When I was a young lad the fantasy writing landscape was different to today's. Certainly, my fickle memory suggests there were fewer authors about, or certainly that were widely-enough published in this country to leap to the general attention. Terry Pratchett was a new development, for example, and aside from the obvious Mr T (1) there were a few particular names to conjure with that any given fantasy reader was expected to have a passing familiarity with. Everyone had, I think, read something by Anne McCaffrey, for instance. Everyone knew who Elric was. Similarly, A Wizard of Earthsea was basically required reading. You couldn't honestly claim to be a fantasy fan unless you had at least a passing familiarity with Ursula le Guin, Sparrowhawk and the magic of true names.

Earthsea is in itself an interesting creation on a number of levels: as a post-Tolkien look at both dragons and wizards (wizards as people, gifted humans, rather than the somewhat nebulous status that Gandalf has); as a sea-based setting based on an enormous archipelago; as a very early work (1968) to introduce the concept of religion-driven desert-dwelling (2) ;adversaries long before the recent vogue (3); as one of the first fantasy works to set out a logical system of magic (rather than just saying, basically "it's magic").

The structure of the series, rather like the geography of the archipelago, is scattered. After the initial trilogy of A Wizard of Earthsea, The Tombs of Atuan and The Farthest Shore (4), written from '68-'72, and with its somewhat downbeat ending, it was almost two decades before le Guin returned for Tehanu in 1990, resulting in many who read the original trilogy being unaware that it was ever continued. This goes double for The Other Wind, a decade later still. Indeed, as The Other Wind shows, on its list of previous works "Tehanu: The Last Book of Earthsea" there is at least a small suggestion that le Guin herself wasn't intending to go the full five yards. On reading the complete set, though, this is surprising: Tehanu, a novel very different in feel to its precursors, which deals in often traumatuc detail with cruelty and helplessness at a very real and non-epic level, has no sense of closure at the concluson. It leaves readers with more questions than they had at the start. The Other WInd, however, is so fitting a sequel, both to Tehanu and to the original three, that it is hard to believe it was not intended all along (5).

However, my particular focus on Earthsea is that it has become an example of how to do, and mostly how not to do, an adaptation for the screen, as Earthsea has now had the dubious pleasure of two separate versions being brought to the visual medium.

Firstly, the Sci-fi channel undertook a live action 2‑parter, under the title of Earthsea. It is difficult to know what to say about this, to be honest, especially in light of the extremely good Frank Herbert adaptations that the SF channel was responsible for. However, Earthsea was not good. The first two novels, Wizard and Atuan were taken, shaken, broken and gene-spliced with a lot of foreign material to create a lumbering, unrecognisable and non-viable mutant. Given that le Guin's first Earthsea book has an extremely powerful plot that surges along without any unnecessary distractions or complications, it is hard to understand why this god-given opportunity for good drama was thrown aside. The only thing "missing" from Wizard was a romantic sub-plot, given the emphatic celibacy of the hero and his fellow magi. This was no obstacle for the producers, who happily had him shacking up with the female protagonist from the Tombs of Atuan, The book strayed so far, and so needlessly, from the names, places, facts, ethnicities and basic principles of Earthsea that le Guin herself asked, ;in response to ;the producers' claim that the film was "faithful to the spirit of the books", whether Tolkien fans would have found Jackson's Lord of the Rings a faithful adaptation if Frodo had kept the ring and ruled all Middle Earth. This is no exaggeration. My response to the TV movie was jsut a bitter disappointment that the chance to film the original story had been blown so definitively. It was not that the script invented characters, places, peoples, traditions and points of reference that were not in the original. Adapting a book for a screenplay is surely a difficult business, and there may well be gaps the novel did not need to cover that the film does. The fault was that all of those places & c. had already been created, and they were overridden roughshod by cheap replacements that made less sense and served only to rob the setting of those aspects that made it so memorable. Everything brought in by the TV version, whether character or plot or world detail, served only to genericise.

So, on to adaptation the second. This last year, an animé entitled Tales from Earthsea ;was produced by Studio Ghibli in Japan. Ghibli have a long track record of bringing out superb full-length cartoons. They are one of the very few animé-tors(?) who have had large-scale cinematic releases, with Howl's Moving Castle, for example, and the absolutely remarkable Spirited Away, and their back catalogue (most of it recently re-released in this country) is well worth getting hold of. Their approach to Earthsea was decidedly more thoughtful. For a start, they left the first two novels entirely alone, whilst leaving enough references to Atuan and the like to make it clear that everything in those books happened exactly as stated. This is obviously unorthodox, as the viewer is immediately being challenged — the film complementing the books rather than trying to supplant them. The plot of Tales from Earthsea is something of an intermingling of books 3 and 4 of the sequence, following Sparrowhawk and Arren through a version of their quest to save magic and the world inFarthest Shore whilst bringing in the title character and some of the plot of Tehanu, and concluding with a scene that oddly mingles the climaxes of both books. Does it work? A considerable amount of liberties are taken, it must be said. The character of Arren is given a sufficiently different backstory that he is unrecognisable, although this in itself involves a reworking of the "Shadow" idea from Wizard that, at least, feels in keeping with the setting. Similarly, the final confrontation of, and on, the Farthest Shore, which in the book is genuinely nightmarish, is considerably lessened by transforming the malefactor from the terrible lost soul of the book into a more traditional demon king villain, with ;a castle and henchmen. There is also, for a cartoon set in a land of small islands, remarkably little of the actual sea, and a scene of someone being rescued from a slaver's ship is, for no good reason, turned into a rescue from a wagon on ;land. Despite this, though, the feel of the animé does come across as much more faithful, both to the letter and spirit of the original books, and I'd give it a reasonably confident thumbs-up.

(1) "I pity da fool who has to take that ring to Mordor…"

(2) The Kargs of Earthsea live on four large islands to the east, which by virtue of their individual size have a desert interior. It is worth noting, and often forgotten, that the Kargs are white, nordic, and as well as being desert fanatics are also quasi-vikings.

(3) Also, unlike many fantasy settings where the ultra-religious desert people are basically led by the nose by evil priests either fabricating or genuinely serving their evil demon god, the ideological balance of right and wrong, of understanding and ignorance, ;is by no means so simple in Earthsea.

(4) There are certain titles that have a classic simplicity that is absolutely unimpeachable. They lend their books a solidity and grandeur that most writers would kill for. I covet, as I have coveted few things, The Farthest Shore. It's one of the most evocative book titles I've ever come across.

(5) In the preface to her short story collection, Tales from Earthsea, le Guin states that Tehanu brought the story of Earthsea up-to-date, but that, when she chanced to look back there, later, things had changed and the story had moved on. More of this later, possibly.