I really like the first three books. But after reading Tehanu… ugh. If this is any indication of how the other post-20-year-writing-lapse Earthsea books are written, I don’t think I’m going to be reading the rest of the series any time soon.
One, hardly anything of consequence happens in that mess. There’s no reason for it to be the longest of the first four books given the threadbare plot it tries to focus on. Hell, there's no reason for it to be longer than a brief epilogue to Farthest Shore.
Two, the entire thing comes off like Le Guin said to herself, “Well it’s been two decades since I’ve written about the Earthsea universe and my original teen audience is all grown up now, so now I’m going to re-invent Earthsea for mature adults.” Except her concept of something aimed at mature adults amounts to in-your-face I’M TALKING ABOUT FEMINISM GET IT GET IT GET IT? social commentary and long passages of basically breaking the fourth wall. It turns the series into a full-blown political manifesto.
There’s whole chapters where Tenar and Witch Whateverthefuckhernamewas do nothing but sit down and talk about men’s roles and women’s roles and men’s power vs. women’s power and oh my fucking god just get on with it. And the really sad thing she was able to get the same point across when she was writing Tombs of Atuan in the 1970's in a way where it integrated into an actual plot with characters who act like rational human beings instead of walking political soapboxes. That’s some George Lucas shit right there.
Third, that goddamn climax. And I’m not even talking about the arguable Deus Ex Machina part. That’s a completely different discussion and it’s actually one of my smaller complaints. In the afterword, Le Guin was saying something about how she wanted to separate Aspen from Cob and tried to design him as a specifically anti-feminist womanizing motherfucker so he could clash with the book’s themes. Yeah, you sure did differentiate them. Cob was actually a memorable villain. He was genuinely chilling. He had his own kind of charisma going. Farthest Shore’s entire apocalyptic tone, the dragons going nuts and eating each other, villagers succumbing the mass paranoia to the point of sacrificing babies on altars and stoning their local Wizards to death? All of that shit was on Cob. The entire book dealt with developing Cob. And when they revealed he was obsessed with trying to break death itself, it was a throwback to Ged’s foolish youthful mistakes dicking around with portals in the first book. It was a clever “If Ged had gone the other way…” type of idea. The way he was written instantly gave him some interesting dynamics with Ged.
And he’s Zombie Saruman for his final form. I mean, come on. Zombie. Saruman.
Aspen is some completely undeveloped stock jackoff who functions as the book’s weak de facto villain after being in two random scenes, and he exists for no other purpose than to force the story’s shallow GURL POWR message across.
tl;dr: I'm not angry Tehanu talks about feminism. I'm angry that it deals with the topic in a completely hamfisted way while trying to be a sequel to other smarter books.