CULT HERO: There are many reasons to loathe the Harry Potter franchise, not least its fatuous literary aspirations and tiresome ubiquity.
Devotees of heroic fantasy - an oeuvre enjoying an overdue revival in the wake of the widely praised Lord of the Rings movie - have particular cause to moan. Rowling's bespectacled whelp has cast an enervating shadow over genre writing and its rich heritage of children's fiction. Polemical Californian author Ursula K. Le Guin should feel especially affronted, for Potter listlessly - albeit coincidentally - apes her most celebrated creation, the multi-faceted juvenile epic, A Wizard of Earthsea, with eerie exactness.
Chronicling a gawky youngster's flight from poverty and repression, his tutelage at a forbidding college of magic and his reluctant struggle against a seductive evil, the novel - and two equally potent sequels - blazed a trail through 1960s children's literature. Unlike the cheery Potter, Earthsea is an ambiguous and nuanced piece, tinged with grit and darkness. What begins as straightforward adventure becomes a subtle rumination on fate and mortality, a labyrinthine saga rendered with uncommon flair and aplomb.
Although the trilogy's final instalment, The Farthest Shore, culminates in a lather of overwrought philosophical cant, Le Guin takes care never to allow her pretensions to occlude the tale's thrusting narrative, an example which modern contemporaries - most notably the self-regarding Phillip Pullman- would do well to follow.
Le Guin produced Earthsea in the mid-1960s, when she was at the height of her powers. This astonishingly fertile period also yielded the powerful Left Hand of Darkness, a gloomy exploration of sexual mores set in a world where individuals change gender according to whim and season. Arriving several years ahead of science fiction's new wave explosion, the book caused a stir and bagged innumerable awards. She followed it with the equally bruising The Dispossessed, a hallucinatory Marxist rant disguised as a throwaway inter-planetary romp.
While Le Guin has fiercely resisted the debilitations of old age - she recently turned 93 - her output has inevitably slowed to a trickle. Two recent Earthsea sequels and a collection of mainstream short stories set in her adoptive home of Oregon garnered modest praise, as did a collaborative foray into the field of graphic novels. But her time has passed - bloated space operas and swords-and-sorcery trilogies have supplanted the revolutionary speculative fiction she pioneered.
Like Earthsea's tragic protagonist, Sparrowhawk, doomed to end his days wandering distant seas, her legacy is cast adrift, bobbing forgotten in the oceans of obscurity.
See website at www.ursulakleguin.com