Listened to the audiobook with Rob Inglis – like A Wizard of Earthsea, well read.

As I wrote in my review, A Wizard of Earthsea is a rather traditional novel. So when I pressed ‘play’ on The Tombs of Atuan, I rather expected the same. Instead, my surprise kept rising as even several hours into the book, the main character from A Wizard of Earthsea had not appeared yet, nor did his arrival seem particularly imminent.

Of course, the connection to A Wizard of Earthsea does eventually come, but I love that Ursula Le Guin set out to write a novel that can essentially be read independently and that only slots into the wider story later in the novel.

The Tombs of Atuan has a completely different protagonist that allows us to see the events and characters of A Wizard of Earthsea through a completely different lens. As a result, the first trilogy of the Earthsea Cycle is unlike the ‘standard’ fare of fantasy trilogies in which we follow a protagonist in three stages of their life.

The Tombs of Atuan is moreover a very original novel which focuses on the indoctrination of a child priest and her isolation in a theoretically powerful but in practice highly constrained religious role. That is pretty heavy stuff for a fantasy novel for young readers, but I think Le Guin writes it in such a way as to make it relatable despite the bleakness of the subject.

Le Guin also uses this plot to essentially write a story from the perspective of what most people would instinctively describe as the antagonist, which makes the development of the main character all the more interesting.

Because The Tombs of Atuan is centred on a single location, there is unfortunately less worldbuilding. In a way, the reader feels as confined to the Place of the Tombs as the book’s main character. In the case of this novel, though, that is not necessarily a bad thing; it adds to the atmosphere and the wider world of Earthsea spends more than enough time in the spotlight in A Wizard of Earthsea and the third novel in the trilogy, The Farthest Shore.

Overall, The Tombs of Atuan is a short novel, but it is full of surprises. It is focused, original, darker, but still suitable for younger readers. I think it showcases a completely different side of Ursula Le Guin’s quality than the other novels in the Cycle, and I love it for that.