I do have some uneasiness at Hobb's treatment of rape.
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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Date: 2006-05-13 02:54 pm (UTC)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*