogging my lane.

I’ve had to abandon a lot of audiobooks that I was intensely enjoying because I lost the thread so badly I couldn’t even tell how much of the story I had missed. My mind wanders when I’m reading too—but less so. When I’m reading, I’m sitting in one place and I have the black and white words on my Kindle to mark the way. But I listen to audio when I’m walking, doing errands, washing up and a thousand other things. Between those unavoidable distractions and the self-generated ones—the daydreams—there are simply too many demands on my attention to stay completely focused.

I stopped listening to the seafaring adventures of Jack Aubrey and Stephen Maturin, even though I loved the Master and Commander series—I had to switch to book form, since I loved it too much to want to lose half of it to my daydreams. I likewise gave up on the audio version of Geoffrey Blainey’s A Short History of Australia, when I realised that he had covered several decades of Aussie time while I was half-oblivious. But this is different. I am as spellbound by the words as the creatures Ged, Le Guin’s wizard protagonist, calls to him by speaking their true names.

I’ve written about Le Guin’s influence on my life before. The Left Hand of Darkness is among my top ten favourite novels of all time. See the full list below:

I have a poor memory—but in some ways, that’s an underrated gift. What Maya Angelou allegedly said of people, is true for me of works of literature:

People will forget what you said, people will forget what you did, but people will never forget how you made them feel.

I have definitely read the Earthsea pentalogy before. I remember disjointed, out-of-context details from the books, wispy fragments like the vague impressions of an exceptionally vivid dream that leaves your heart thumping with adrenaline although you can remember only tiny glimpses of what happened to your sleeping self. Above all, I retained impressions from the second book, The Tombs of Atuan: memories of a black-robed girl priestess traversing pitch-black tunnels, trailing her fingers along the rough rock as she counts the openings to unseen passageways branching off to left and right, to ensure she doesn’t lose her way in the featureless gloom. But, thanks to my poor memory, after thirty years I have forgotten almost everything else and feel the thrill of someone encountering the stories for the first time.

I’ve read The Lord of the Rings and the Song of Ice and Fire series, but I’m not usually a fan of fantasy writing. But at this moment in my life, I feel strongly drawn towards it. It’s partly that I’m at a lower ebb than normal and—as always when the black dog is nipping at my ankles—I instinctively seek escapism. But Le Guin’s books are partly resonating for me because of what is happening in the Middle East and—most of all—how people in the West are responding to it.

Wars are dangerous and unpredictable, actions can have unforeseen consequences—or, as Le Guin so beautifully puts it, “To light a candle is to cast a shadow.” Clearly also, there is history and context to every conflict. But not everything is complex. Some things are simple. Despite all the punditry, all the TikTok reels, all the excitement of marches and banners and slogans, all the horrifying imagery of dead children—some heart-rendingly real and recent, some recycled from unrelated conflicts, some AI, all muddled together in bewildering confusion—despite all the pseudo-intellectual pontificating and obfuscatory academic jargon and the age-old tropes and propaganda from every side—despite all this, there are truths. Even if you’re unsure of what actions governments and nations should take, even if you don’t know how things will play out on the world stage, some things are evil and you must retain the moral clarity to declare them evil.

The cult of darkness and death that forms the backdrop to the story of The Tombs of Atuan has been constantly reminding me of the thanatocratic Islamic Republic of Iran. Iran is ruled by people who happily execute their young people in the main square, who outlaw dance and music, who prefer their women—like Le Guin’s tomb guardians—shrouded in black, who declare their love for death, who want their children to die as martyrs, who are at war with not only the world but with life and joy and liberty themselves. Such are the ayatollahs. If you are not fervently wishing for their downfall, you have lost touch with your humanity.

And there is another, far more widespread, evil force at work. A tsunami of antisemitism—the oldest of hatreds—threatens to drench the world again. Some are diving into it headlong, eager, gleeful. Others are swept up and carried along and lack the strength to swim to shore. Still others are blithely unaware that their clothes are growing sodden and their flesh swollen and wrinkled through long immersion. “I’m not antisemitic,” they declare, while mindlessly repeating Soviet anti-Zionist propaganda and old tropes from the days of Nazi Germany—even to the extent of using old posters with hook-nosed caricatures and Stars of David merged with swastikas.

Antisemitism often has an almost timeless feel to it, as the ideas and metaphors in which it is expressed have been recycled so often before in so many different countries, by so many different people, as part of so many different movements. An intellectual I otherwise respect recently opined in a speech that he was concerned that he couldn’t state some simple things any more without being accused of antisemitism. As an example, he gave the “uncomfortable truth” that there are so many Jews in finance. That Jewish control over the flow of money makes him “uncomfortable” is an opinion that could he probably have voiced, in only slightly different vocabulary, in a dozen different centuries.

The old hatred can be found in almost every circle. It is strongest among those Muslims for whom Jew hatred is doctrinal, but its waves are also soaking leftist academics and educators, while many influencers in heterodox right-wing circles are knee deep in bilge water. The filthy tide marks of this flood are everywhere.

Amid all the elaborate justifications and weaselly equivocations of those who are floating on these noxious waters, Le Guin’s work is comforting to me. It’s not simplistic. But nevertheless, it’s clear. There are forces of darkness—within as well as without. There always have been and there always will be. Yet there are also lights to guide us, even when those lights are as weak and wavering as the tiny glow of a wizard’s staff in the dark of a tomb, a bobbing turquoise ball of werelight, illuminating the way only a few metres at a time.