It's hard to put into words what a book like Ursula K. Le Guin's The Farthest Shore does to the reader. Is it a fantasy story for adults and children alike? Is it a Daoist parable? Is it a meditation on death? Short answer: yes. Someday I will read these books again, and then maybe I will discover the true name of a more adequate review. For now, let this review suffice.
The Farthest Shore is the third in Le Guin's Earthsea series, the last in the trilogy of early books published between 1968 and 1972 (see my reviews of A Wizard of Earthsea and The Tombs of Atuan). A few more books arrived in the 1990's and 2000's, and I look forward to reading those. While the first three books comprise a trilogy and each book does involve the character Ged, it's not a single story the same way that say, The Lord of the Rings is a single story (Le Guin is indebted in these books to Tolkien in some ways, mainly, I think, in her prose). Like the previous books, Le Guin's prose is breathtakingly beautiful and different than in much of her science fiction: more epic, deliberately a bit archaic, and all the most beautiful for it.
In The Farthest Shore, Ged is an old man, now the Archmage. And it turns out that magic is leaving Earthsea. He goes on a quest with a young prince, Arren, to discover the cause. Adventures, one with a floating village, many with dragons, ensue.
And here's where the Daoist death business comes right into it. The quest is not a straightforward journey from point A to point B. They meander through the archipelago, picking up clues, acting or not acting as seems necessary. Ged even mentions something much like the Daoist concept of wu wei (literally, non-action, but non-literally not exactly that).
"... do nothing because it is righteous or praiseworthy or noble to do so; do nothing because it seems good to do so; do only that which you must do and which you cannot do in any other way" (p. 67).
That The Farthest Shore is a meditation on death is probably one of the most obvious things you could say about the book, but saying this of course does not to justice to the experience of reading it. Le Guin offers something of a statement of what some philosophers call bio-conservatism about death, or the idea that in some sense death is a blessing or at least something natural that is not always to be lamented or struggled against. The plot of the book revolves around the harm that denying the fact of death does to us as individuals and as societies. (A more visceral, horrific treatment of this issue is Stephen King's Pet Sematary, but be sure to read the book. Neither movie does it justice.)
There is also a Daoist angle here (of course!) in the complementarity of life and death. I noted at least a dozen quotes in the book that could be added to a list of sublime/profound/beautiful passages that create a feeling I've called "coolness of mind."
But let me pick just one quote for this review. This is one I remember going around when Le Guin herself died in January 2018, when her own individuality merged back into the great ocean of being.
"You will die. You will not live forever. Nor will any man nor any thing. Nothing is immortal. But only to us is it given to know that we must die. And that is a great gift: the gift of selfhood. For we have only what we know we must lose, what we are willing to lose... That selfhood which is our torment, and our treasure, our humanity, does not endure. It changes; it is gone, a wave on the sea. Would you have the sea grow still and the tides cease, to save one wave, to save yourself?" (p. 122).
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