Ursula K. Le Guin's Tombs of Atuan: A classic fantasy masterpiece that gives you everything you want and then some

What’s the plot?

In an isolated temple in the mountainous deserts of Atuan, young Tenar is raised to be the priestess of the nameless gods, and guards the underground labyrinth of their ancient tombs. But when a thief appears with forbidden magic to seek the labyrinth's greatest treasure, Tenar begins to question everything she’s ever known ...

Where’s it from?

This was first published in the US in 1970 - it’s the unplanned semi-sequel to A Wizard of Earthsea which came out a few years earlier.

Three words: Thrilling, immersive, timeless.

Re-readable? Oh yes.

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One of my controversial book opinions is that it’s fine (and sometimes better) to read a series out of order, and Earthsea is a fine example.

My mum gave me a copy of the full Earthsea Quartet when I was a teenager - an intimidatingly dense volume of small, close-set text, with generic silhouettes of men and dragons on the cover. I knew that this was supposed to be one of the best fantasy series of all time; I was semi-familiar with the story thanks to the forgettable Studio Ghibli adaptation; I used to have far lower standards for books and would read anything I could get my hands on. Still, no matter how many times I opened up the volume over the years, I could never get past the first five pages. A Wizard of Earthsea, it seemed, was not for me.

But I’ve always been a fan of reading things out of order (a trait probably instilled from a childhood of reading whatever random books happened to be available at the library). I think of spoilers more as DIY flash-forwards, an extra sprinkle of foreshadowing - it’s interesting to bounce around a series hearing hints of earlier books, getting the gist of what happens without knowing exactly how things unfold. You don’t miss much, especially if the story’s well written - and then if you really want you can go back to the beginning and experience it like a prequel. 

All this to say: for some reason I had the notion to try going back to Earthsea - but this time, I’d skip straight to the spooky-sounding second book, The Tombs of Atuan. 

And I loved it.

I think a lot of contemporary stories are very aware of their genre, embracing or subverting tropes in a way that relies on the audience already having a good knowledge of what to expect. But The Tombs of Atuan is totally different from modern fantasy.

 

The first thing that struck me was how ancient the story felt. It's like something straight out of One Thousand and One Nights - a tale full of truth as well as magic.

Aside from a bit of wizardry later on, the majority of the book could almost be realist fiction. Tenar’s upbringing is told through a well-paced montage of rituals and chores, lentils and porridge, fishing and weaving - things that have been part of people’s daily lives all through history. It’s a very grounded world, which makes Tenar’s strange life as a chosen priestess all the more believable - and tragic, knowing that similar things have probably happened in real life.

The Tombs of Atuan is a cool example of the ever-appealing ‘double fantasy’, where you simultaneously wish that you could live in the characters’ world while being relieved that you don’t have to go through what they suffer. 

Who wouldn’t want to be destined from birth to be high priestess of nameless powers, untouchable and fearless, spending your days unearthing forgotten secrets in a place no-one else can enter? And yet how terrible, to be cut off from all others, to forever serve an empty throne, to be nameless yourself and be mistress of nothing but the dark and the dead. 

The book paints these opposites wonderfully - we feel Tenar’s boredom and loneliness as the days and years of her life pass by without change, and feel torn by guilt when she exercises her priestly duty of choosing how three prisoners are to die, an especially chilling scene. But Tenar’s life isn't completely dark. It’s lit up by apples shared with a friend, legends around a fire on a stormy night, sunset over distant mountains, games played in a courtyard. Tenar is just as keen as we are to see the labyrinth, and once it’s introduced as a setting we spend most of the rest of the book exploring it.

Even the tombs themselves are a source of excitement - but at the same time these moments of curiosity and awe are shadowed by despair. Tenar puts off going to the room of the greatest treasures, because - not that she admits it to herself - how could she live then, with nothing left to look forward to? What’s the point of being mistress when your domain is buried underground, and the only place you can be independent is alone? Le Guin poses these questions subtly, never outright, but always bubbling beneath the surface.

In a way I’m glad I didn’t read this when I was younger - I would have liked it, for sure, but I wouldn’t have appreciated it on the same level I do now. If I was still in high school or uni, I’d be spoiled for choice for essay material. You could connect the dark, unseen labyrinth to the twisting depths of the psyche, or ponder what its eventual downfall might have to say about feminine rage. You could, as Le Guin does herself in the book’s afterword, think about how Tenar has power over others but no power over her own life. You could interpret their belief that she’s the reincarnation of the original priestess as representing how women’s lives have been stifled over untold generations in ways that echo into the present. It’s no surprise that the book’s sparked extensive debates about how/whether it’s feminist ever since it was published.

I’ve never wanted to annotate a book until now - you could analyse not only every chapter but every passage, it's so richly layered and thought provoking. 

And, of course, you can enjoy it as a brilliantly-written fantasy - in terms of pure adventure, it’s right up there with The Princess Bride. I went into The Tombs of Atuan with cautiously low expectations, but boy did it deliver on its promises. A bottomless pit is fallen into; treasure chests are opened; dark caves are illuminated and ancient gods awoken. Every Chekhov’s gun is fired, everything you wonder about gets cleverly revealed and neatly wrapped up.  It's probably a good thing I watched the adaptation before reading the book, otherwise I would have been so disappointed by how underwhelming the movie was, especially when the tombs are so reminiscent of the mine tunnels and abandoned castle in Ghibli's Laputa.

After giving up on a pile of disappointing books earlier this year, I was pleased to finally find a story that had my two book must-haves: characters that you care about, and a talented writer who can skilfully guide you through the story. Tenar is a compelling protagonist, and a main appeal of the book is watching her grow. Her dynamic with the mysterious thief - Ged of the first book, now grown up - is also great, and I loved how they slowly came to trust each other. Ged may be a wizard, but in Tenar’s domain he’s at her mercy, and they both have to rely on each other if they’re ever to escape the tombs. The stakes are high - death, and things even worse than death.

Characters we care about? Check! And a talented writer? You bet. Right on the first page when Le Guin describes Tenar as a toddler “running and bobbing like a bit of thistledown blown over the darkening grass” I could picture it exactly, and knew I was in good hands. The Tombs of Atuan is full of excellent metaphors, similes, and evocative descriptions, which never feel out of place. The sentences flow naturally, and every action has consequences that drive the plot and amp up the tension. Unlike the weirdly detached narration of the first book, we’re right there with Tenar, and the simple language makes the emotions super punchy. Like Antonia Forest, Le Guin has a knack for efficient dialogue too, and doesn’t weigh down her writing with any unnecessary words.

 

The world of Atuan is built up effortlessly, from its customs and gods to its politics and history. My only niggle with this book is that the early mentions of directions made me pause for a bit to suss out the geography in my head (the edition from my mum even has a map of the labyrinth in it, which is pretty funny considering it's supposed to be an impenetrable place of darkness that no-one but Tenar can navigate).

I love how Le Guin withholds certain bits of information, one of my favourite writing techniques. A lot of the time things are left unsaid, for us to read between the lines - like how Tenar must feel when she enters the tombs for the first time and is forced to crawl like a dog to the skirts of the elder priestess to find her way out. Other times, bigger things are unseen. We only see Ged from Tenar’s point of view, for example - what goes through his head when he’s trapped in the labyrinth for days on end? How does he weave his spells to keep the nameless gods at bay? Where does he go when he does his astral projecting thing at the end of the book? And what exactly is squirrelled away in the attics and basements and alcoves of the tombs? It’s all left to our imagination, and that’s where the real magic of storytelling lies.

“She watched him, and never could she have said what was in her heart as she watched him, in the firelight, in the mountain dusk ...” 

I was also impressed by the way the book deals with what happens after ‘the end’. Tenar's decision to free Ged - and herself - isn't easy, and she struggles with that choice even after it's made. As I saw noted in another review, a lesser book would conclude after the story’s climax, but Le Guin keeps us with the characters for a few chapters more as Tenar faces the new challenge of how she is to live her life in the world beyond the tombs, which makes the ultimate ending feel much more earned. And despite my insistence on reading the last page of books first, I was still so moved by the last sentence - which perfectly mirrors the opening line of the book - that I actually cried ... and immediately went online to buy my own copy.

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I sometimes wonder what works of art people must be creating right now that I'll one day be obsessed with, and sometimes that obsession turns out to be a book that was written long before I was born.

It’s always fascinating to read a book that's the ‘grandparent’ of a genre - you get to uncover the original things that dozens of later creators were inspired by. I had no idea that the ‘true names have power’ trope came from the Earthsea books. I’ve seen it so often, from Spirited Away to the Deverry cycle, that I always thought it was something from myth and superstition - which I’m sure it was to begin with - but it turns out it was Ursula Le Guin who popularised the power of names for a whole generation of writers. You can also really see her influence on Neil Gaiman, in those old-style sentences like “Full of gold, and the swords of old heroes ... and bones, and years, and silence.”

I really like that Ged is described as dark-skinned, and I agree with other people's criticism of publishers for hardly ever depicting him like that in cover art. It’s great that this masterpiece of fantasy has a dark-skinned hero, but awful that you’d never know that unless you read the books. Funnily enough, I imagined all the characters as vaguely South American or Middle Eastern because of the landscape of deserts and temples - only to later find out that Tenar is meant to be white, and that her people are apparently the pale minority of Earthsea.

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On one hand, I’m tempted to read the rest of the series - it’s cool how each one is set years, if not decades, apart, and I want to see more of Ged and Tenar. On the other hand, I know that the six Earthsea books have a reputation for being quite different from one another - when I checked out an online discussion to see what one I should look to next, every single commenter had ranked the books differently. Besides, I kind of prefer Ged as a side character, with his heroic deeds an intriguing backstory rather than a central plot.

And I guess I’m worried that perhaps none of the other books can quite live up to The Tombs of Atuan ...

This the rare kind of book that keeps you up at night, a book you carry with you just for company, a book you get reminded of when listening to song lyrics. This is fantasy - and storytelling - at its very best.

Antonia Forest's marvellous Marlows: A postwar kids’ series with depth, humour, suspense, and characters who are utterly real

What's the plot?

When the Marlows inherit their ancestral home, a huge seaside farm, all sorts of shenanigans ensue - from the simple joys of falconry and midnight horse treks to the perils of railroad rescues and attempted kidnappings, amongst the everyday fun and conflict of family dramas and boarding school life.

Where’s it from?

The author’s a true-blue Englishwoman (writing under a pen name), and the books are set in a fictionalised south coast countryside, written between the 1940s and the 1970s.

Three words: Relatable, exciting, nostalgic
Re-readable? For sure!

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Welcome back to the stacks!

I’ve been taking my time writing a post about the Marlow books, because there’s so much to say about them that it’s all quite daunting. Lacklustre books are easy to review, but where do you start with books that are excellent on every level, their tapestries of story so well-woven that you can barely find a loose thread to pick at?

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Antonia Forest’s Marlow family series is a fitting first review for this blog, since it’s one that’s definitely spent a long time hidden in the depths of the library stacks. 

I only discovered them thanks to my English Lit course on children’s 20th century fantasy, where the fifth book Peter’s Room was a set text (likely a much-loved book from my lecturers’ youth). Even then, they had to send away to a special publisher, Girls Gone By, to request a reprint for the class, and the series has since gone out of print again - even the stacks don’t have the full series, unless you request some interloans.

 

To tell the truth, I didn’t fall in love with Peter’s Room right away - probably because of the fact that it was jumping into the series mid-way through. (Though I admire the fact that Forest never holds her readers’ hands, instead trusting that we’re smart enough to suss out for ourselves who’s who and what’s what - these may be books about kids, but they’re certainly not just for kids.)

Peter’s Room is set during the snowy Christmas holidays at the Marlow farm, which begins with the discovery of an abandoned attic in an old barn. Industrious 15 year-old Peter soon transforms it into a hideaway where a gang of Marlow siblings and their friend/crush Patrick invent a fantasy world to roleplay in (like a proto-Dungeons and Dragons), inspired by the Brontes’ Gondal lands and the historical relics up in the attic. Out in the real world, there’s hunting and a Twelfth Night dance and a fuss about a party dress, interspersed with dramatic excerpts from the imaginary adventure plotline that the kids are living out in the attic, their alter-egos dabbling in all sorts of treachery and intrigue.

 

Once I’d gotten used to the leisurely pace and the long chapters (not to mention the super fun 1950s slang, which deserves a whole post of its own), the story and characters got well and truly stuck in my head. Wishing that characters could be your friends is probably the best response you could have to a story, and I felt that for all the Marlows, from full-of-bravado-but-scared-of-heights Peter to insufferable-yet-sympathetic baby-of-the-family Lawrie. The book has stayed on my shelf long after graduating, which prompted me to give the rest of the series a go - and I’m so glad I did.

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The quality of the writing is so good that after reading three of them this year, I’ve given up on a dozen other books because they couldn't match the standard set by Antonia Forest.

 

First it was the third book, Falconer’s Lure, in which 13 year-old Nicola - who’s usually the protagonist - takes up falconry with neighbour Patrick, and the rest of the family prepare for a sort of countryside talent show that involves everything from high-diving rivalries to the horrors of remembering your lines in a singing competition, culminating in a horse-riding show where Nicola goes up against a cheater with a vendetta who’s mistaken Nicola for her identical twin Lawrie … classic stuff. The falcons cause their own conflict too, always getting lost or into danger - and this book doesn’t shy away from dealing with death, either, whether animal or human. The plot of these books may sound a bit quaint or twee, but in style and substance they’re anything but.

 

Apparently Forest wrote this one because she wanted to write a pony book, but her publishers suggested choosing a different, less-overdone animal! It was a great idea, though - learning about the ancient art of falconry through Nicola is fascinating.

As an aside, you don’t have to read these books in order - it was fun to reread Peter’s Room and now know what the girls are referencing when they come home from boarding school buzzing about the fallout from End of Term. I wouldn’t really recommend starting with the first one, Autumn Term, however - it’s a bit tame compared to the others, as it was initially written as a stand-alone book.

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The Marlow books are unique in that they’re not just holiday-hijink or boarding school books, but both, with the more adventurous escapades happening in between the term-time books.

 

End of Term - book four - was next out of the stacks for me, and gave me vivid flashbacks to the time when school was your whole life and being snubbed for a role in the play in favour of someone who can’t act was the most unjust thing in the world. Antonia Forest writes the intricacies of relationships brilliantly - everyone is perfectly drawn, and the little interactions between them are fully realistic (and often very funny). There’s the painfully shy new girl, the conniving scouts leader, the quietly witty prefect, the hot-and-cold ‘best friend’, the fearsome form teacher, the impressionable first-years, the useless head girl, the netball team outcast, the clingy companion … Add in twin-swapping shenanigans, a dog rescue, and an overly-ambitious Christmas play, and you’ve got a heck of a lot of fun and drama ready to unfold - and that’s just a taste of what the gang gets up to in this book. Who knew a single term of school could be so thrilling?

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Then there’s the seventh installation, The Ready Made Family, which I liked much more than I was expecting. In this one, studious eldest daughter Karen suddenly drops out of Oxford to marry a man twice her age and moves back to the family farm with him and his three young children in tow, much to the shock of the rest of the Marlows.

 

What makes The Ready Made Family my possible favourite is that it shows Forest’s talent not only as a character writer or school stories author, but as an action writer.

 

 

As Nicola and Peter reluctantly take on babysitting duties for their new younger siblings-in-law, there’s three major ticking-timebomb setpieces where they court disaster: a sunken ship, a railroad near-miss, and an attempted kidnapping when one of the kids runs away and is found by her ‘uncle’. All three - especially the last one - are genuinely scary and masterfully suspenseful. I’m super keen to get my hands on The Thuggery Affair now, which is set over a single weekend where Peter, Lawrie, and Patrick foil some drug-smugglers.

 

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The Ready Made Family was written in the late ‘60s and, just like Tintin or The Simpsons, it's a great example of a ‘floating timeline’ - I love how they talk about colour TV and miniskirts even though they're technically still living in 1949 and the farm's only just been decommissioned as a WWII army base.

 

I've seen other people describe the Marlows as a ‘stiff upper-lip’ bunch, which is pretty accurate - there's one or two scenes where a kid gets hit by an adult and it’s brushed off as impolite but tolerable, which is quite disconcerting as a modern reader. That’s one of the strange things you get when reading books from a few generations back, although there's also more fun things like reading about how telegrams work, what to do if you get stranded at the wrong train stop pre-cellphones, or what the heck a Twelfth Night party is.

Another cool thing that adds touch of realism is the references to other works of literature - the Marlows argue over whether they're too young for Jane Austen, debate what happens at the end of Childe Roland, make fun of lame poems, and have in-jokes about childhood books that I've never even heard of. Sometimes Forest even pokes fun at the genre by having characters imagine what might happen if they were in a novel, before shaking their heads and reminding themselves that this is ‘real life’.

 

If I was British myself, maybe I’d have stronger feelings about the vague classism in these books (the Marlows eventually acquire a cook, a maid, and several horses), but as a New Zealander these aspects seem more like just an interesting part of a far-off long-ago world.

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Lastly, I’ve got to mention Antonia Forest's skill at dialogue and description. Half the time, she doesn't even use dialogue tags - that’s how easy it is to tell who’s talking, where they are, and what they're feeling. It’s incredibly succinct. But when she needs to, she’ll give us an evocative description of a lonely moonlit field or clattering dining hall to give the scenes an extra breath of life. Another thing done very well is the setting - you can imagine exactly where everything is in the landscape and in the Marlow house.

I also love how Forest describes people’s thoughts and inner lives, in ways that are so simple yet so universally relatable. Journalist Lucy Mangan put it perfectly when she said ‘When I first came across CS Lewis’s adage, ‘I read to know that I am not alone’, it was the Marlows I thought of’. Judging by the collection of other wonderful reviews, in print and online, I'm not alone in my belief that Antonia Forest deserves to be more widely appreciated beyond the smallish circle of us lucky enough to have found her books.

These are one of the few books that I recommend to anyone, no matter whether or not you have a particular fondness for British kids’ books. It’s simply fantastic writing and fantastic characters, and you won’t regret letting these stories set up a home in your head.

Welcome to the stacks

When I first heard of ‘the stacks’, I imagined a cavernous room, crammed to the ceiling with books in precarious piles.

Old novels languishing in obscurity, rare editions too delicate for public browsing, tedious tomes of non-fiction superseded by the internet - all lying dormant in this secret stash that seemed to exist in a liminal space somewhere beyond the Staff Only doors of the library.

So when I recently saw a public invitation to come along to a once-a-year stacks visit, I signed up straight away. I knew the stacks were somewhere out of town, and had a vague idea of a warehouse full of endless roller-shelves, but I was super curious to see this hidden place where most of my library book requests lived out their days. Would it be like the basement labyrinth of the National Library, sprawling under a whole city block and humming with a mini monorail network ferrying books from floor to floor? Would it be like the quiet back rooms of the small library I’d volunteered at as a teenager, with benches covered in ripped and broken volumes waiting to be restored? Would it be a sort of bookish supermarket, librarians pushing trolleys down the aisles to pick out peoples’ orders?

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Funnily enough, I found that the mysterious stacks are hidden in plain sight - a modern, unassuming building tucked away between a rug shop and a real estate agent on a main road I’d been down dozens of times. I even went right past it on my way there, and ended up walking to the wrong branch.

“Ooh, you’re visiting the distribution centre? Exciting - they don’t let people go in there very often!” said the person at the desk who I asked for directions, who promptly pointed me back the way I’d come. 

But after arriving in a wind-blown rush, worried I’d be late for my visiting slot, I was soon subsumed by the peace of the stacks. In the door two friendly librarians gave me a brief intro to the building - nonfiction downstairs, fiction upstairs - and left me to it.

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The stacks wasn’t the giant cave of ye olde artefacts, of course, but a large well-lit room full of metal shelves and carpeted floor, like any other library. Only this was a library that didn’t usually see the public, meaning it was meticulously organised, not a book out of place. Graphic novels took up the wall by the greenery-filled windows, next to rows of manga, zines, YA, adult fiction. Hand-drawn maps were taped up to help you navigate the maze of shelves. I went into the children’s section and didn’t emerge for a whole hour - delighted to see old favourites I’d forgotten about, wowed by the quaint art and colourful covers of the 20th-century collection, and occasionally passing another thoughtful browser or excited kid.

They had everything, and I hadn’t even ventured downstairs to see the non-fiction.

Soon I was lugging about ten books around, despite already having ten at home. My hands full, I did a loop round just to see the whole place. At the back was shelves of book bags addressed to rest homes, and to the sides were quirkily-decorated desks and a snazzy lunchroom full of board games for the lucky people who worked there.

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The stacks may seem like any other library, but it’s definitely where I’ll be headed to hunker down in the event of a zombie apocalypse.

It got me thinking what a shame it is that a lot of these books don’t go out into the world unless they’re specially requested. Sure, hundreds get sent out every day, but that’s not much out of the hundreds of thousands kept there (a treasure trove compared to the twenty thousand in my local branch). There’s only so much shelf space in the world, and it’s inevitable that books will be moved into the stacks to make way for the constant stream of new material. Still, it’s strange to think of how many stories there are that you’ve never read just because you never stumbled across them in person.

So I’ve set up this blog to share some books from the stacks and bring them back, if only briefly, to the spotlight. I’ll be rereading old favourites, taking a fresh look at classics, checking out new discoveries, and giving them all a decent review to see how they hold up these days. 

I generally like to wait at least five years before reading a brand-new book; my logic is that if you still hear about it five years after the hype, then it must have some kind of staying power. For this blog, I’ll only be reviewing books that are at least 20 years old - so some of them will be from my early childhood, but none of them from a time when I could remember them being published or have been aware of any marketing or literary fanfare. 

What’s the point of reviewing books that are already ancient, then? Because it’s fun - because it’s interesting - and because some of these books deserve to be dusted off and read again.