There is a limited cast of characters: the principal ones named are Tenar and high priestesses Kossil and Thar, the minor priestess Penthe and Tenar's personal servant the eunuch Manan.It is not until the arrival of an interloper - one familiar to readers of A Wizard of Earthsea - that circumstances alter and events move to startling conclusion. Much time passes in an unchanging succession of rituals and customs, the years blending one into another, until she - literally - sees the light.While A Wizard of Earthsea journeys to and from the four compass points of the Earthsea archipelago, The Tombs of Atuan is much more circumscribed, and thus more claustrophobic in being confined with the walls of a sacred enclosure, the temenos called the Place. Other high priestesses of the God King and the God Brothers are subservient to her, even though they are her teachers and therefore much older than her. So it's entirely appropriate that much of The Tombs of Atuan involves the protagonists negotiating the complexities of a multicursal labyrinth with all its twisting passages and dead ends.Tenar is not just a priestess of a temple complex on the Earthsea island of Atuan, she is the reincarnation of the priestess of the Tombs, identified from birth and dedicated to the service of the Nameless Ones. It's a measure of her talent as a writer that she rises magnificently to the challenge while being a doggedly resolute pathfinder. Does one offer a second helping of the same ingredients on the grounds that readers seem to like more of the same, with just a few details changed for the sake of variety? Or does the writer go with something radically different and risk alienating fans of the original?The second of Ursula Le Guin's Earthsea novels goes with the second option, and certainly this is tough for some readers but Le Guin is of that class of author who not only needs to challenge herself through her craft but to also avoid treading the same tracks as before.
Sequels are notoriously hard things to pull off many authors struggle.
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