Le Guin Unloosed

The Fantastical Canon: The Books and School of all Ages http://www.newstatesman.com/200612180040 Amongst more general edifications and pleasantries, a major clue to Le Guin's beautifully clean and clear English style reveals itself herein. I think she owes much in this regard to the best writers of "children's books." They have helped her to evade three serious temptations: excessive intellectualizing, vain verbal peacockery, and solipsistic obscurities. I, of course, am prey to all three. In some sense, though, her diction may constitute an availed luxury of her chosen genre, perhaps even a precondition of its success. Yet a clear river does not alone suffice. It must float one through the realms of gold, and in company of characters who do not beggar the imagination, but fulfill various of its finer latencies. Here, too, she finds mastery at her fingertips--in counterpoint to Tolkien, that arch-incompetent among fantasists. He keeps his river relatively clear, I concede. However, it slows to the degree that it seems sometimes a lake and the reader finds his company merely seems since Tolkien never persuades us that it could be. Mayhaps, though, in the end, we ought to be grateful to him for inspiring others to believe they could do his work, but better. After all, when an author achieves supreme transcendence in a given genre, he often manages thereby to kill it. Shakespeare's tragic plays (and not only his tragic plays) have so whelmed and pervaded the minds of his successors (especially those heir to his language) that they’ve scarcely so much as attempted to write such grand drama in the last 400 years. So too did Milton kill epic poetry with Paradise Lost, only excepting the exuberant eccentric Blake. Tolkien was a mere mapmaker, not a master. He reminded his successors of what might be found through new adventures and, unintentionally, fortified their self-confidence too.