The Golden Fool, by Robin Hobb

This is the kind of book that they don’t let you write unless the seven previous books in the series have all made them a lot of money. Why? It’s six hundred pages long and it has no plot.

Don’t be misled: this isn’t like a late-Jordan glacial doorstopper where it takes six hundred pages to move from one end of the room to the other. Things happen. In fact, compared to my memory of the book, I was surprised just how much did happen. It’s just that there’s no plot. If that sounds paradoxical, imagine an episode of Deadwood, or The Wire – the episode begins, some stuff happens, and then the episode ends. Sometimes it ends after some big endingy thing has happened, but other times it just… ends. That’s what this book is like. There are plots here – some wrapping up from the last book, some setting up for the next book, some linking the trilogy with the Liveship Trader trilogy… but the book itself does not have a plot. There are maybe four major plot strands, plus the threads of Fitz’s relationships with maybe five or six other characters (which sometimes go along with the plot strands, othertimes not). I felt the major climax of the book (the point where we finally find out what this book and the next book are about, what the big plot of the trilogy will be) happened around three hundred pages in; then there was a heap of dramatic stuff, then another climax around four hundred and fifty pages in. Then some other stuff. It ends with the conclusion of perhaps the most important arc of the book… but the arc is a low-key one and the ending is exceptionally quiet. And the epilogue is pointless and trite.

But that doesn’t mean that I didn’t love this book. In fact, I found the first half brilliant. The character of Fitz gradually thaws, as he accepts the need to return to some semblance of life after his long self-imposed exile, and he slowly finds a place in a world he thought had no place for him. Inevitably, when frozen things begin to thaw, a great deal of damage is done to them, and it’s a painful book for Fitz – or rather, maintaining the metaphor, the defrosted and reanimated Fitz is forced to confront pains dealt long ago, that his (metaphorical!) cryogenic preservation had allowed him to ignore. At the same time – as in the original trilogy – important events are set into motion around him, and the leftover plot of The Liveship Traders bounces at a tangent into the side of this book, leaving everyone a little discombobulated. This trilogy takes the same approach as the original trilogy – it gives us a standard heroic plot, but it tells the story from an unexpected, peripheral perspective, and in the process gives us, as it were, the realistic inner workings of the myth. It’s stunning, in fact, just how cliché some plot points are. I don’t want to spell it out for you, but the big moment in this book, which will shape the final volume fundamentally, is lifted straight out of the fairy tale/epic fantasy Big Book of Clichés. [One hint: it involves a Quest.] But it doesn’t read like a cliché. More importantly, it doesn’t feel like a parody either. What it is is, in a way, a deconstruction of the myth: it takes it from the mythic realm and fleshes it out with motivations and characters and consequences until it looks like an entirely realistic plot point. It was actually a few pages after this happens that it suddenly struck me: hey, did [plot point redacted]? – why yes, yes he did – I hadn’t thought of it like that, but that is actually what just happened.

This is, if anything, a book about a man facing up to consequences. But it’s also a book about masks, and the truth of masks. Everyone – absolutely everyone – in this book is wearing a mask of some kind. Everyone is one thing to some people and something else to others. Fitz, of course, cannot take off his mask, both for psychological and practical reasons, and he is stuck living an artificial life – neither his old life nor the life he has built for himself in his cottage – while his history is known to some, and to others he is an enigma neither one thing nor another; and from his peripheral perspective we see too the multiple personas worn by those around him, as even friends and allies hide aspects of themselves from one another. If I were to make a list of the secrets in this book, who knew them and who knew who knew them, I would soon run out of electrons; but unlike in the cheaper, tawdrier secret-ridden novels, there is very rarely a sense that problems could be solved if only people were just more honest with one another. Instead, even when we can see that honesty is the best end point, we cannot see the tangled and precipitous route that could lead there without setting off landslides of unwanted consequences. This is a trilogy about just how thoroughly entangled in lies Fitz and those around him have ended up as a result of his actions in the original trilogy. And yet the biggest shock to Fitz is when he realises that he is neither the most secretive nor the most multidimensional player on his stage. We spend the time, inevitably, in Fitz’s head, preoccupied with Fitz’s problems – but around him, others too see their carefully constructed façades imperilled by unexpected circumstances. That, I suppose, is the message of the book: that deceit may seem to best for all concerned, but that every lie gives a hostage to happenstance. And at the same time it’s about the truth of masks, and whether a deceit remains a deceit when it is lived as truth for long enough, and whether there is any truth at all under the layers of presentation and manipulation – or whether there are perhaps too many truths, all incompatible.

Or maybe, as Fitz says, it’s about the cyclical nature of life. As I said in my review of the first volume, this trilogy sees Fitz play a new role, as a parental figure rather than a child. It’s an old role, and we see echoes of Burrich, and Verity, and Chade in Fitz’s own behaviour toward his various sort-of-children – and in the process we also see Fitz’s own behaviour in the original trilogy through new, more cynical eyes, as the new generation acts out his own childish mistakes. At the same time, we see Fitz wrestling that parental role away from older rivals, in a way that causes us to wonder about how the adults of the original trilogy dealt with their own predecessors. Fitz is completely conscious of all this, and at one moments welcomes, and the next fights bitterly against, the repetition of history, the comfortable easing of new actors into old roles. It’s a manifestation in miniature of the Prophet’s predictions about the circular nature of time, a demonstration of what it means to wrench time into a new track – and of how difficult that is, and how painful, and how dangerous. And on a more prosaic level, I have to say it’s a joy to read a fantasy book with adults in, behaving in adult ways, worrying about adult things. So often either we’re only given adolescent protagonists, or else the circumstances (war, cataclysm, etc) force the protagonists to concentrate entirely on their present situation; so it’s wonderful to be allowed inside the head of a middle-aged man worrying about his son’s love life, not knowing when to step in and when to let him go. Normally to get that sort of thing you need to go and read Literature or something. Here we get mid-life angst and (rumours of) dragons – what more could you want?

But the virtues of the book aren’t limited to philosophising and character exposition. It’s also a surprisingly tense and exciting book. I’m reminded of the wonderful film, Twelve Angry Men – in which a bunch of guys arguing with each other in a small room for a few hours makes for thrilling entertainment. There are scenes here that go even further in their complete disdain for conventional action – some of my favourites are the scenes where Fitz is watching the expressions of various characters in a room as they each watch the expressions of the others (and of Fitz). So much can be accomplished with only glances. Of course, it’s not a heart-pounding thrill, but it is gripping. And it’s also emotional. Very emotional, without it being necessarily a tear-jerker (nothing, at least, to compare with what happened in the previous books). When a reader knows a character as well as we know Fitz by now, the author doesn’t have to put him through hell to make us feel. She just shows us what it’s like inside the man’s skin; we feel every contusion.

It isn’t a perfect book, largely because of the second half. Halfway through, I was entirely satisfied, but then things went a little off the rails. In terms of pace, the buildup lost momentum and we were treated to a bumpy half-book of climaxes and anticlimaxes, not really forming a clear emotional arc (let alone a narrative one!) – and worst of all, ending with a slow glide to a sudden stop. I just found it hard to care about the contents of the final two or three chapters, compared to the more interesting things that had been going on before. Talking of which: too many things went wrong for Fitz in too short a time, which exposed us to the most offputting side of the character: his whingeing. A little is good, but too much just gets… irritating not because I’m irritated at the author, but just because I feel Fitz’s chafing against constraints and it chafes at me too. And then too many relationship plot points are resolved too neatly and too easily.  And because of this, and because there’s no clear plot, and because the set-up for the next volume has struggled to stand out from all the day-to-day stuff, I’m not left with a great sense of needing to read on. It’s the opposite of a cliffhanger, which is a strange decision for the end of a penultimate book.

Oh, and this is small I know, but it just gnaws at me: Hobb isn’t very good at conveying the passage of time. Sometimes I wasn’t sure, and had to check, whether a day had passed or six months. It ultimately doesn’t matter in this case, but it was a niggling confusion I had.

On the positive side, Hobb continues her thing of being constantly a little mystifying – the mythos never seems entirely worked out. It’s been relegated to little bits around the edges by now, but it’s still there – notably in the one, two, or maybe three different voices Fitz hears when Skilling. One of those voices, I can guess pretty easily… but the other two are mysteries, and seem to push forward the conception of the world. Either that or I’ve just missed something obvious.

Finally: on this re-read, I continue to be struck by the ambiguity of the narration. Oftentimes we read Fitz talking in the past tense about the Fitz of the time of the novel thinking back to the Fitz of the past: it’s clear the Fitz of the past can’t be trusted, and the Fitz of the present makes clear that the Fitz of the time of the novel can’t be trusted either… but should we really trust Fitz-the-narrator? It’s not done in an intrusive, postmodern way – it’s so subliminal I don’t think I really picked up on it the first time I read it – but every level of the narration is imperfect. Fitz himself is imperfect to an extreme: come to think of it, he’s really not that smart (just well-informed, and well-trained, and with a good memory). But that realisation, which Fitz also has, undermines itself: Fitz maybe isn’t all that bright when it comes to judging himself. When he says he is being too harsh on himself… maybe he’s not. Or when he says that he’s learnt… maybe he hasn’t. When he says he was wrong… maybe he wasn’t. Time and again I found myself questioning Fitz’s interpretations of things – not only Fitz-the-character’s interpretations, but Fitz-the-narrator’s as well. In other books, this would result in me getting annoyed with either the character for being an idiot or the author for making their character an idiot… but here there is enough ambiguity, both in what Fitz really believes and in what’s really true, that I felt that this was part of the point of the book. Wilde once said: the old believe everything; the middle-aged suspect everything; the young know everything. This is a very middle-aged book.

Adrenaline: 3/5. I’d like to score it higher but I can’t. Much of it is a 4, but it slackens in the second half (despite there being more conventional ‘action’ in that half).

Emotion: 4/5. Not a tear-jerker, but a thoroughly emotionally engaging read nonetheless. Few fantasy books put the reader so intimately in the skin of a character as this one does.

Thought: 4/5. Between the elements of mystery and the worrying about what might happen next and the glimpses of different possible longer-term resolutions, and the constant evaluation and re-evaluation of Fitz’s past and present actions and judgements, and a few bits of philosophical and life-experience-y rumination, it’s a pretty intellectually engaging novel too, even if it never actually says anything startlingly original, or engages in any one topic in great intellectual depth.

Beauty: 3/5. As usual for Hobb, it’s polished enough not to be ugly, but she’s not aiming at beauty, I don’t think.

Craft: 4/5. Occasionally heavy-handed, and the prose is nothing remarkable. Plus one or two minor niggles (eg passage of time) and maybe the plot/structure/pacing as a whole could have been shaped a bit more sharply. But in general, a really accomplished piece of writing displaying her characters with acuity and nuance and sophistication, and a book that does well being re-read.

Endearingness: 5/5. So maybe it’s not my perfect book – a thrilling ending and a bit less whining in the second half might have done that – but it’s still a book I love. It’s just a joy to read – for me, anyway. This is the most subjective of my categories, I know – not everyone will love this fairly slow, rambling, ruminating book. But I do. It puts us into the head of an extremely sympathetic (in my view) character, and gives us time to live in there a while while he deals with a range of interesting problems from the intimate to the personal to the political, to potentially even bigger problems than that. It allows the magical and the fantastic to merge comfortably and inseparably into the personal and realistic. It’s just a great book to curl up with. It’s not a coincidence that I finally got around to picking this up to re-read it on the day my cat died – it’s the sort of book to lose yourself in. If you’re me, at least.

Originality: 4/5. It operates within the confines of epic fantasy, and a fairly conventional form of epic fantasy at that. Royals, quests, talk of dragons, vikings, animal companions, prophecies, chosen ones, etc. But within that subgenre, it is completely it’s own thing – it’s original in style and structure and above all in what it cares about. Most epic fantasy doesn’t spend pages musing on the potential hurt feelings of unsympathetic former lovers or worrying about the apprentice fees for dependants, or worrying whether wise old friends are going a bit senile. Most epic fantasy is all about the… well, you know, the fantasy. This is the sort of book that’s determined to remind us that the fantasy only matters because of the reality in its shadow – that motivations are personal, and that consequences will also be personal.

Overall: 6/7. Very Good. When I say that something’s Very Good, I mean it. There are some classic, classic books that I’ve put down as Very Good. This deserves to stand alongside them. It may not have the same sort of impact as a book like A Canticle for Leibowitz or The Stars My Destination, or Dhalgren, but to me it’s just as good (I recognise that this hinges on the fact I love the book; but even if I’d found the book odious personally, the other scores are high enough to make it Good at the very least!). It’s obviously a very different sort of book from those books – it’s 600 pages long, for a start, and a lot of the heavy lifting has been done in the previous four giant books about this character (and three more related volumes). In fact, this is a great argument for the seemingly obscene size of many epic fantasy series: I’ve no doubt that even if she tried Hobb wouldn’t be able to write a short novel as stunning as the ones by Miller and Bester, but because the genre lets her expend so many words on the same characters (and places), she’s now able to do things those authors couldn’t possibly have done in their short novels – the weight of words has sunk us so deeply into the heart of FitzChivalry, in a way that I suspect only epic fantasy or a similarly longwinded genre could ever do (or, of course, the hand of an overwhelming genius – never underestimate genius). Readers who prefer more external, and less internal, action may find this not quite so good as the first volume in the series, but to me it’s the best book of the series so far, and enough to confirm Robin Hobb as one of my favourite authors. In fact, this is probably one of my favourite books ever. [Which doesn’t, of course, mean that it’s the best!]

Fool’s Errand, by Robin Hobb

“And he knows you.” The words were almost an accusation. “He once told me that you were incapable of entirely trusting anyone. That wanting to trust, and fearing to, would always divide your soul.”

The story of FitzChivalry Farseer was concluded, it seemed, with the publication of Assassin’s Quest in 1997; Robin Hobb’s following trilogy, The Liveship Traders, may have been set in the same world as the original Farseer Trilogy, but was only tangentially connected to it. And yet, four years after we left Fitz dreaming of his future, we returned to him in this book, Fool’s Errand, the first volume of a new trilogy (Tawny Man). Four years for us, perhaps – but for Fitz it has been a long, but surprisingly uneventful, fifteen winters. His old life has been left far behind him; he is a man now, not merely middle-aged, but old beyond his years. His life is quiet, almost eremitic. The business of assassination, the world of politics, the society of the Royal Court, his friends, his family – he has put aside all these childish things to live simply, in a cottage, with an orphan boy, writing, hunting, growing his own vegetables. Struggling against the addictive lure of the Skill, and suppressing his wanderlust, waiting for himself to surrender everything.

But then a series of visits by friends both old and new disrupts that melancholic idyll, and Fitz realises than he cannot avoid his duties for ever. A new crisis is threatening the Farseer dynasty, and Fitz may be the only man who can defeat it; yet to do so he must return to a world that believes him long since dead.

There are a lot of books and films about old veterans returning to the fight. There’s almost always an awkward little section at the beginning, showing us the serene but boring life of our protagonist, and then giving him a good enough reason to get back in the saddle. That’s exactly what happens here, too… and then it keeps on happening… and happening some more… it takes Fitz almost 200 pages, of a less-than-600-page novel, to actually come back to Buckkeep. It’s slow – no, glacial – it’s sentimental, it’s introspective… and in any other book it would be intolerable, but here, it works. It’s a joy.

Why? Well, part of it is that these are characters we know and love – both Fitz and several other characters from the earlier trilogy renew their acquaintance with us in these chapters, and for me the euphoria of this section was much like that felt at a party where you finally see a lot of your old friends for the first time. Even when, as for me, it hasn’t been so long since you last saw them (I re-read Farseer last year), it’s immediately apparent how long it has been, how long it has felt, for the characters themselves. We feel Fitz’s loneliness, his nostalgia, and it awakens our own. It’s an indulgent pleasure – one of the few times a fantasy novelist gives us the luxury of being with our friends, not when they are saving the world or saving their own skins, but when they are having some nice cheese, some brandy, some coffee, just sitting around having a chat on a nice summer evening.

The other reason, however, is deeper. The fact that the action takes so long to kick off should warn the reader, very clearly, that this is not a book about action. It’s not about things that happen – it’s about the people who do them. Farseer and Liveships were both character-driven stories, but this new Tawny Man trilogy takes that a step or two further. This is all about character. It’s all about Fitz. We need this indolent beginning to come to terms with that – to immerse us fully into his soul. Fitz did a lot of running around in the previous trilogy, and now he gets to sit and reflect on his life. That may not necessarily be a good thing for him.

Ultimately, this is a love story. It’s about people who love each other, and people who may seem to but don’t. Romantic love, yes, but also the love of fathers for their children, and of children for their fathers – Fitz had three fathers, in a way, in Farseer, and because that was a story about a boy, those relationships were paramount, but here, in Tawny Man, he is a middle-aged man, and the focus is shifting from those fathers (toward whom the dominant emotion is becoming worry and concern) to the next generation. This time, Fitz has three children – again, in a way, and Fitz’s relationship with those children will dominant this trilogy. And yet, all relationships are secondary here, because what is at stake is Fitz’s very ability to have relationships. A brutalised child has become a broken man – a man who perhaps will never be able to trust anyone, and yet who, at the same time, perhaps trusts too many people, and too far.

US covers for Hobb continue to be inferior, although at least these are better than the ghastly US Farseer covers.

This is the third time I’ve read this book, and it benefits enourmously for the re-read, at least for me, because what I did not at first appreciate was the extent of Fitz’s failure both as a human being and as a narrator. We know he is flawed, and yet instinctively we take him at his word. When he berates himself for making the wrong decision, we believe the decision must have been wrong – when he realises the truth about someone, we believe that what he has realised is true. This is not so much a matter of brute facts, of errors in factual theory that Fitz makes, but more his way of looking at the world. He is like a timid child, reaching out desparately for affection, for trust, for purpose, and then recoiling sharply at the slightest threatening gesture. We see his world through the eyes of a paranoid and melancholic man, and inevitably, through those eyes, it seems as though his fears are justified. But when we look at the brute facts, we realise that things are rarely as clear-cut as Fitz believes them to be. I’m currently watching some House, and there are strong resemblances between the two lead characters – both are men whose unusual perspicacity is used to reinforce their own cynicism, their own sense of independence, while they turn a blind eye to their own many failures of logic, their own dependency on others, their own (at least in the case of earlier seasons of House) idealism. Fitz, of course, is a lot nicer. There is a lot more of the idealist left in him – and that idealism is a loyalty to a more subservient, more conventional morality. Much of this novel is an exploration of the battle within Fitz between his desires and his duty – his desires, which may be selfish, egotistical, and fundamentally normal and good, and his duty, which is selfless, and dedicated, and brutal in its cold amorality. Fitz doesn’t know who he is; and though much of the novel is his endeavour to discover who or what may be worth trusting in the world, and how far, much of the novel (sometimes the same parts) is also about to what extent people should allow themselves to trust Fitz. Because if he doesn’t know who he is, nobody else has any chance. Everybody thinks they know what to expect from Fitz – everybody sees the rorschach of his actions in their own ways – but it remains to be seen who, if anybody, truly knows him. And will that be a discovery, or will it be a decision for Fitz to make?

Don’t be mislead, though. This isn’t six hundred pages of self-conscious moral dilemma. Hobb doesn’t do those. The action may take a while to start, but once it has, it’s not long before she hits the accelerator, and we arrive breathless at the end, cursing her habit of making the first volume of her trilogies semi-stand-alones. The action shuts down as soon as it gets going, leaving us eager for more, ready for the main affair after this powerful reintroduction.

There are some flaws. For one thing, though I’d be fascinated to see the thoughts of somebody who came to the story at this point, I don’t think it would make much sense to them, or resonate so fully. You’ve got to make it through three volumes of Farseer first (Liveships is non-essential, though does help fill in some gaps and supplies a few in-jokes) – and although I like the earlier books, I think it’s a little unfortunate that perhaps Hobb’s best work is so reliant on a weaker earlier series. That said, if you didn’t like Farseer, you probably won’t like Tawny Man either, since the central character of Fitz is such a dominant one. A more serious complaint is that some moments of inner conflict are just too over-done, with one particularly difficult section of three or four pages having three different moments overly reminiscent of the moralising of children’s cartoons.  The action finds itself too compressed, and as a result too much happens off-screen, making the protagonist insufficiently central to events, and the climax a somewhat unsatisfying deus ex machina that would probably work better if there were less post hoc explanation appended. The end of the novel is, as often with Hobb, rather unsuccesful, a drawn-out anticlimax that sets up the pieces but lacks emotional engagement – though it must be admitted that it is rather more accomplished than the equivalent sections of earlier books.

Overall, this is a strong return to the characters and setting that is not only a good read in its own right but also sets up many potential and interesting threads for subsequent books, while encouraging us to see the whole of the earlier trilogy in a newer, more cynical and yet perhaps more life-affirming, light. Whether you like it or not will depend almost entirely on whether you like Fitz, who is more whiney here than ever and even more a perfect mary sue; on the other hand, if you don’t like Fitz, you’re unlikely to make it this far anyway.

The new UK covers follow the respectable-but-boring single-item-on-bland-background trend, but are one of the better examples, I think

Adrenaline: 4/5. Strange to say about a book with such a slow introduction, but this is a thrilling read. The plot moves rapidly once it gets going, and although flat-out ‘action scenes’ are scarce, they remain one of the author’s strong points. In particular, one viscerally brutal fight scene puts the ‘animal cruelty’ scenes in Game of Thrones to shame.

Emotion: 4/5. I didn’t cry when You Know What happened, but I know a lot of people did and I can see why. It’s a beautiful (if cliché) scene, and just caps the continual deep emotional engagement that the book allows us to have with its characters – engagement that is surprising when you think about it dispassionately and realise that, actually, very few of these characters are actually nice people. Fitz’s cynical eye shows us all their weaknesses, exposes their moral questionability, and yet at the same time gives them enough of a golden light to let us love them all. Even the ones we can’t stand.

Thought: 3/5. It’s not dumb – there’re enough twists and surprises and reflections and dilemmas that my brain was kept active; but it’s also not really a puzzler, with the plot going by too fast to encourage much prediction, and most of the dilemmas and revelations aiming more for an emotional response than an intellectual one.

Beauty: 3/5. Not a lot to say. Not ugly; not beautiful.

Craft: 4/5. Prose is reliable, a step up from the earlier trilogy, but still nothing remarkable. The grasp and portrayal of character, however, is superb, there are many excellent scenes (of both action and characterisation – cleverly, she manages to hide much of the otherwise dull exposition in the guise of character studies), and the only flaws are an occasional excess of enthusiasm, a slight inelegance about the climax, and arguably some pacing problems.

Endearingness: 4/5. Doesn’t hit the top mark because it’s a bit disjointed, with the main plot not having enough time to really hit home, and I didn’t like that heavy-handedness it sometimes shows in making its points clearer-than-clear. Stopped me loving the book. I do, however, really, really like the book, and greatly enjoyed reading it.

Originality: 3/5. It’s an epic fantasy quest novel. On the other hand, it’s unusual in the age of the protagonist, and the emphasis placed on characterisation, and the world is a little more noteworthy than the average fantasy setting, albeit in a low-key, unspectacular way. But back on the first hand, it is an epic fantasy quest novel.

Overall: 5/7. Good. Actually, on the verge of being Very Good, but I held back from letting personal affection shape my assessment too strongly. Tawny Man is probably one of my favourite series of books, and this is a very solid beginning to it.

P.S. Just heard that Hobb is working on a new Fitz series. Overjoyed and worried – as she says herself, if she does it badly, it’s the end of her career. However, she’s apparently working on it very slowly, carefully, and secretly, so let’s hope for the best. Then again, this actually tells us nothing, since I’ve always expected (to the point of certainty) she’d return to the character one day, and her current plans don’t seem much more precise than that ‘one day’, so far.

 

 

P.P.S. I don’t normally do this, but I feel I ought to add a comment about the edition I have. It’s the Voyager hardback, and I’m quite disappointed by it. It’s less than ten years old, I’ve only read it three times, opened it a few times more than that… and it creaks. None of the pages have fallen out yet, but several are going to, with the glue already visible. The ‘hard’ cover over the spine is barely harder than paper itself and dented at top and bottom. And more personally, it’s a shame it doesn’t smell more.

Ship of Destiny, by Robin Hobb (Liveship Traders #3).

I’m not really sure what to say about Ship of Destiny. It suffers from all the pacing issues of the earlier installments – indeed, I more or less abandoned it for a while halfway through, although that was as much about me getting distracted as it was about any objective quality of the book. That said, this isn’t perhaps the best series to read without a break, since the slow pace and rich plotting could probably becoming cloying for many readers.

And yet I can’t really complain about the pacing, because when I did, reluctantly, pick the book back up, halfway through, I fairly raced through to the end. This is a book with a big, impressive climax – a climax the series deserves – with an impressive, and intimidating, sense of destiny approaching, as the past, both ancient and modern, slowly gathers over the characters, ready to pounce, and the different strands of plot all converge for a final reckoning.

In some ways, it’s too big a climax, because the plot threads that don’t get wrapped up in it all have to be pushed to one side and conveniently forgotten about, which feels a bit of a cheat. It’s also a very big bomb to drop near the end of the book, making the subsequent authorial scurrying to tie up loose ends just a bit too obvious. It’s not as ungainly a clean-up as at the end of Farseer, but it’s still… not quite right. The end is maybe 20 or 30 pages too long – I don’t know which bits should have been cut, but something should have been. And there are maybe just one or two too many loose ends wrapped up, one or two too many questions answered – again, I don’t know which ones precisely should have been left dangling (and some were, to be fair), but as it was it went past satisfying, into clever and significant, and then just slightly too far into artificial and… over-neat. Likewise, throughout the book, there were too many dramatic misunderstandings – all by themselves believable, and any one of them a good source of tension, but all stuck in together seeming just a little bit too formulaic.

This isn’t an important thing, but: the issue of slavery is largely abandoned, which I felt cheated by. And at some point that got me thinking: this is a trilogy that explicitly addresses the evils of slavery, and features explicit condemnations of those who see slaves (and by extension all underclasses) as homogenous – and this is also a trilogy that shows us the same events from multiple perspectives, to show us the complixity of things, and how the same things appear differently to different people. OK, so how come there are no POVs of slaves? How come there are no developed slave characters? How come there are only a handful of slaves even named in all three books put together? It’s always “the slaves”, or “the Tattooed”, an almost indivisible mass. If she hadn’t brought our attention to it it might not have been noticeable – no book can give us every perspective, after all – but with so much emphasis placed on the topic, I ended up feeling that this was a massive hole in the series. Couldn’t Hobb have found an interesting slave narrative to tell? Given that there are slaves in the background of almost every plot in the trilogy, I’m sure she could have done. There are other gaps, too – the latent xenophobia of the Old Trader characters would have been well served by some New Trader POVs, for instance, or at the very least some sympathetic New Trader (or Jamaillian, or above all perhaps Chalcedian) characters. It feels a bit one-sided – which is fine for most books, but not for a book that seems to put a lot of its credibility on its (ideological and narrative) pluralism and three-dimensionality.

Another area sorely lacking was a real consideration of the end-point of the series. Although the trilogy, as is traditional, ends on, broadly, a ‘happy ending’, it’s an ending that is both bittersweet and ambiguous, on several levels. That’s great – but I really could have done with this being brought out more in the text itself – particularly as regards the top-level ‘geopolitical’, for want of a better word, resolution, which it’s too easy to read as a positive development. The reluctance of several reliable characters, and the self-doubt of another, do provoke the attentive reader to think more thoroughly about whether this happy ending is really happy or not – but in light of just how dramatic the events are, I really felt that more explicit thought on the subject was needed. Best of all would have been some tie-in between the different levels of theme – how does the ‘serpent’ plot look when placed in the same light as the ruminations on slavery, for instance?

[I’m sorry for speaking in code. I want to make some points that will only completely make sense to people who have read the books, you see, while not including explicit spoilers for those who have not read them. Not sure I’m always succesful at making sense when I do that]

Finally, a massive problem I had with the trilogy as a whole and this book in particular is the way in which several – and by the end frankly most – characters were sidelined after I’d become interested in them. This occurred not only in terms of screen-time, but also in character-development. Relationships between the reader and the characters that at one time seemed intimate and textured gradually become flat and distant. To some degree this is inevitable, in order to make room both for the plot and for the growth of several characters – most dramatically the growth of Kennit from an interesting side-character not directly involved with the main plot into the central, paramount, foundational character of the trilogy – but I feel it could have been handled with a little more sensitivity. My favourite chapter of the entire trilogy was way back in the first book, and it’s a great disappointment that the connexion I felt then was never rekindled.

However, there are good things about the book. First, it’s commendably explosive – it may have a long fuse, and there may be issues with aftershocks, but the big bang itself is a thrilling read. As I’ve said before, I’m constantly amazed by how good Hobb is at writing action scenes, given how far they are from what I’d consider her core interests.

If there is a core interest, it’s character and relationships, and here also the book excells. Many of the characters are rich, believable, and subject to change and development – believable change and development, or in some cases a refreshingly realistic lack thereof. This novel, however, is Kennit’s. In Kennit we are given one of the masterpiece characters of the fantasy genre – a character complex, ambiguous, repellant and attractive, a character even that raises interesting questions. We never know who Kennit is, or who he isn’t, not because he’s hidden from us, or devoid of characterisation, but because we are given at least two completely conflicting interpretations: is he a villain to the core, who succesfully persuades those around him that he is a man of many great virtues, or is he a good man who does good things despite telling himself (from fear and from shame) that he is a villain? Is he both? Or is he neither? The truth of masks and the deception of sincerity… even when we see the events from every perspective possible, still we cannot penetrate to “the truth” of the matter when it comes to the nature of men’s souls. And to some degree perhaps it doesn’t matter that we can’t. Throughout the trilogy, characters engage in various serious and meaningful relationships without ever really knowing the other parties – and though character drives the plot, it is a negotiated, external character, that may be quite disconnected from the heart of the man, or the woman. Most of all, we may never really know Kennit – if indeed there is any meaning to that concept or real knowledge of a person – but it doesn’t matter, because it is “Kennit”, the larger-than-life negotiated social construction that drives events. The man at the core of the myth is perhaps as confused about the boundaries between himself and his legend as we are. But of course, though Kennit exemplifies this most strongly, it remains true for all the other characters – whether the myth is a romantic ideal, or a paternal prescription, or a heroic duty, or the mask of authority. The image and the real – and the ineffability of the real, its negotiable quality – is a theme that runs powerfully through the whole trilogy.

In the process, we are distanced from the characters, and this is one reason why this trilogy is less accessible and immediately likeable than its predecessor. Pacing and the shear confusing breadth of the story are additional problems. Yet for the reader who can settle down for a challenging but comfortable saga, there is an extremely strong story at the heart of this – multiple sympathetic and inherently interesting characters engaged in significant and compelling plots, in an interesting world. I’ve struggled through the trilogy, I know, chipping away at it chapter by chapter. But that doesn’t mean that I didn’t enjoy it – or that I wouldn’t recommend it. I most certainly would.

One warning, though: some readers don’t like rape. There have already been rapes in previous volumes, but the rape and sexual assault quotient does accelerate here. Personally, I think this is an excellent thing, exploring the consequences of terrible actions in a way that felt sympathetic, textured, and never gratuitous. But it needn’t always be comfortable – some of the aftermath of one rape, for instance, makes for some of the most horribly uncomfortable reading I’ve encountered in a genre book. Frankly, I think that’s a good thing.

—-

Adrenaline: 4/5. Full marks toward the end, but it does take a little while to ramp up to speed.

Emotion: 4/5. I’m not sure I cried, but I certainly had very moist eyes at least twice. Perhaps it still didn’t have the payoff I might have hoped for given the amount of investment in the characters, but certainly not a cold or arid novel.

Thought: 4/5. Between the fascinating characters and the fascinating, challenging developments around them, together with a well-worked and sophisticated plot, my brain was really enjoying this one.

Beauty: 4/5. Kicked up a notch from Hobb’s usual utilitarian level by the symmetry and elegance and emotive beauty of a number of key climactic scenes.

Craft: 4/5. Hobb’s prose isn’t sparkling, and there are minor errors and omissions made. However, overall this has an above-average level of craft – both emotional and action scenes are well-written, a considerable amount of information is doled out with a light and graceful hand (and excellent timing), plots, foreshadowings, repetitions and in-world allusions are handled deftly and carefully, and character development and presentation are largely excellent, even if I might want a little more limelight for the supporting cast.

Endearingness: 4/5. I still don’t quite adore this trilogy. Because of its giant cast of characters (I think there are over 20 POV characters alone, though admittedly some are minor) and disparate plot threads it’s hard to immerse us fully in any part of the story – it feels as though in order to show us everything, Hobb has had to use a wide lens. For some authors this can work, but as Hobb intentionally uses complex, often challenging characters who need close exploration to bind us to their more sympathetic sides, and indeed plot developments that (with some exceptions) tend to the subtle rather than the pyrotechnic, the wide lens leaves us often feeling a little less close to the action than we’d like to be. That said, I do really like the novel. It has some very memorable and sympathetic characters, it has a delightfully weird and tingly background plot development, it’s immersive, and for the most part it’s jolly fun to read (though, again, it’s not for those who need breakneck writing styles and constant physical action scenes).

Originality: 3/5. Unsurprisingly, the conclusion has less room for originality than the development section had – there are only so many ways to bring an end to a plot on this scale, and while Hobb certainly doesn’t fall into cliché and manages to surprise a little here and there, the general structure and direction feels, perhaps inevitably, more familiar.

Overall: 6/7. VERY GOOD. I know that a lot of this review didn’t sound that glowing, and I’ll admit that this book didn’t blow me out of the water. It isn’t brilliant at anything. On the other hand, it isn’t bad at anything either – I’ve pointed out a few (I think) flaws, but there are no real weaknesses. Aside from an average level of originality – which is to be expected given the genre and the fact that this is a plot-concluding novel rather than a plot-developing or plot-introducing novel – this book is above par in every way. I think that the trilogy as a whole suffers by its placement between the two Fitz-focused trilogies, because this is a long way from Farseer thematically and structurally and emotionally – I think that the disappointment of Fitz-fans struggling to adapt to such a change has given it an undeserved reputation. It’s true also that the genre is an issue here – it’s close enough to epic fantasy for many readers to dismiss it, but it doesn’t directly appeal to core epic fans either. It’s not dark lords destroying the earth unless they’re stopped by teenage farmboys – it’s a bunch of women talking about relationships, politics, trade, ships, and sea serpents. [With added pirates and magic and fighting and sea serpents and toxic mutation and buried secrets (literal and metaphorical) and rape, and some more rape, and a prophet]. Nonetheless, I do think that if you take this series on its own merits, not expecting it to be Jordan, not even expecting it to be Fitz, it’s a really good old-fashioned sprawling yarn with great characters that now and then makes you think. Which I think is a very good thing to be. And it ends on a high note.

The Mad Ship, by Robin Hobb

Short version of my reaction as I went through this novel: “YEAH!…ok!… ok?…. er?… [twiddles thumbs]… oh, yeah!”. Or to put it more comprehensibly: the second novel of the Liveship Traders takes off where the first ended, and seems to be getting even better, before suffering something of a mid-novel hiatus and being revitalised at the end with a rousing finale.

It’s not that there’s anything wrong with the middle portion exactly – it’s just that, as not uncommonly with Hobb – the author seems to take her foot off the accelerator and lets it all coast along a bit too sedately.  The underlying problem is that her style, particularly in this trilogy, is a slow one, with a lot of introspection by characters and a lot of reporting and reflection and reconsidering of things that have happened off-screen. When the plot is strong enough to drag the reader through this heavy meal, or when it is sweetened by high-octane scenes (at which Hobb is surprisingly talented, given that they don’t seem to be what she’s interested in), the result is a satisfying feeling of fullness. When the plot slackens and slows and we go too many chapters without a seamonster or a kidnapping or an assault, the result is that we’re left picking through a perfectly-pleasant-and-nutritious grey porridge of events in the hope that something exciting will happen eventually. When it does happen, it’ll be twice as good because of all the set-up (and I don’t mean bland exposition – every chapter is a good story in its own right and things are always happening – they’re just not thrilling in their own right), but while we’re going through the set-up it’s a little slow. It’s important to stress that this slowness isn’t Jordanesque ten-pages-describing-a-dress filler; it’s all important character development and plot development – but it sometimes feels like a lot of healthy food without much sugar.

That means that this book isn’t brilliant and I don’t adore it. I do, however, really, really like it.

Ship of Magic was a character-driven complicated story, as various tangentially-connected individuals tried to go about their lives and ran into complications. The Mad Ship is still heavy on character, but now the events of the first book have taken on a life of their own, and the wheels of plot have pulled out of the hands of the characters. This lends procedings a rather desparate air – things are getting worse and worse and less and less controllable. That doesn’t mean we don’t get to see a lot of in-depth character work, though. On the contrary. If you like you fantasy to focus on character, come read this book. Towering above it is the incredible character of the pirate king, Kennit, who goes from being intriguing to being one of the greatest creations of the fantasy genre. I’ve recently been watching HBO’s wonderful In Treatment (the second season), and at times that’s how The Mad Ship feels – a slow, elliptical exposure of the surprising and paradoxical layers of Kennit’s psychology. Unfortunately, Kennit’s power, both as a work of art and as a person within the novel, rather overshadow some of the characters near him (no spoilers!), including particularly one of my favourites from the first novel. My other favourite becomes increasingly less likeable, as their experiences leave them more experienced, and more calloused – personally I preferred the naïve and endangered version. Meanwhile, though, other characters rise to the fore. Etta, for instance, gets more screentime; a new character, Serilla, is introduced (and promptly spends almost the entire novel travelling at a pace of about an inch per page), and with her a new mode of femininity. Indeed, much of this trilogy feels like an exercise in discussing different ways of being female – although there are male characters, and important ones, they seem almost independent of one another, while the women are more closely linked thematically. In part, this is because the main male character, Kennit, is (at least apparently) the only truly freely-acting person in the trilogy, while the female characters (and Wintrow, who in the first book was frequently likened to a woman in his behaviour and psychology) are forced to react to hardships. How they deal with those hardships defines them – the trilogy is perhaps (leaving Kennit aside) a study in how women can come to terms with, and attempt to transcend, positions of powerlessness: Althea, Keffria, Malta, Ronica, Etta, and now Serilla all attempt to do this in different ways. Nor, I think, is it a coincidence that the two immensely important characters introduced near the end of the novel are both female. This is not to say that it’s a feminist novel, or that the lessons of the women are not meant equally to be heeded by men (after all, in today’s society the division between powerful men and powerless women is rather less clear and unambiguous than in the trilogy’s setting – and by the end of this novel it’s starting to seem as though it’s going to be subverted even within the trilogy). But as a man, I have to say with an earnest explosion of relieved sighing: by heavens, it’s good to finally have a fantasy novel about women. I love feisty tomboys with swords, and I can accept both narratively and historically the need for mothers and swooning love interests ‘back home’, but it’s good to finally get a work where women are at the centre – and such varied women that you’d have to try hard not to like at least one of them.

Malta, I might add, is fantastic in this novel. The first time I read it, I thought that what Hobb did with Malta was genius on the level of what she did with Kennit. The second time, watchful and not taken by surprise, I found I could see through the gaps, as it were, a little better – but it’s still true that she’s a fantastic piece of work that should act as a lesson for everyone out there wanting to learn about character development. And even about character per se. The obvious comparison is Martin’s Sansa, but Malta is both more realistic and more infuriating than Sansa – and her character development is more impressive and more believable.

Going back a moment: if you want to know who this paragon (no pun intended) of characterisation, this “Kennit” is, I can summarise him, broadly, roughly, approximately, like this: he’s Deadwood’s Al Swearengen, mixed with Battlestar Galactica’s Gaius Baltar. And we see inside his head. Yes, that is as awsome as it sounds. In fact, when reading the first novel, encountering this little trinity of Kennit, Sorcor and Etta, I found it hard not to believe that David Milch must have read it, and that this was the basis of Deadwood’s Al, Dan and Trixie. Hobb’s versions, though, are better. And to Baltar I owe a curious semi-revelation halfway through the novel: remembering Baltar’s prison scene, in which he talks about his father and reverts to his native,  peasant accent, I experimented with giving Kennit (like many real-life pirates) an uneducated West Country drawl, rather than the supercillious RP that I first imagined. I’m not convinced it’s the best interpretation, but it certainly helps cast him in a new light. And no, I’ve still not come to terms with the fact that he has a moustache with pointy ends – I’m sure that fits in somewhere, but I don’t yet understand quite where.

However, despite what I’ve said above, this isn’t just a character-driven low-magic fantasy saga. Oh no. In Ship of Magic, it began to become apparent that Weird Things were going on beneath the surface. Well, in The Mad Ship those weird things smash their way to the surface – the all-important words start being bandied around in the very first few chapters, and by the end it’s clear that world-shattering events are unfolding.

That additional dimension adds a sparkling finish to the saga, because the fantastical dimension of Hobb’s world-building is extremely impressive: doubly so for the way that the revelations of this novel merge with, reframe and underpin the revelations of the earlier Farseer Trilogy, while at the same time standing alone in their own right for those who have not read those books. This, in a way, captures the essence of Hobb’s approach: to give the –sometimes confusing – impression of a world far larger than the one we see, and in the process to allow each individual thing to stand independently. I suppose what I mean is that, for instance, if a reader of this trilogy were told that there was another trilogy set before this one in time, there would be three or four possible times and places where one might imagine that that earlier trilogy was set. As it happens, Farseer is set in the Six Duchies and neighbouring areas a few years before the events of The Liveship Traders, and its events cast one light on the events of this trilogy – but if it had been about something else (Kelsingra, perhaps, or the Others, or Jamaillia, or the founding of Bingtown, or Chalced, or the lands to the south) I get the feeling that it could have cast a different light on things. Hobb’s world feels big and complicated and shrouded in mystery – a puzzle that all fits together somehow, but half the pieces are lost, and we don’t know which pieces will be found again and which are lost forever. There are a dozen clever references to Farseer, but there are just as many things that could equally well be references to other books – which happen not to have been written.

More prosaically: the creatures Hobb starts to describe in this book, and their lifecycle, are as imaginative (and yet weirdly believable) as anything you’ll find in epic fantasy.

I have to try to talk about problems, though. Well, as I’ve suggested, although there’s always something happening, a lot of it isn’t important or exciting in its own right, only in terms of what will happen next, and that makes the book slow (not a problem, only a taste) and uneven (perhaps a problem). The prose remains… uninspiring, though in no way bad by the standards of the genre. The more practical, sociopolitical side of the worldbuilding sometimes feels a little cardboardy (although political developments in Bingtown are well-handled). AND I WANT A PROPER MAP, DAMNIT. That was more of a problem for the first book, where I kept looking on the map to find places, only to realise that hardly anywhere is actually marked on the map at all, but it continues to be a frustration in this installment. If you’re going to provide a map, could you please mark places on it that are mentioned in the text? You know, just some of them, maybe?

–

Adrenaline: 3/5. Sounds high given what I’ve said, but there are exciting and gripping bits here – just sometimes spread too far apart.

Emotion: 3/5. I suppose one complaint is that this volume didn’t really kick on, emotionally, from the first. In part, I wonder if that’s because of the multiple-POV system: with so many characters developing simultaneously, it’s maybe harder to get fully caught up in the feelings of any one of them, because ten pages later we’ll be wrenched out and put in an entirely different head.

Thought: 3/5. As with the first volume, this isn’t thinky-fantasy, but it’s not stupid fantasy either. The underlying magical-biological mystery intrigues but does not perplex; the moral dilemmas are interesting.

Beauty: 3/5.*shrug*

Craft: 4/5. Almost 5/5, but I suppose the pacing could be a little better, and the prose needs to sparkle more as well. Mostly, though, extremely sophisticated. Handles a wide range of characters in an impressive way, including both development and revelations.

Endearingness: 4/5. Almost loved it, but not quite. Perhaps a bit too cold and ponderous to really be adorable. Plus, my favourite chapter in the series isn’t in this book (probably Athel on the sealer).

Originality: 4/5. Pushed up by the weird life-cycle, and generally distinctive world-building, and things like showing the political dimension through the eyes of an annoying brat.

Overall: 5/7. GOOD. Pretty similar to the first book in the trilogy, maybe a little better. Continues to be well-written and enjoyable, and suprisingly sophisticated for the genre; critics may wish it was a bit more full-blooded.

Ship of Magic (Liveship Traders 1), by Robin Hobb

The best way to explain this novel: imagine if a BBC production crew in the 1980s had set out to film a Victorian novel, but accidentally picked up an epic fantasy trilogy instead. The echo of Hardy, and the afterimage of The Jewel in the Crown, The Onedin Line, the Barchester Chronicles and a host of Merchant Ivory films hung in my brain as I plied my way through this novel.

On the one hand, yes, this is epic fantasy. The ‘Ship of Magic’ of the title is a Liveship (the series is known as ‘The Liveship Traders’) – a ship made of a magical wood that is able to move and talk once three generations of one family have died on its decks. The wood the wildships are made of, ‘wizardwood’, is obtained from the mysterious, mutated, inhabitants of the Rain Wilds, who purvey a host of other magical trinkets. Throughout the novel, meanwhile, sentient sea-monsters pursue ships while speaking amongst each other in portentious tones about their destiny. This isn’t traditional literary fiction.

On the other hand, it’s not precisely traditional fantasy either. To start with, the setting is not medieval, but early modern. The series is set in the same world as the Farseer Trilogy, but to the south of the Sixth Duchies, and the inhabitants of the Duchies (i.e. the protagonists of the earlier trilogy) are regarded as a backward tribe of barbarians. As in the Farseer Trilogy, the magic level, at least at first, remains low – there are talking ships, but nobody is throwing around fireballs.

More important, however, is the unusual focus of the action. There are two plot-worlds at the beginning of the novel. The bigger is the world of the Vestrit family. The Vestrits are an old family of Traders in the merchant-colony city of Bingtown, but both Bingtown and the Vestrits have fallen on hard times lately, and their debts are mounting up. The patriarch of the family, Ephron, begins the novel on his death-bed, his family seemingly not yet ready to take up the reins when he lets them fall. The only good news is that Ephron’s death, if it occurs aboard their liveship, will quicken it (his father and grandmother both died on its decks) into a sentient being, an inseperable member of the family – this is traditionally a cause for great celebration, and is assumed to herald some future prosperity (if nothing else, liveships sail faster and more surely than ordinary wooden ships).

Around the dying Ephron are his wife, Ronica – a wise woman who has always managed the Vestrit estates, but is only now coming to realise how much she has failed to pay attention to over the years – and his daughters, Keffria and Althea. His sons taken from him by plague, Ephron has nurtured and favoured his younger daughter, Althea, who sails with him, and believes herself to have the makings of a great captain, caring little about the damage her roving career and callused hands have done to her social standing and marriage prospects. Keffria, meanwhile, has fallen in love with and married the short-tempered, controlling, but pragmatic and reliable Kyle Haven (a man of foreign, Chalcedian, blood). Keffria and Kyle have three children – the eldest boy, Wintrow, has been sent away to a monastery to become a priest, against his father’s instincts, while his younger sister, Malta, waits at home desparate to become a woman (their youngest, Selden is largely overlooked by all). As the novel begins, Kyle Haven sails the Vivacia back to Bingtown, quarrelling with Althea, and Wintrow is summoned back to what may be his grandfather’s deathbed, and to the disapproval of a father unimpressed by robes and quiet ways. When Ephron dies, who will take control of the awoken Vivacia – and what will they do with her? Elements of their story are illuminated by Brashen, Ephron’s First Mate, a disillusioned runaway from another Trader family; in the background the political and economic situation is difficult, as the mother-empire, Jamaillia, attempts to reassert control in Bingtown by licensing an influx of new colonists ignorant of local ways and customs, and who in particular are keen to introduce slavery – illegal under Bingtown law, but permitted in Jamaillia and in neighbouring Chalced. Some Traders wish to resist the changes; others, like the Vestrit family friend, Davad Restart, a man destroyed by the death of his family, feel compelled to move with the times. Amber, a mysterious shopkeeper who makes wooden jewellery, is a very different sort of immigrant; and in the background, abandoned on a nearby beach, is the blind and deranged ship Paragon, known as Pariah, who is rumoured to have killed his crew – repeatedly.

The second, smaller world is the world of Kennit, a pirate with dreams of glory – one of the large and growing number of pirates who have established de facto control of the large, poorly-charted stretch of coast between Jamaillia and Bingtown. Kennit is succesful, but ruthlessly driven by ambition, and will not rest until he has been proclaimed the King of the Pirate Isles; as his fellow pirates are libertarian at best and downright feloniously anarchistic at worst, his dreams seem unlikely to be fulfilled – and perhaps even a throne will not be enough  to satisfy him. Kennit himself is a man with almost no redeeming feature other than charisma, and he recognises this quite frankly to himself – and yet that charisma (and the occasional, enigmatic assistance of a magic charm) are enough to weave quite a different impression for those around him – most significantly his trusting first-mate, Sorcor, and his deeply damaged favourite prostitute, Etta.

Needless to say, these two independent plots will at some point come together, and the meeting is unlikely to be pleasant for anyone concerned. Also waiting for significance is the ground-drone of the sentient serpents, who cannot quite remember who or what they are, or what they are to do, but who are certain that something important is going to happen, and that they have a role to play in it.

Deep breath. I don’t normally take so long to talk about the plot – normally I can’t. I’ve only just, and briefly, outlined the starting positions of the major characters, and already I’ve written something longer than the detailed plot summaries I could draw up for many other novels. If you want a simple boy-finds-sword-boy-kills-dark-lord story that everyone can hum, this isn’t the series for you.

Instead, what it is is a deeply multisided family saga. On a casual count, I think there are 12 POVs in the first novel – and although some don’t get a lot of screentime (and four are non-human), that compares respectably with anything else on the market. A Game of Thrones, for instance, by my count has only 9 POVs (including the prologue). What’s more, Hobb’s viewpoint characters aren’t just viewpoints – they’re also characters. Whereas many of Martin’s POVs are (at least at first) broadly-brushed child-archetypes who primarily observe, secondarily react, and only then may now and then act from their own interests, almost all of Hobb’s POVs are fully-fleshed out individuals with their own distinctive, and almost inevitably conflicting, set of objectives and priorities. Much of what happens is not the result of some evil macchiavelli or dread alien power, but simply the result of the conflicting (and conflicted) efforts of individually reasonable men and women.

Characters, and in particular relationships, are the heart of the novel. Above all, this is a novel of family. The blood relations between Ephron, Ronica, Keffria, Althea, Malta, Wintrow and Selden; the marital relationship of Keffria and Kyle, and the legal relationship that Kyle bears toward his assorted female in-laws; the magical relationship between liveships and their families, which in many regards can be seen as a metaphor for blood bonds writ large; the more distant national relationships between the Bingtown Traders and their mysterious Rain Wild cousins, and between the Traders and their mother-empire, Jamaillia; and, of course, the absence of family relations seen in the bloodless, friendless pirates and whores. It is a novel about how children try to escape their parents, parents try to control their children, and those with neither parents nor children strive to gain the illusion of family, or to destroy the families of others.

It’s fortunate, then, that Hobb is a great crafter of characters. There is nobody here particularly unique, particularly vivid, except perhaps the villainous Kennit, but most of the characters have great vitality, and great believability. The idea of the tomboy daughter, here seen in the woman who believes herself a great sailor, is a familiar one in fantasy, but I’ve rarely if ever seen it done so believably, so sympathetically, as in Althea. The young priest-boy, wise beyond his years yet still naïve, who comes into conflict with a farmer who values physical labour and daring and leadership above books and peace-making and goodwill to all creatures, is hardly a new creation, but I don’t think I’ve ever seen it done better than in Wintrow – a particular accomplishment, as the character needs to combine vulnerability with strength, and near-fanatical confidence with both humility and sometimes crippling doubt, and still be a believable child, and still clearly develop over time. This isn’t a showy characterisation that begs the audience ‘look at me, see how complicated I am, ooh, you thought I was like this and actually maybe I’m like that, ooh, I’m conflicted, aren’t I sexy?’. This is a quiet, background verisimilitude that may not draw the attention but makes every page matter a thousand times more greatly because these a real, and interesting, people we’re talking about. Perhaps a good way to say what I mean is to say that many books have star characters and supporting characters, and in a film adaptation, the star characters would have star actors and bring in the box office results, and the supporting characters would be played by ‘character actors’ who, if they put in a really good performance, might bring more to the character than can be read in the book. Well, Ship of Magic is a novel where often the greatest actor in the world could not bring more to some of these characters than is already present in the text – and all the characters need character actors. Perhaps that’s why those classic TV shows spring to mind. It’s not even just the main characters – as I was reading, I was thinking how I would adapt it for television, and came to the conclusion that several of the supporting cast could be given major actors and whole new storylines of background. It feels as though, if you scratch beneath the surface, you’ll simply find another layer of stories that Hobb could have chosen to tell, but didn’t.

What are these characters like? Well, in my opinion one of Hobb’s triumphs lies in making all her characters simultaneously likeable and dislikeable. Not, as in lesser works of characterisation, merely “likeable but reprehensible” or “dislikeable but admirable”, but actually both likeable and dislikeable. We like these characters in the same way that we like our friends – we recognise that they have faults, and when it is pointed out to us we may realise that these faults are gigantic, and we may fully understand when other people hate them or are contemptuous of them – and yet for us, these problems are still OK because it’s only our friend we’re talking about. Well yes, I suppose he is a colossal arsehole now you come to mention it, but you know you just have to get to know him… oh, well, yes, she is paranoid and vindictive, but aside from that (and you have to understand where she’s coming from, you know?) she’s a really great person. Most of Hobb’s characters are instantly sympathetic and likeable, but thinking about them dispassionately it’s hard to explain why.

In fact, if I had to sum up the plot of the novel based on the characters of the protagonists, in a single phrase, it would be “pride and prejudice”. Not the Austen novel, specifically, but that’s what it’s about. It’s an array of characters who could be nice, and who could get along with each other with no difficulty, but who aren’t, and don’t, because they’re proud and prejudiced. Whether it’s Kyle’s obsessive need to control (or ‘protect’) his wife and children, or Ronica’s fear of immigrants, or Brashen’s island-sized chip on his shoulder, or Althea’s sense of entitlement and indomitable self-righteousness, or Wintrow’s holier-than-thou conviction, or Kennit’s contempt for everybody in the world including himself, it’s a novel full of people looking down on, and keeping their distance from, others.

[Whilst on the ‘Pride and Prejudice’ line: what a rubbish title this novel has. ‘Ship of Magic’? I would be embarrassed buying it, and not in a ‘I know it looks geeky to you but I think it’s cool, but I’ll look embarrassed anyway because I’m not good at confrontation’ way. This title is both geeky and shit. It doesn’t sound good, and it doesn’t fire the imagination. Ship of Magic. So called because it involves a magical ship. Oh good. That’s inventive. Robin Hobb novels will never win awards for their titles (the only clever one is “Fool’s Errand”, and that’s too trite), but the Liveship novels have the worst, and ‘Ship of Magic’ surely takes the crown. Though come to think of it, “Ship of Destiny” has to give it a good run: less stating-the-obvious, more groan-inducing-cliché – I mean, what is this, a lost Enid Blyton series? Anyway, ‘Pride and Prejudice’ would have been a far better title, if somebody hadn’t already appropriated it.]

So, there is complexity of character, and, thanks to the conflicting motivations, complexity of plot – not only is it never entirely clear what’s going to happen (although, admittedly, as the first novel of a trilogy, it quickly becomes clear that certain general classes of things will happen, mostly along the lines of Things Will Go Wrong – otherwise there wouldn’t be a trilogy; hmm, come to think of it, another good name for this novel would be “There Will Be Blood” – what, somebody’s taken that one too?), but it’s never even clear what we as the readers ought to want to happen. Part of this is Hobb’s very mature attitude toward opportunity – that is, in essence, that it cannot be returned to once spurned. In many novels, particularly in fantasy, the protagonist fails to achieve something, or loses something and then spends the rest of the novel trying to get it back or right the wrong or redeem themselves. In Hobb, and particularly in the Liveship Traders, it’s just as much about accepting that you can’t get it back and moving on with your lives – almost inevitably, even if you do get back what you set out wanting, you’ll lose so much, or change so much on the way that you’ll end up wondering if it’s really been worth it, or whether this is really what you still want. When you fail a test, it’s no good getting better and trying to pass it next time – like as not, it’s simply too late. So, as the threads diverge from their starting point, because Hobb doesn’t allow us to believe in a simple reset button, ‘and they all lived happily ever after’ or ‘and then they apologised and discussed their feelings maturely and came to the compromise decision they should have made originally’, we can see the once-accessible happy ending fading further and further from sight, and it becomes increasingly unclear how the objectives of the different characters can all be accomodated.

Unfortunately, this dedication to complexity makes it rather too obvious when Hobb is cutting corners. She does this most notably in the characters of Kyle and Torg, and on the issue of slavery.

Slavery is bad – I think we can all agree. Hobb, backing out of a completely relativist narrative, tries to use this bedrock of badness in order to give a firm moral contour to her novel – while we may disagree over particular motivations and characters and assign responsibility differently, we can all agree that slavery is bad, and therefore that anything moving the world toward slavery is bad. Whose fault it is can be debated, but slave-trading is wrong.

Unfortunately, whether out of a lack of thought or from a need to make slavery absolutely and unarguably bad, this results in the issue of slavery being completely whitewashed (blackwashed? – that’s not a race joke, I just mean that the features are obscured under the layers of condemnation). In real societies, slavery does not exist simply because of Evil People – it serves many social functions, and convinces a goodly portion of society that it is better than the alternatives. In this book, slavery is shown as, on the one hand, absolutely reprehensible, and on the other hand almost inevitable. This is hard to swallow. The descriptions of the slave trade make it sound like the American-Carribean slavery system in its brutality – that is, like the most brutal slavery system known to mankind in its history – and yet most slaves appear to be citizens, not strange aliens with a different skin colour and religion. There is no clear reason given why slavery is so allegedly profitable – no clear parallel to Jamaican sugar, a crop so difficult and dangerous to manage correctly that free labour was clearly inferior. Certainly, the whole enterprise, the spreading extent of slavery, is explained by its profitability – and yet this seems strange, given that in most times and places in the world, laborious slavery is not profitable. Laborious slavery (by which I mean low-skilled work like mining and farming, rather than the high-skill high-value domestic service kind) is only normally profitable when there is an almost unlimited supply of slaves, which a society cannot produce from such limited methods as indenture, penal servitude, and natural population growth: societies with this form of slavery are all rapaciously expansive societies. This also explains their brutality – the slaves are aliens, invaders (albeit not of their own volition). Rome, for example, had even more widespread slavery than Jamaillia seems to have, but the slaves who worked down the mines and died on the farm were almost all Celts and Germans and Africans and other conquered barbarians. Domestically-produced slaves worked in the cities, and were treated far better – in part because it was harder to justify mistreating civilised people, and in part because they were simply too valuable to waste. Once the Empire stopped expanding, the slaves in the difficult jobs were quickly replaced with free labour: because without conquest to provide an endless stream of nearly-free human goods, most slavery is not profitable.

To cut the matter short: either slave-owning is profitable for Jamaillians or it is not. If it is profitable for them, why do they treat their slaves so appallingly? If one slave can make so much money, why are their owners so uninterested in keeping them alive, or even at employing them in the most efficient way? The question is particularly clear in the case of ‘mapfaces’, described as slaves who are sold frequently because they are troublesome – well why are they still alive? These traders are letting docile and maybe even skilled slaves die on ships and in prisons and be worked to death on farms… and yet when the slaves become troublesome and try to escape or refuse to obey orders, they’re kept alive and tattooed a little more? It makes no sense. More generally, the lack of attention paid to the well-being of slaves only makes sense if slaves are all very cheap: this requires, first, an immense pool of potential slaves (eg Africa for America, or conquest for the expanding Roman Empire), and, second, a great bar to prevent these cheap menial slaves from being trained into more valuable skilled slaves (i.e. racism in America, ‘barbarianism’ in Rome) – given that most of these slaves seem to be ordinary native-speaking citizens, many of them with their own skills and crafts, neither criterion appears to be met. Of course, slavery can be unprofitable – but then why is it spreading? Hobb puts no effort into caste systems or racism, no consideration of slaves as a form of prestige. Indeed, prestige slavery is often even more genteel than profit slavery – I’m reminded of some Indian slavery systems in which slaves were more pampered than masters, to show off the wealth that the master could waste. Even in America, by the time of the war, slaves were probably better-treated than equivalent free labourers in most of the South – and that was WITH racism! More generally, Hobb views slavery, explicitly, as a system in which people are viewed as commodities – which doesn’t really, or at least entirely, fit the reality of most slavery systems (in which concepts of family and land are usually very important as well).

So, the Big Bad of the novel doesn’t really seem to make sense to me: people have to do things that are obviously evil to people who look and sound exactly the same as them, and it seems impossible that it should be profitable to do so. It’s all just handwaved away, ‘it’s slavery, innit’, as though it were some primal evil, and not a complex econocultural phenomenon that actually requires reasons and has consequences (the world seems like a normal world, only with slavery bolted on the side, without much impact on anything else). You might not mind that. I admit I’m more interested in coherent worldbuilding than most, and I’m also unusual in thinking that slavery gets a bad rep [short version: a) it wasn’t as bad as people think it was, partly because people hear ‘slavery’ and think of the sugar plantations, as though people heard ‘capitalism’ and always thought of the brutal Amazon rubber plantations, or heard ‘democracy’ and always thought of the death of Socrates, or the Boer War concentration camps; and b) because it’s all very well to compare slaves to masters, but a more balanced assessment comes from comparing slaves to free labourers – and in many societies, while, sure, slavery was bad, poverty could be even worse. Poverty is a form of slavery not governed by laws or morals. So while I agree that the abolition of slavery has been a good thing on the whole, I think that in the precise situations of particular slavery systems, the instantaneous abolition of slavery would often not have improved people’s lot].

However, that problem breeds other problems. By making slavery so atrocious, and simultaneously so incomprehensible, Hobb forces those of her characters who support slavery, or allow it, to themselves be incomprehensible and/or atrocious. In this book there is no such thing as somebody who supports slavery for good reasons – all such people must be simply greedy or cowardly or malicious. The worst example of this is Torg – he’s a two-dimensional character in part, I think, because Hobb needs him to mistreat slaves (to show us how bad slavery is) while not allowing him any actual reason to mistreat slaves. So he’s just Evil. The same is largely true of Kyle Haven – in his case, the problem is not only his openness to the slave trade, but also his misogyny and need to control his family, which in the novel spring from, it’s implied, his Chalcedian background. Unfortunately, we don’t see any detail about Chalced, so we don’t know why all their men act like arseholes. It seems as though Chalced is simply evil, and everyone and everything influenced by Chalced is in some way evil as well. Now, to some degree we gradually get a sense of where Kyle is coming from, and we can respect that he’s a pragmatic man dedicated to the wellbeing of his family. But Hobb allows us no more than the slightest glimpse of this. The decision to, on the one hand, not give us any sustained exploration of Kyle’s background, or of the culture that he has been influenced by, and, on the other, to show us Kyle almost entirely through the eyes of his enemies, make him a thoroughly, and unnecessarily, unsympathetic character. Kyle could never have been the hero, but in making him so clearly and reprehensibly the villain I feel that Hobb is doing a disservice to her own story and characters.

The obvious and unambiguous and unexplained evil of everywhere that isn’t Bingtown also makes it hard to problematise the arrogance of the Vestrits. Pretty much the entire family (the whole of Bingtown really) is objectionably xenophobic, viewing all those who don’t exactly follow traditional Bingtown culture as inferior upstarts. This is not surprising, and enrichens the characters and dynamics of the family, and suggests some moral ambiguity when everybody protests about how needlessly hidebound and insular the Traders are. Unfortunately, it’s hard to keep hold of this interesting element in light of the fact that they are clearly correct: everybody else IS inferior. And, troublingly, that means that a big part of the message of the book is “immigrants are evil (unless they completely assimilate instantly, without question, and know their place)”. Not just dangerous (though they are – immigrants are the long-range threat throughout the novel) but actually evil. Now of course, there are interesting questions that can be raised in this area – sometimes societies do have to deal with troubling influxes of people of other cultures, and sometimes the host culture probably is superior in some moral respects. But by making it so unambiguous (the immigrants are all pro-slavery, and slavery is unambiguously bad and cannot be defended or explained, so there’s no question of compromise, or even of trying to understand their position), Hobb almost seems to deny the validity of these debates. Look, can’t you just see that all other cultures are inferior to us and must be wiped out? I don’t think this was the intention at all, but the broad bright colours of the slavery issue make it hard to see the finer distinctions and nuances being made.

So, that’s my problem. Don’t get me wrong – in terms of depth and complexity of character and conflict, this is still a good book. It’s just not as good as it could be.

It’s also flawed in its pacing. The pace is well-shaped (it rises and falls as it should, though it is a bit flat, more like Part One than Book One), but very, very, very slow. Particularly at the beginning, before the action starts, where there is chapter after chapter of people sitting down thinking to themselves. A hundred pages in and almost nothing had happened, but we’d been introduced to half a dozen different viewpoint characters, who had all had jolly good thinks about things. No surprise that last time I tried re-reading these I gave up after two chapters. It’s not easy to get into, and frankly it never becomes exhilerating.

That, of course, is partly a matter of taste and custom (another reason it feels old-fashioned). Once you get into it, once you get grabbed, and once you get accustomed to its style and manner, it’s pretty compelling. It would be nice, however, if it were easier to get to that point quicker.

I must, though, make one thing clear: although this is a very talky, thinky book about relationships, that doesn’t mean there are no exciting bits. There is a small handful of action scenes, and although these are sparsely scattered, they are extremely good. In fact, I would happily put Hobb’s action scenes alongside the best the genre has to offer. They just aren’t all that common.

Finally, a trivial point but worth mentioning: don’t read if you’ve got a queasy stomach. I’ve said before that I find Hobb’s maturity impressive – the way she can go to some dark places in a very matter-of-fact way, not feeling gratuitous or sensationalist – and in this novel this is best seen in the repeated ‘amateur surgery’ scenes. Sometimes people have to have things amputated or things sewn up, and Hobb isn’t embarassed to talk about it quite straightforwardly, to quite an ‘urgh’y extent. The graphic surgery and the exciting action scenes were the two things that surprised me on the re-read.

Anyway. Scores.

Adrenaline: 3/5. Could be higher, but the pace is generally slow, and the beginning in particular takes a long time to get going.

Emotion: 3/5. I cared about the characters and worried about them, but this is only the first book of the trilogy, so I don’t expect to be put through the wringer yet.

Thought: 3/5. Not particularly taxing – the plots are not simple, but not convoluted either, and there’s enough thinking around to keep the mind active without really getting philosophical at any point.

Beauty: 3/5. *shrug* Some beautiful scenes, I suppose. Prose is uninspiring but solid – a bit rough in places, particularly near the beginning, but nothing too off-putting.

Craft: 4/5. Prose not perfect, but gets the job done. Pacing and content issues are largely inevitable (that is, the slow pace feels like an intentional decision, part of what these books are, rather than an avoidable mistake). Maybe could have had a more exciting beginning. Characters complex and well-depicted, plots well-handled, generally well-written, though not perfect in every respect. Didn’t blow me away with artistry.

Endearingness: 4/5. I’m strongly attached to the characters, and found reading very enjoyable in an old-fashioned way. But not enough happens for me to love it.

Originality: 3/5. Individual character-arcs are all familiar, but well-handled, and they fit together into an interesting and unusual work, at least by the standards of the genre.

Overall: 5/7. GOOD. This is a good book. It’s well-written, it’s enjoyable to read. It’s solid. Its biggest problem is that it’s too solid. It doesn’t make too many mistakes, but it doesn’t exactly come out swinging either. That said, it’s only the first book of a trilogy, so there’s plenty of time for the big guns to be wheeled out.

The Farseer Trilogy, by Robin Hobb

As is my wont, I thought I’d create a single post to link to to cover reviews of all three parts of the trilogy.

Don’t worry, I’ve tried to make all three spoilers more-or-less spoiler-free, so unless you’re a puritan about such things, you shouldn’t be scared to read them before you read the books.

My reviews of:

Assassin’s Apprentice

Royal Assassin

Assassin’s Quest

 

 

 

Assassin’s Quest – Robin Hobb

The Six Duchies would fall. The world would end.

We went to fetch blankets.

**

“Even while [they] were raping me, they seemed to take no pleasure in it. At least, not the kind of pleasure… They mocked my pain and struggling. Those who watched were laughing as they waited[...] It was a thing they could do to me, so they did it. I had always believed, perhaps childishly, that if you followed the rules, you would be protected, that things like that would not happen to you. Afterwards I felt … tricked. Foolish. Gullible, that I had thought ideals could protect me. Honour and courtesy and justice … they are not real.”

When I talked about Royal Assassin, I made a lot of the gradually increasing pace, which slowly mounts from a standing start to a frightening end. Assassin’s Quest is the opposite of that. The first half of the book continues at the same pace – if you put together second half of RA and the first half of AQ, you’d have a thoroughly riveting all-action adventure – but as it goes on it gets slower and slower and slower. I still enjoyed it, but it became heavy – I would read a chapter, enjoy it, but then feel that I needed a break. Hence why it has taken me so long to finish.

Assassin’s Quest is in some ways quite a disjointed book, easily split up into segments. There are approximately seven stages of varying lengths, which fall into two clear parts, although they aren’t labelled as such.

Part One is the mirror of the second half of Royal Assassin. Where that novel depicts the ‘teenager’ phase of Fitz’s maturation (not necessarily in age, but in role), with the lovelorn boy gradually confined, pressured, restrained and crushed by heavy weights, unable to escape either from his situation or his location, Part One of this novel relates what happens after the lid has been taken off the pressure. Predictably, it’s explosive. It is, as some have complained, not entirely wise – like many young men suddenly freed from the bonds of childhood, some of his goals and decisions are not perhaps the most sensible – but it’s enthusiastic, even exhilarating in its liberation, even as we simultaneously feel the great weariness within Fitz. There are three sections to this: the first, wrapping up the ramifications of the events at the end of the last novel; the second, showing new determination, and the third, a period of doubt and uncertainty. The first section is a little ungainly, but that couldn’t be helped; the second section is the most straightfoward adventure, and the third introduces more depth. All together, the first part is twisty and turny and full of event, but not without psychological acuity as well.

Part Two, as the momet of elation passes into a man’s dedication to a cause, his re-entering of the adult world, this time as an equal, is more problematic. And unfortunately it comes last, which doesn’t help the reputation of the book as a whole, as this is what they remember. In fact, the bit people complain about only lasts a few chapters – but it’s a few chapters of increasing sloth where we expect increasing speed.

That sloth is not without reason. The first section of this part, the bulk of it, is the procession to the ending, and because it is an emotional ending as well as a purely narrative ending – the novel remains primarily character-driven – it tries to impress the importance of the character development with weight and significance. It feels much like the way some pieces of music become slower and louder as they build to a solemn conclusion, or the way a river broadens and slows at nears the ocean. If it convinces you, it’s a moving and majestic – if it doesn’t, it’s an interminable travelogue filled up with boring character interaction. Indeed, the whole of the book has been accused of being a travelogue – I had no problem with this. Not much time is spent lingering on the surroundings, after all, it’s just a background for a character who keeps moving. Frankly, I’m surprised this is the part people have a problem with, rather than the previous novel, which was set almost entirely within a single building (and only about four rooms of that building). And then there’s the end. Or rather: then there’s three endings in a row. There’s the climax, the anticlimax, and the epilogue. (Not marked as such, but that’s clearly what it is). The climax (or climaxes, as there are actually two) work well enough, and the epilogue is sheer genius; and although I remembered the anticlimax as terrible, it’s actually not that bad. Basically, Hobb wanted to reach the epilogue, which requires eveything to be wrapped up, but the soul of the book is finished with the climax, so she has attempted to pass very rapidly from climax to epilogue with a whistlestop round-up of all the loose ends. I think that maybe because I was reading slowly this time it worked for me – if you go at full speed through all the slow weight of the climax and then suddenly drop off a cliff when you get to the anticlimax, it may well annoy you.

Hobb’s strengths are her plotting and her characters. She has a particular way of producing plots that are eventful and unexpected but that do not feel manipulative or artificial. In this sense, she is a true story-teller. She’s able to do this because her characters feel so natural (except Kettle. She may have hidden depths that help explain her, but for too much of the novel she’s a stock cliché), and because she allows them all the room they require. They are not railroaded into the plot, the plot evolves out of them. This authorial philosophy is seen most strongly in the character of Starling, who is, in the final analysis, entirely superfluous to the plot. There’s no reason for her to exist! But she does, and she’s a brilliant character, and she’s there because Hobb wanted to tell us about the character.

Of course, if you don’t care about characters per se and only want action, this renders the second half of the book rather dull. And it also makes the books very reliant on the likeability of their characters – particularly in the first half, where Fitz is more alone (both literally and metaphorically) than at any other time at the series. Now, I love Fitz, so for me this was a highlight, but those who find him whiny and stupid [patronising views, I think, from people who judge with the benefit of an omnipotent viewpoint, and who do not remember adolescence] are likely to groan when they find him alone and free to monologue internally. And it should also be said that those who [equally unfairly in my view] complain about how much suffering and physical damage Fitz has to go throw will also not be best pleased. There aren’t any prolonged and graphic torture scenes or anything here (and Hobb never feels gratuitous, even when discussing the worst things possible), but he does get put through the wringer. I think that’s entirely appropriate – Fitz isn’t a god, he doesn’t have superhuman powers of badassery, and his continued survival in dangerous situations is due to a combination of good luck and superior determination. Personally, I think that making the hero someone stubborn enough to not give in until he’s won, rather than making him someone so universally superb that he can win everything easily, a good decision. Others may disagree. He’s sort of an anti-Mary Sue: he’s set up with skills and abilities and knowledge in so many different areas, but as it turns out he’s only minimally or averagely competant in any of them, and generally hopelessly outmatched by his enemies.

Her characterisation, in my opinion, is superb; but some may not find it so. This, as I suggested in my other reviews, is because her characters are very natural – they are not all exceptional individuals, they are not strikingly good or strikingly bad or strikingly peculiar or even strikingly complex. They’re just people. This series, I think, is the epitome of the “gritty fantasy” that’s now become popular – but it feels distinct, because this doesn’t flaunt its violations of taboos or wave its ideology in your face. It’s very low-key and very matter-of-fact. Very human. In a way, that makes it even darker. A great example is the one I quoted above, where one character talks about being raped. The scene occurs in the dark, so that nobody can see them crying, but other than that it’s very straightforward. We don’t see graphic depictions of rapes and murders, we don’t see people wailing and screaming about how terrible the world is, we just get one person talking quietly about what has happened to them, and how it has changed them. It’s very brutalised – and very alienated. The book is full of moments of casual brutalisation. A character doesn’t just kill an enemy soldier and take their money – they take note of the personal items in the dead soldier’s purse and wonder about their lives. At one point Fitz kills somebody he recognises, and spends some time thinking sadly about shared memories from his younger years. It’s not – in my opinion – mawkish or sentimental, it’s just that the author is always at pains to remind us of the human suffering behind every action – even the actions of the heroes.  I think another reason people may not like Fitz is that he doesn’t slaughter his enemies with badass puns – he pities them. Humanity – albeit humanity in the most constrained and terrible of circumstances – is his strongest characteristic, and the core characteristic of the trilogy as a whole.

Indeed, the moral ambiguity in general is worth mentioning. Although we’re assured that the good guys are doing things that are For The Best, we almost have to take it on faith, because in this world The Best is still pretty awful – we realise this at the end in particular, when we zoom out to understand the underlying causes of the conflicts in the trilogy, and have a bittersweet comprehension of the possible consequences of “victory”. Indeed, hints that we should be somewhat uneasy crop up as early as the second book, where we see, amongst other things, the oppressive nature of the Outislander regime (that is, many ‘enemies’ are actually just as opposed to the enemy government as the good guys are), the racism of the ordinary people toward the Outislander refugees, and an uncomfortable number of references to seeking a “final solution” to the Outislander problem. Our real-world knowledge should warn us at this point that final solutions are never the end of the matter, and the determination to seek them can lead to unsavory consequences.

The naturalism that underpins her characterisation is also seen – tangentially, but symbolically enough that it’s worth mentioning – in the topic of knowledge. Fitz lives in a confusing world, and much of the third volume is discovery, and piecing together of facts. From an omniscient viewpoint, many of the conclusions of Fitz and others are wrong – but we don’t get that in the books. We get Fitz’s viewpoint. It’s only in the later trilogies that we actually get to see from another direction and work out how Fitz is wrong – in this trilogy, all we have is a slight confusion, the unease that he clearly hasn’t got eveything quite right. But where Fitz’s knowledge and intellect run out, so does the book – it shrugs its shoulders and does not explain. Again, I liked this. Others have found it frustrating.

I’ve been praising her a while, but Hobb is not without faults. The writing is the least awkward of any of the three books; and she also largely avoids the problems with recapping that cropped up in Royal Assassin. In part this may be because she has become a better writer – Assassin’s Quest, I think, is in all technical ways the best written of the three – but it is also partly because Royal Assassin  and Assasssin’s Quest form a clearly-linked duology, whereas Assassin’s Apprentice is largely an independent preliminary adventure designed to set up the pieces for that duology: instead of having to restart, as at the beginning of RA, here the action can flow directly onward (though with a few nods in the first chapter or so to remind readers of where we are). But she is still not perfect. The slightly-fauxdieval language is largely unobstrusive, but there are still uncertain moments, particularly the insistence on “did I know, I should not have”-type conditionals. The pacing is… understandable but still trying. Toward the end, some of the psychobabble becomes unconvincing; and having so much of import happening through the intangible sense of the Skill and the Wit makes it hard to keep describings things in a way that’s understandable without being repetitive. I’m not entirely convinced by some of the metaphysics, in terms of its continuity and coherency. And another problem is that Hobb seems to have hedged her bets too much, and tacked on a heroic framework that just doesn’t seem required or justified. The story works perfectly well on the level of personal and national crisis – and then she has to tack on the prophecies and the annointed heroes and the saving-the-world stuff, which doesn’t fit in, and doesn’t serve any real purpose. And the prophecies in particular add to that metaphysics worry I mentioned. They also are one way in which we can see constant retconning throughout the trilogy – some of it is actually explanation of things that were unknown earlier but make perfect sense in hindsight, but other bits feel like later additions. And Fitz is a little too perfect an observer to put us in full ‘unreliable narrator’ territory, so the moments that remind us that he ISN’T perfect are a little jarring. They also lead to “Fitz is an idiot” complaints, since the quick-witted audience will work some things out long before Fitz does.

That said, this is an impressively ambitious and original book, that tries to put gripping storytelling, imaginative worldbuilding, deeply personal and relatable and naturalistic and memorable characterisation and a profound and steadfast conscience (some may find it occasionally preachy at points, but I think this would be a very hostile reading; to me, the morality expressed both through the characters and through the events seems to evolve naturally, even inevitably, out of the characterisation and the world, and I never felt lectured at – which is actually somewhat rare for me) all together in a pleasantly entertaining, yet brutally dark and sophisticated (but never gratuitous or manipulative, or for that matter depressing, or unrelentingly bleak; Hobb doesn’t shy away from the darkness when it appears, but doesn’t go looking for it, and the darkness is thoroughly lightened by the moments of humour and humanity), mature and complex story, embedded in and offering glimpses of a larger and stranger world beyond the confines of the page.

It isn’t entirely succesful in any direction, and in it’s epic-storytelling-with-a-literary-tone, many may find it (as I think it is) neither sufficiently enjoyable nor sufficiently literary. Nonetheless, I personally find the attempt itself to be of value, and while it is neither the most thrilling trilogy nor the most incisive, I found it by and large highly readable, highly likeable, and highly memorable. It isn’t a perfect work by any means – but it is good solid adult (in the true sense of the word, neither prudish nor sensationalist) epic fantasy. I don’t think there’s a lot of that.

Adrenaline: 3/5. Some people may find it deathly dull, but I didn’t. The first half of the novel in particular I found very exciting. The second half is slower-paced, and my attention wandered at points, but although it took me a while to read the book I never took any length of time to read the chapters. Mostly, I’d say it was heavy rather than slow. So overall, I think an average score here is fair.

Emotion: 3/5. I mostly found it a surprisingly cool and distant book; but there are a few points where the emotion does hit home. The final page is one of them. In general the emotion tends to the bittersweet and the sorrowful.

Thought: 3/5. It’s still fairly straigtforward, but as we come toward the end the wider mysteries about the world, the moral complexities, and at some points simply the difficulty the main character has in grasping what exactly is going on, do start to keep the mind rather active. There are also some intriguing points here that will only be noticed and understood by readers of the later trilogies.

Craft: 4/5. By and large, I think it’s very well written (if you don’t mind the diction, but if you’re reading fantasy at all you probably don’t). It’s not perfect, though – the diction occasionally becomes objectionable even to me, and the pacing doesn’t do the book a service (though its hard to see how it could have been improved without totally rewriting the story).

Beauty: 3/5. Not a lot of infelicity to object to, really. And the bittersweet ending counterbalances any problems there may be.

Endearingness: 4/5. I like it a lot – but I did find it a tad tiring and slow in the second half. I loved the ending, though.

Originality: 4/5. The plain plot alone is pretty peculiar. Add in the psychological dimension, the strange multiple ending, and the genre-unusual moral and character complexity and the imperfect (not dishonest, but limited) narrator, and I’d say it’s definitely odder than average!

Overall: 5/7. I think it’s right up there with Royal Assassin in terms of quality, although this is certainly likely to be the more opinion-dividing of the two, as it’s considerably more thinky and less pacy (or at least it feels that way, since the pacing is reversed compared to the earlier book).

Royal Assassin – by Robin Hobb

If Assassin’s Apprentice verged at times upon the slow, reading Royal Assassin is like falling through treacle. That doesn’t sound complimentary, but actually it is, in a way. You hit the book with the speed built up at the end of the first volume, and within a few chapters it’s all lost, with an almost physical impact. As you keep on falling, the pressure around you builds and builds and you can’t breathe at all. It feels as though you’re not going anywhere, just getting more and more stuck – until suddenly you feel the last of the treacle moving from under you with an awful inhalation-sound, and then you’re in a rather unpleasant freefall onto a floor of rusty nails.

Come back! That was meant to be a compliment! I can see how it might sound bad, but it’s not!

What I mean is: in the first volume, Fitz is a marginalised boy with little control over his life. In the second volume, Fitz is a young man trying to take control of his life but gradually realising that he is no longer so much marginalised as trapped in the middle – no longer a pawn or an accidental victim, but increasingly a target. The book is an excellent demonstration of what it is like to be trapped – and indeed hunted.

In the first half of the book, this is still a fairly mild issue, with more focus on Fitz’s personal relationships than on the politics – though that is always a thread. I should warn you that some readers may find this half of the book boring and annoying – even I felt a little chafed at points. Fitz is a teenager, and teenage relationships – particularly difficult teenage romances – are not the easiest reading for many. But, although there is a great deal of whining and melancholy and lovelornness and pigheadedness, the action is never entirley devoted to this side of things. Fitz’s other relationships (including to his three contrasting father-figures, as well as some more equal ones) play a role, and the politics is always present. King Shrewd is old and increasingly ill; Prince Verity, increasingly tired and distracted by his work with the Skill; Prince Regal, increasingly ambitious; the Outislanders, increasingly devastating; and the rift between the front-line coastal duchies and the softer, more secure inland areas, increasingly dangerous. It seems difficult to imagine how a happy ending will be achieved at this point, for either Fitz or the Seven Duchies as a whole. And then, there is a glimmer of an idea…

…and things get very bad indeed. In a way, you could call this the “Empire Strikes Back” part of the trilogy, and it’s impressive how many guns Hobb brings out, and how mercilessly. At times it feels less like the traditional ‘adversity to triumph over’ episode and more like being a duck in a barrel. Not that Fitz is shot every chapter – its more the building dread as it becomes clear how little chance he or anyone else stands of getting out of the barrel before somebody decides to start shooting. The light at the end of the tunnel becomes smaller and fainter with each page. Not a book for people who like happiness and freehearted adventure.

Of course, it’s not just the second half. The book is pervaded by an unusual brutality – a brutality that is harsher for not being gratuitous, not being stylistic, not being revelled in. The very-early chapter they chose to give as a preview in the first book (although almost better as a stand-alone story than where it sits in the whole) hammers the severity, the reality, of the situation home very hard, like a big warning sign that looms over all the light-hearted moments that there are in the book, reminding us that this is serious, that there are Bad Things out there. A raid occurs, and one character asks the king’s Fool – a strange albino who is said to foretell the future – about the fate of one woman in particular, but he cannot answer – or rather, he answers too much:

“Did she die? Yes. No. Badly burned, but alive. Her arm severed at the shoulder. Cornered and raped while they killed her children, but left alive. Sort of [...] Roasted alive with the children when the burning structure fell on them. Took poison as soon as her husband awoke her. Choked to death on smoke. And died of an infection in a sword wound only a few days later. Died of a sword thrust. Strangled on her own blood as she was raped. Cut her own throat after she had killed the children while raiders were hacking her door down. Survived, and gave birth to a raider’s child the next summer. Was found wandering days laer, badly burned, but recalling nothing. Had her face burned and her hands hacked off, but live a short…”

By this stage in the action, we know that these are not hypotheses – the Fool is telling us the fate of every woman in the town that was raided, one by one, throwing his knowledge into the face of everyone who didn’t prevent it – and anyone egotistical enough to ask only after one individual person.

Yes, it’s a bloody book. There’s cannibalism, there’s babies pulled apart, there’s ‘good guys’ ripping people’s throats out with their teeth, there’s people tortured to death, and the ‘hero’, as the title implies, murders people for a living. It’s not the most blood-soaked or most graphic book I’ve read, but it’s one of the hardest-hitting in its brutality – because it isn’t there for show, and because there is a perfect balance of callousness (in showing us the world) and compassion (in insisting that it matters that the world is like that). It isn’t, like some less mature books, “well, the world is shit, let’s get on with it”, it’s “the world is shit. It shouldn’t be.” Unlike so many novels in a pre-modern setting, there is an aching anger here, insisting the world should be better – but without a patronising or anachronistic prescription for how to actually improve it. In a way, that makes this a more true, more realistic, depiction of such a place – because, yes, people would have accepted what they saw around them, maybe even thought it inevitably, but they would also have hurt because of it. People criticise Hobb sometimes for making Fitz (and her other characters) suffer, but at least in this book, the suffering Fitz experiences is only a reflection of the terrible suffering that fills her world. The second sentence of this paragraph suggests a sensationalist approach to violence, but that’s not so at all – I just plucked these things out of my memory, and they didn’t seem sensational or out of place when I read them. Just… part of what happens. The way the world is. And we never forget that for every character who is rescued, every character who does escape, there is someone else who “strangles on her own blood as she was raped”. And she’s just as important.

It’s that egality, indeed, that rejection of the fantasy superman who’s more important than everyone else, that in a way shapes the narrative: by the end of this book, it’s clear that Fitz is not going to be the magical dashing prince who heroically saves the day and goes down in legend. From the beginning of his life to the end of it, he is, as it were, a supporting character. He takes centre-stage from time to time, and perhaps in the end everything does depend on him, but it’s not really his story after all. In a way, the point is that it’s everyone’s story – that everyone plays some role in things, and it’s not always the lead actor who’s most important.

On the subject of taboos of violence, by the way, the sex may have some curious affects on some readers. It’s not explicit in the slightest – but for various reasons, which I won’t go into, some moments may provoke perverted horniness, revulsion, nonchalence, or confused uncertainty, depending on your personal morality (and perhaps your views on metaphysics). Again, it’s not sensational at all – no “my god, what just happened!” moment, but just one or two “err… hang on, wait a sec, wuh… okay, how do I feel about that?” moments.

The book is not perfect. The whole project may be unappealing to some – too little sword-swinging, too much lovestruck depresion, perhaps too claustrophobic (this is the opposite of the common ‘fantasy travelogue’ species, as the action is almost entirely confined to a single town, and most often a single building, with only occasional chapters of brief excursion). The pace may be too slow for some, particularly in the first half. The amount of suffering in the world, and the anxieties and pains of Fitz in particular, may be found boring, upsetting, or frustrating.

On the more technical side… it’s hard to find objections. Most of the ungainliness that sometimes affected the dialogue in the first volume is gone now. The biggest remaining problem is, in my opinion, Hobb’s paranoid recapping, where we are reminded fully of all the important events of the first novel, both through narration and occasionally through dialogue, and sometimes even events from only a few chapters ago. There were several times when I found myself annoyed by this. Fortunately, this drops out as we move through the book, and doesn’t get in the way of the mounting tension.

More generally: even I wanted to slap Fitz and tell him to get a move on in the first half. But if you don’t mind wading through to the whirlpool of the second half, it’s definitely worth it. With twists, turns, drama and consequences, this is one of the greatest climaxes in any fantasy book I’ve read – and, perhaps because the action of the third volume will follow more closely from it, it is less frustrating in its post-climactic section, without Hobb’s frequent sin of overly-rapid wrapping-up.

Also worth mentioning is the characterisation. Although there is more direction in this volume than in the first, that doesn’t mean that the characterisation is less emphasised. As the situation worsens, new facts emerge about several of the small cast of characters, and new facets of others are displayed. The result is that not only Fitz but also Burrich, the Fool, Verity, Shrewd, Patience and others become rich, fleshed-out, subtly tragic figures. It is a slow drawing, without the flashy skill of some more literary writers, and occurs largely in the background, but it is highly, quietly, effective. The resulting characters may not be the greatest in literature, but they are more than good enough for light entertainment.

Adrenaline: 4/5. The excitement gradually increases through the book and by the end it’s gripping. However, due to its length and the long slow start, I can’t give it a perfect score.

Emotion: 3/5. I feel this score ought to be higher, but for some reason I didn’t really vividly connect with the emotional situation of the characters. Nonetheless, even without a direct personal connexion, it’s hard not to feel the desparation in the atmosphere and the quiet notes of tragedy.

Thought: 2/5. Not a lot of thinking required or wanted. The plot gets twisty enough that you might expect a degree of thinking-ahead, but it’s so brutally contingent, so real, that that just doesn’t help.

Beauty: 3/5. As before: nothing to say here, really. It’s all functional, but not too ungainly.

Craft: 4/5. Still not quite perfect, but generally excellent in construction.

Endearingness: 4/5. I really liked this book. And the fact it’s been a favourite of mine for nearly a decade shows that it lingers in my affections. On the other hand, I did get bored, frustrated or irritated at times, particularly in the first half, so again not perfect.

Originality: 3/5. Again, old tropes, new application. Nothing screamed ‘cliché!’ or ‘tired!’, but then again nothing really surprised me with its novelty either.

Overall: 5/7. Good. A better book than the first installment. Better than most fantasy, too. In a way, when I first read this, this trilogy (and in particular this volume) was what kept my attraction to fantasy, reassured me it could produce good books (later, I discovered Martin). In many ways it’s excellent – but I can also see why the “Fitz is a whiner” crowd hate the books.  That said, I don’t – I really don’t.

Assassin’s Apprentice – Robin Hobb

The nobles of the Six Duchies are given names that represent the qualities their parents wish them to have. And so King Shrewd has three sons, named Chivalry, Verity, and Regal. Chivalry is a brilliant diplomat and a charismatic general who inspires loyalty and affection in everyone he meets; Verity is bluff, honest, down-to-earth soldier happy to lead where his brother follows; their younger half-brother Regal is a politician, a charmer, a man who would look good on a throne. All appears well; until another male of royal blood appears, this time with no name at all, a young boy brought to the gates of a fortress – Chivalry’s bastard son.

Assassin’s Apprentice is the first book of a trilogy – later to be followed by an independent but connected trilogy in the same world, and later still by a sequel trilogy of its own. Each of the nine connected volumes (and I hear there is another couple added since that I have not yet read) is not gargantuan, but is certainly fairly hefty, so this is not a book to start if you’re afraid of big page-counts…

When I first picked up this novel to re-read it, I was a bit worried. Nostalgia always makes the heart grow fonder, and I had always remembered these books as superior fantasy fare. Would my delusions be shattered? The first few pages were not promising – slow, whiney, unnatural in prose. Self-conscious. But then either it improved or I got into it, because I ripped through the book, and am now halfway through the second volume before even having had time to review the first (which is a bit of a problem for me, as the two are merging into one in my mind…)

This is not groundbreaking fantasy. All the standard tropes are there, from the bastards and the magic and the viking raiders down to the cod-medieval inflection. Putting a positive spin on that: if you’re used to epic fantasy, nothing here will scare you. It’s very familiar and very comfortable.

And yet: familiar it may be, but it is still surprisingly original. This is a long-lost cousin, not the brother you see every day – the same features are there, but their arrangement is novel and somehow uncanny. Assassin’s Apprentice is original in both content and in setting – the latter distinguished by its relative dearth of magic. There are no elves, dwarfs, goblins, or dragons – there are no fireballs, no floating castles, no zombies. There is talk of – but no appearance by or even confirmation of the existence of – various legendary non-human races (Others, Elderlings, pecksies), and one character who is said not to be entirely human, but so far as can be seen his only distinguishing feature is that he is an albino, so that may be folklore.

Magic is not only rumour – there are at least two kinds attested (the Skill, a telepathy-based art, and the Wit, a form of enhanced empathy, particularly with animals), while various hedge magics are spoken of and widely believed in (mostly forms of prognostication), and levitation and the like exist in legends, but are generally considered as fictional as they are in our world. No magic has any great or prominent role in the lives of ordinary people, though the Skill is traditionally employed by the ruling Farseer family for political and military gain – its practice, at the begining of the book, has been severely degraded by loss of knowledge, and only three people are known to use it any longer. Not only are these magics rare, but they are subtle and almost natural – much is made, indeed, of how akin to other phenomena they are (the Wit is an extension of the natural empathy felt by all people, while the oneness-of-mind brought by the Skill is compared to the efficient, wordless working of a practiced crew of sailors; the Wit is what makes someone look up before they hear a knock at the door, and the Skill is what lets them know what a loved one is about to say before they say it). This is not just a feature of the books, but a noteworthy strength – this is the most natural presentation of magic that I’ve seen, avoiding the traps of both mysticism and scientism. This is greatly aided – I realise, on re-reading – by the trick of having the main character, Fitz, begin the book very young and naive, so that he accepts the world around him without question, and we are lead to do so likewise.

Beyond that, the world feels fairly conventional, somewhere toward the dark age end of the medieval continuum. Points should be given, however, for the brief but interesting descriptions of the neighbouring Mountain Kingdom, best summarised as a sort of fantasy Tibet.

As I’ve hinted, the plot is a coming-of-age story as the bastard grows into a hero. This first novel takes us from early childhood through to his teenage years and his first serious assumption of responsibility. Inevitably, this will put some people off. Children are self-centred, and when they’re as isolated as Fitz is, they can get self-pitying. That’s the most common complaint about these novels: that Fitz whines too much. I didn’t find that a problem at all in this first volume – although it’s true that there are a few passages about feeling alone and having no friends, I didn’t feel it was overdone or out of place, and it didn’t get in the way of the plot.

A bigger problem for the plot was its own near-total absence. Fitz grows up, learns things, meets people, things happen. Only near the end of the novel does an actual plot break out. This could be a problem for some readers – particularly if they don’t instinctively like Fitz – but again, I didn’t find it an obstacle. Although the action (if such it can be called) is seemingly unguided and meandering, it’s actually not that slow, and it’s not wasted either: each chapter moves the novel on and establishes things that have to be established. In fact, the lack of a driving plot gives it a degree of freshness and vitality – you never quite know when something important’s going to happen, or which developments will be followed up and which fall into the background. Moreover, this is the first book of a trilogy (and the first of three trilogies), so I think a degree of leniency should be given – and by the end of the novel, while there’s still no trilogy-spanning plot in place, the ingredients are all clear, with an established cast of goodies and baddies, some Problems established that will have to be addressed, and the main character equipped with a clear character, skill-set, and array of priorities, loyalties and obligations. It’s a set-up novel, and it does a pretty admirable job of not always feeling like one – the incidents have importance of their own, and it doesn’t feel as though Hobb is simply making these things happen for plot reasons.

Where Hobb’s writing is really original within the genre, however, is in the focus, which is firmly upon the characterisation at all times. In this, she is often compared to George RR Martin, and the similarity is certainly there – but there are differences. Whereas Martin seems to take all the stock characters and try to give them all a bit of depth, Hobb focuses more tightly on a very small (for the genre) cast of characters. Her characterisation also feels more natural than Martin’s – where Martin’s characters often display hidden depths or unexpected facets for plot reasons, or as a sort of philosophical demonstration (‘look, even this seeming villain has his virtues!’), Hobb’s seem to develop wherever their nature leads. It’s hard to know how to describe this. They actually aren’t very complicated or ‘deep’ characters, and could well be accused of being a bit predictable, but they’re very… rounded? They feel like real people, inspiring real like or dislike. And yes, that does mean that some of them are obvious villains because quite frankly they’re arseholes – and others are obvious goodies because they’re really likeable and you don’t want anything to happen to them. There’s not a lot of grey inbetween, frankly. But that also happens in real life – yes, you meet people who redeem themselves or reveal some hidden virtues, but you also meet people who honestly are ghastly to know, even if you understand them or even pity them. I felt I understood the characters in this novel – and it’s true that most of them aren’t that hard to understand, they’re not all enigmas waiting to be unlocked by a brilliant psychological insight. Most of them are pretty plain and simple people – like a lot of people in real life.

The best summary, then, might be this: Hobb’s characters are the plain, striking archetypal characters familiar from a lot of epic fantasy, but rounded and coloured in and painted in better detail, so that they retain their instinctive comprehensibility while nonetheless managing to feel real and convincing. Like normal epic fantasy, but better.

Another key difference from Martin is the perspective – where Martin has third-person narration looking over the shoulder of multiple POV characters, all Hobb gives us is the first-person account of Fitz himself. Everything is seen through Fitz’s eyes, and the clarity and depth of the world correspondingly weakens as we get further from his field of vision.

Fitz is everything. In the absence of a plot, we have a character: Fitz. Everything is subordinate to the portrayal of that character. The success of the novel and the trilogy, therefore, hinges on whether you personally like or dislike Fitz. I like him, so I like the books. I like him, and therefore the excursions into self-analysis do not bother me, but only bring me closer to him. If you hate him, you’ll want to throw the book across the room a lot, because he does talk about (and to) himself a lot. But that’s the point. And unlike some coming-of-age characters, Fitz does do things as well, lots of things – its just that the actions are there to express and progress his character and personality, rather than his character and personality being there to express and progress the plot. Book-externally, that is – within the book, Fitz is a very (and increasingly) confined and manipulated boy, pushed along by the plot without many opportunities for self-control.

I say ‘Fitz’, but more properly I should speak of two of them. One Fitz is the child who is the focus of the narrative; the other Fitz is the author of the narrative, who appears to be talking directly to us, many years after the events of the book – and who is also responsible for some or all of the encyclopedia-style discursions on random (or cunningly chosen) topics that head the chapters. Some of these are info-dumps, some are trivia, some are actually very telling alternative perspectives on the events of the chapter to come. Most aren’t that fun to read, but as they’re usually only a paragraph or two it’s not a problem, and they can provide a useful second view of things – useful because otherwise we are so dependent on the perspective of child-Fitz, and these entries give us a broader (and more cynical) overview.

This second Fitz is responsible for my problem at the start of the novel – because although he is normally talking only about his younger self, the later form does surface now and then – usually the beginning or end of a chapter, as though the older man’s attention has wandered from the story to himself, but also at the beginning and end of the book itself. Generally, the more direct the address from narrator to audience, the more self-conscious and ungainly it is, and this hurts the first chapter or two, where (Fitz-the-character being too young to do or even think much of interest) Fitz-the-narrator has to take a more central role. I say ‘role’, but it’s not that we learn (much) about F-t-N himself, more that we get more of his voice, more of his musings, and less of F-t-C’s voice and musings. The way Hobb makes F-t-N seem older and more weary, more worn-down and rueful, than his younger self, is quite skilled – but the actual content and prose can be a bit ouchy sometimes.

In general, the prose throughout the book is universally unexceptional. I barely spotted a bad or a good sentence, although the prose, and particularly the dialogue, does tend to the archaic throughout, which may be a problem for some, but not for practised readers of fantasy. The only time I struggled with it was at the beginning, where it felt that F-t-N was intentionally striving for a more authoritative, formal, tone, almost an intoning tone – and that felt less natural and less convincing. The other major problem with the dialogue is the tendency of characters to repeat large chunks of what others have told them in direct speech, verbatim, in a wholly unnatural way. But that too is a common trope, and while it scratches a little it’s not a major issue. It’s also true that while Fitz’s personality generally seems in keeping with his age (albeit, of course, with the hastened maturity forced on him by a hard environment, both of the historic setting and of his own personal situation), sometimes his dialogue in the early parts can be a bit too precocious, a bit too verbose. But that, I think, is a problem with almost all portrayals of child characters.

Related to this is the prose problem of exposition – there are some long speeches both in the dialogue and by the narrator which are clearly just there to infodump – and the structural problem of reporting – a lot of people spend a lot of time sitting around listening to people report things that we already know about. Neither problem is fatal – the first declines over time once we’ve got a better idea of the background, and the second is ameliorated by not making us actually sit through the report ourselves (instead we simply get “I reported” or “I gave my report” or “I repeated what..” and so on), but still helps to give the impression of a fairly action-light, talking-heavy novel. Which is strange, because in fact there is not an unusual amount of dialogue, and there is an awful lot of action.

The pace, then, is slow – not glacial, like some fantasy novels, but certainly not rapid. I would call it ‘deliberate’ or ‘organic’. This is strange because a lot of things happen, and there’s never a long period without something happening. Its more that those actions are low-key enough, small enough relative to the looming threats, and sufficiently character-based and talking-based that the pace appears slower than it is. I found myself ripping through it, enjoying what was happening, not finding it slow at all – until I paused, looked back, and wondered what had happened. The end of the  book picks up the pace notably, but this is a mixed blessing – although enough pages are devoted to the climax that it ought to be sufficient, its complexity and excitement mean that, after the relatively slow episodes earlier, it feels as though it needs more room. That is: objectively, read by itself, the climax would probably feel well paced, but comparing how much attention is paid to the life-or-death moments and unexpected twists of the climax to how much attention is paid to the quiet, character-establishing talks and brief interludes of action earlier in the book, it feels as though the climax is short-changed and a little rushed. Nonetheless, it is gripping and suprisingly fresh-scented.

Unfortunately, Hobb has a problem with endings. This ending has three parts: the climax, the anticlimax, and the epilogue. The climactic episode is great, but just as it finally hits its peak it collapses into a very quick resolution and tying-up, far too brief for what has gone before it. As if aware of this, there is then a formal epilogue – not those one-page things you get in Gemmell or the like, but a full chapter-worth of what-happened-next stuff which feels like an ungainly and unnecessary way to link the novel to its sequel. Fortunately, this edition ends with a preview of a chapter from the next book, and it’s one of the best chapters of the trilogy.

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Adrenaline: 3/5. Although meandering and deliberate, it doesn’t slow down much, and it accelerates toward the end. Hobb does a good job of making the content feel fresh and unpredictable, when in other hands it could feel very derivative.

Emotion: 2/5. From the first book of an epic fantasy trilogy, you don’t expect to be put through the wringer, and in this case we aren’t. What emotion there is is largely melancholic, and may irritate some readers. That said, these are clearly emotive characters, with whom I empathised greatly.

Thought: 3/5. Few great moral dilemmas, no real mysteries, and although the plot is not flatly predictable, it isn’t baffling and intriguing either. Not a stupid book, but it doesn’t set out to engage the brain cells. I suppose it should be considered average on this score, boosted by the tricky plotting of the climactic section.

Beauty: 3/5. Not a lot of beauty in the prose… or the events… or the metaphors, or the scenary. Not ugly, I suppose.

Craft: 4/5. There are some obvious flaws that I consider either inexperience or the constraints of the form. By and large, Hobb’s craft is quite sophisticated, creating interesting and sincere characters, a well-drawn and quietly distinctive world (with an excellent magic ‘system’, though that word is a misnomer here), a plot that makes you think she’s thought about it at least twice, and half a dozen moments of foreshadowing, expectation-subversion or ironic subtext that made me think “hey, that’s clever…”.

Endearingness: 4/5. Yes, Fitz is a BIT too whiney now and then, and spends too much of this novel too young. But I still love him, and several of the other characters as well, and I really do like the setting too, and while it all may feel a bit woolly and ponderous to some people, I found it comfortable, relaxing, and endearing – while still having enough bite and intrigue to it to keep me awake.

Originality: 2/5. There’s very little here that genuinely original, not found elsewhere in fantasy. But, as I say, the way it’s all put together is distinctive. I’ve not read any fantasy author quite like her.

Overall: 4/7. Not Bad. I can’t lie: this isn’t a literary classic. I wouldn’t recommend this to snobs who look down on fantasy, to show them the error of their ways. I would recommend it to people who like fantasy but want something a bit better than TSR and similar fare, something a bit more impressive and respectable. Fantasy but better. From the other books I’ve reviewed, the closest in type are the Empire novels – this is better written, though with a little less headline impact.