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Robin Hobb, The Liveship Traders: Ship of Magic, Mad Ship, and Ship of Destiny: This trilogy takes place in Bingtown and the Pirate Isles, far from the lands in which Hobb’s Assassin trilogy is set but connected to them in a few key ways. The story focuses on the Vestrits, who own a valuable liveship – a living ship, quickened with the blood of generations of Vestrits. But the liveship was bought on credit and times are hard, with pirates preying freely on trade and equally mercenary Chalcedeans enslaving anyone vulnerable. Slavery was prohibited in Bingtown, but Bingtown’s dissolute and distant ruler has made agreements that have brought it in. Althea Vestrit hopes to inherit the liveship Vivacia, but circumstances put the ship in the hands of her ambitious brother-in-law, who makes her a slaver and, in order to have a Vestrit family member on board, rips his young son Wintrow from the life he hoped to have as a priest. Since liveships are affected by death and suffering onboard, being a slaver threatens Vivacia’s sanity, and the crew is vulnerable to the ambitious pirate Kennit, who is determined to have a liveship of his own. Meanwhile, Wintrow’s sister Malta, on the cusp of womanhood, chafes at the strictures put on her by her mother and grandmother, but doesn’t understand the dangers she courts.
I haven’t even mentioned the dragons, the sea serpents, or the ancient riches of the Rain Wild Traders, the source of Bingtown’s trading wealth. Hobb’s strength is in complex social and political structures, combined with a real appreciation for how characters can convincingly change. Maturity is rarely achieved by going on a quest and coming back with the thing you set out trying to get; it’s often achieved by learning that (a) you can’t have that thing, (b) you no longer desire that thing, and (c) you can’t come back, anyway.
I haven’t read the first volume in Hobb’s new trilogy, but the pirate king Kennit may well be her masterwork. He is a sociopath, incapable of understanding the softer human emotions and thus unable to understand or trust the belief others have in him even as he ruthlessly manipulates their trust and faith. His background is horrific, but that doesn’t excuse his behavior. Still, his charm and miraculous luck make him a compelling character, and the tension is never higher than when he’s risking it all for the sake of glory and power – he’s always on the verge of losing what he’s won by failing to emulate normal human reactions. His fate is the main reason to read to the end – and it’s a complicated one, especially given that he fools enough people that arguably it would be good for him to go down in history as a noble figure rather than the monster he is.
I do have some uneasiness at Hobb’s treatment of rape. She portrays a society in which the position of women is contentious, with Bingtown a fading bastion of equality; I accept that the characters are in a culture where female chastity is overvalued by all. But there’s a recovery from rape that feels even more unearned because of that; it’s not “Character is healed by mystical bond with dragon,” because the dragons are quite unsentimental and overbearing, but it’s enough like that to disturb me. Is psychic healing ever a fair way to resolve a trauma? Am I applying a special standard to recovery from rape? Probably, but then Hobb’s characters think rape is the worst thing that can be done to a woman. (Or a man, but most of them aren’t even capable of thinking that.) It’s certainly an engaging and powerful read with lots of devastation and rebuilding, and it’s right that not everything is fixed by the end; I guess I felt let down that this thing was.
Robin Hobb, The Tawny Man: Fool’s Errand, Golden Fool, and Fool’s Fate: FitzChivalry Farseer is back, with a new mission to save the Six Duchies and form an alliance with the Outislanders who latterly raided and destroyed so many Six Duchies communities. Fitz, who’s made a quiet life for himself and his aging wolf, doesn’t want to go, but duty propels him resentfully back into matters of state. The Farseer heir needs to make a good marriage, but he doesn’t understand his promised bride’s culture, and she has an agenda of her own that may spell destruction for them all. The long-lost dragons are also a factor, even though no one is quite sure if they’re real.
Hobb continues with the intricate plotting and thorough characterization that made the earlier Farseer trilogy fun. While Fitz’s anger at being fortune’s pawn is understandable, after a while hanging out with him (including reading about him) and hearing him complain makes him seem a little developmentally frozen – as fellow characters repeatedly point out to him; this isn’t a criticism of the writing. Rather, Hobb explores what it means to stay repetitively angry for over a decade. That’s not to say the trilogy is a psychological inquest – there’s plenty of action and intrigue. As the title of the trilogy indicates, the Fool plays a larger role in this trilogy, but still remains fundamentally a mystery.
In the end, the Fool says something about his sexuality that I found entirely unpersuasive, given what went before (to say the relationship between Fitz and the Fool is slashy is accurate only if you leave off most of the “y”). If Fitz is meant to be an unreliable narrator about this, and I suspect he is, I like the writing better but feel much worse for the Fool, and also for Fitz, who at the end still hasn’t learned to see the world outside of his preconceptions.
I haven’t even mentioned the dragons, the sea serpents, or the ancient riches of the Rain Wild Traders, the source of Bingtown’s trading wealth. Hobb’s strength is in complex social and political structures, combined with a real appreciation for how characters can convincingly change. Maturity is rarely achieved by going on a quest and coming back with the thing you set out trying to get; it’s often achieved by learning that (a) you can’t have that thing, (b) you no longer desire that thing, and (c) you can’t come back, anyway.
I haven’t read the first volume in Hobb’s new trilogy, but the pirate king Kennit may well be her masterwork. He is a sociopath, incapable of understanding the softer human emotions and thus unable to understand or trust the belief others have in him even as he ruthlessly manipulates their trust and faith. His background is horrific, but that doesn’t excuse his behavior. Still, his charm and miraculous luck make him a compelling character, and the tension is never higher than when he’s risking it all for the sake of glory and power – he’s always on the verge of losing what he’s won by failing to emulate normal human reactions. His fate is the main reason to read to the end – and it’s a complicated one, especially given that he fools enough people that arguably it would be good for him to go down in history as a noble figure rather than the monster he is.
I do have some uneasiness at Hobb’s treatment of rape. She portrays a society in which the position of women is contentious, with Bingtown a fading bastion of equality; I accept that the characters are in a culture where female chastity is overvalued by all. But there’s a recovery from rape that feels even more unearned because of that; it’s not “Character is healed by mystical bond with dragon,” because the dragons are quite unsentimental and overbearing, but it’s enough like that to disturb me. Is psychic healing ever a fair way to resolve a trauma? Am I applying a special standard to recovery from rape? Probably, but then Hobb’s characters think rape is the worst thing that can be done to a woman. (Or a man, but most of them aren’t even capable of thinking that.) It’s certainly an engaging and powerful read with lots of devastation and rebuilding, and it’s right that not everything is fixed by the end; I guess I felt let down that this thing was.
Robin Hobb, The Tawny Man: Fool’s Errand, Golden Fool, and Fool’s Fate: FitzChivalry Farseer is back, with a new mission to save the Six Duchies and form an alliance with the Outislanders who latterly raided and destroyed so many Six Duchies communities. Fitz, who’s made a quiet life for himself and his aging wolf, doesn’t want to go, but duty propels him resentfully back into matters of state. The Farseer heir needs to make a good marriage, but he doesn’t understand his promised bride’s culture, and she has an agenda of her own that may spell destruction for them all. The long-lost dragons are also a factor, even though no one is quite sure if they’re real.
Hobb continues with the intricate plotting and thorough characterization that made the earlier Farseer trilogy fun. While Fitz’s anger at being fortune’s pawn is understandable, after a while hanging out with him (including reading about him) and hearing him complain makes him seem a little developmentally frozen – as fellow characters repeatedly point out to him; this isn’t a criticism of the writing. Rather, Hobb explores what it means to stay repetitively angry for over a decade. That’s not to say the trilogy is a psychological inquest – there’s plenty of action and intrigue. As the title of the trilogy indicates, the Fool plays a larger role in this trilogy, but still remains fundamentally a mystery.
In the end, the Fool says something about his sexuality that I found entirely unpersuasive, given what went before (to say the relationship between Fitz and the Fool is slashy is accurate only if you leave off most of the “y”). If Fitz is meant to be an unreliable narrator about this, and I suspect he is, I like the writing better but feel much worse for the Fool, and also for Fitz, who at the end still hasn’t learned to see the world outside of his preconceptions.
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I found it obtrusively repetitive as a theme: the land is raped metaphorically, the dragons are raped metaphorically, the hero is raped literally, the villain is raped literally, by the time the ancillary characters began getting raped I was begging for relief. *g*
Hobb's strength is in complex social and political structures, combined with a real appreciation for how characters can convincingly change
I agree -- in Ships she chucks out the masculine, linear and external quest that is so typical of fantasy and instead writes a series of multiple highly personal quests that take her characters in all sorts of unexpected internal directions.
Hobb's weakness to me as a fantasy writer is that the fantastical elements of her stories seem to sit awkwardly within her worlds -- this is a highly subjective reaction but -- the dragons seemed like odd refugees from another book in Ships, they never quite gelled with anything else (though they gelled better in Ships than they did in Assassins). Possibly this is because when compared with the attention given to character development, the appearance of Dragons in Assassins seemed limited to a fly-by, which made me wonder: why have them at all? The subtler fantasy elements are the ones that work best for me in her books: the Fool, the beach of glittering objects.
I just finished Soldier's Son (the new one) and will keep my eye out for a future review from you as I'd be v. interested to see what you think of it. *g*
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