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There are bits that now feel like foreshadowing, that weren't so when I first read it--phrases and a song, and a bit of the ending, that point to The Other Wind.
Tenar keeps asking "Why do we do what we do?" It's the difficult question here: why do people do the sort of evil that the villains of this book do, or attempt? It would be tempting to dismiss it as "the plot needs it", but people really do mistreat children for no comprehensible reason. Tenar doesn't have the "I'm in a novel" answer available, but she also refuses the easy solution of making it something that "they" do and "we" do not: she recognizes that, for all that they are incomprehensible and deliberately cruel, they are of the same kind as we are.
The book is stronger for being (re)read immediately after The Tombs of Atuan, with Tenar's experience as priestess and familiar with the dark fresh in my mind. Internal chronology puts it right after (and overlapping by a few days) The Farthest Shore, but while Arren is in this one, the book isn't about the same things. (I think: "about" is a tricky concept.)
And I have no idea how, or if, any of this will prove useful on Saturday; I don't know what the moderator has in mind for this panel.
Tenar keeps asking "Why do we do what we do?" It's the difficult question here: why do people do the sort of evil that the villains of this book do, or attempt? It would be tempting to dismiss it as "the plot needs it", but people really do mistreat children for no comprehensible reason. Tenar doesn't have the "I'm in a novel" answer available, but she also refuses the easy solution of making it something that "they" do and "we" do not: she recognizes that, for all that they are incomprehensible and deliberately cruel, they are of the same kind as we are.
The book is stronger for being (re)read immediately after The Tombs of Atuan, with Tenar's experience as priestess and familiar with the dark fresh in my mind. Internal chronology puts it right after (and overlapping by a few days) The Farthest Shore, but while Arren is in this one, the book isn't about the same things. (I think: "about" is a tricky concept.)
And I have no idea how, or if, any of this will prove useful on Saturday; I don't know what the moderator has in mind for this panel.