A Wizard of Earthsea and the pleasure of a short book
Read in two evenings. I keep coming back to how much this book does with how little. There is no map-sized cast, no council of kings, no chapters of exposition about the ages of the world. A boy on a poor island has a talent, gets educated, does something proud and stupid, and spends the rest of the book dealing with it.
The prose is the reason. It is plain and slightly formal, closer to a chronicle than a novel, and it moves at speed without ever feeling hurried. Whole years pass in a paragraph and the paragraph does not feel like a summary. I noticed that I could not find the sentence where I had started caring about Ged, which is usually the sign of good work rather than none.
The magic system is a naming system, and it is the rare invented magic that carries an argument: to know the true name of a thing is to have power over it, and using that power carelessly disturbs a balance that nobody can see the whole of. Restraint is presented not as a rule imposed by teachers but as the actual content of skill. That is a very unfashionable idea in fantasy and it is the best thing in the book.
The middle third, the pursuit across the sea, is where I felt the age of the book slightly. It is episodic, and one or two islands blur. But the final chapters are as good an ending as I have read in the genre, and the resolution is not a fight in any conventional sense.
What I took away, and this may be a reading imposed by being older than the intended reader: it is a book about accepting that a mistake you made when you were nineteen is yours, and that the work is not to escape it but to turn around and go towards it.
I have the rest of the sequence on the shelf. I am deliberately not reading them back to back.