The Farseer Trilogy (Robin Hobb) : Review

Book(s):  Assassin's Apprentice, Royal Assassin, Assassin's Quest (The Farseer Trilogy)
Author:  Robin Hobb
Genre: Fantasy


First of all, let me just say that I can’t believe I’ve managed to call myself a fan of fantasy all these years and have never read any Robin Hobb.  I’ve actually read these all out of order.  I started with the Rain Wild series (after a recommendation from my mother to read the Liveship Traders, which I still have not done) so I ended up finding out a bunch of stuff in advance of the Liveship books which will probably ruin some of the surprise (specifically what the “wood” is that the Liveships are made of).  At any rate, I read those and then decided that I wanted to read the Farseer Trilogy.  I was admittedly a little put off, at first, by some of the names.  The nobility all had names like Verity and Chivalry and Shrewd.  It took me a little while to stop rolling my eyes every time she referred to King Shrewd or King-in-Waiting Chivalry.  It got even worse when Chivalry’s bastard, the main character of the book, took the name FitzChivalry (“Fitz” denoting that he was, in fact, a bastard).  But, as I continued to read, the story overrode my issues with the weird names and I really enjoyed all three books.  It had a bit of a Song of Ice and Fire feel to it, thought not quite as involved.  The characters, I thought, were very well fleshed out.  

One thing I both loved and hated was the reader’s relationship with Fitz himself.  Fitz starts out as an uncertain and eventually somewhat precocious youth who was taken from his mother at the age of six and dumped into Prince Verity’s lap, for the king to look over, since he was the bastard of the King-in-Waiting.  I’m not going to recap the plot of all three books, by the way.  I’m just going to assume that anyone reading this is already familiar with the plot and go from there.  Anyway, Fitz’s character progression was grueling and painful, for me.  He started out with such promise and you sort of have all of these hopes that he’ll Harry Potter it and turn out to be The Most Important Man In The World.  Which, he kind of does, but not in the way you’d expect.  His experiences with Galen were unexpected for me, probably because the series doesn’t follow the typical fantasy formula.  In typical fantasy, Fitz would be incredibly gifted in the Skill (which he is, at first) and would eventually, after many trials and tribulations, learn to master it through some kind of dramatic event and be a card carrying Skill bad ass.  That is not the way it goes for Fitz at all, though.  Instead, he has a tough time concentrating and doing what the rest of his potential coterie can do, and Galen eventually burns a lot of his Skill out of him.  Then, he starts using elfbark all the time and eats up a great deal more of what’s left (which he doesn’t find out until book three - oops).  Fitz never becomes the hero, in a conventional sense.  He is always a little bit of a coward and is always outmatched by the people around him in terms of Skill, physical prowess, etc.

People turn on him easily and leave him.  Molly leaves (although he was an idiot for not realizing she was pregnant - how many more hints did Hobb have to drop?) and Burrich decides to be a real dick about the whole Wit thing and abandons him for a while.  Fitz is childish and, even as he grows into a man, never really learns how to be a man.  He can be churlish and sullen, predisposed to holding grudges and dwelling on The Unfairness Of It All.  Basically, Fitz is human.  He isn’t perfect and he isn’t supposed to be.  He isn’t what you want him to be, and yet you feel like he couldn’t be anything else.  You root for Fitz, even when he’s being an idiot, and you keep hoping he’ll see it coming this time, or he’ll wise up and stop being such a child.  Sometimes he does and sometimes he doesn’t, but that’s what makes Fitz unique.

His extraordinary stretch of bad luck and bad timing was also a bit hard to stomach.  He doesn’t get the girl.  Well, he does, but only long enough to get her pregnant and for her to run off to take care of her child elsewhere and eventually marry Burrich (at least both he and Molly think Fitz is dead).  Starling seemed like a promising love interest, but Fitz is so dedicated to the fantasy of Molly and their daughter that Starling is all but ignored.  He sleeps with her once, eventually, when everything else is falling apart and he’s found out that Burrich and Molly are in love, etc., but there’s very little emotional connection there. Which is fine, but just unexpected.  He’s accused of murdering the king after he hunted down and slit the throats of the people who actually killed the king.  Regal throws him into a dungeon, beats the hell out of him, and he has to fake death to escape.  Chade and Burrich leave him.  Kettricken and Chade assure him that his daughter will be used as a piece in their game every bit as much as he has been and he has no say in it - it’s for the good of the kingdom.  He finds Verity, who has gone a little insane and dipped his arms in a Skill river, so he’s making dragons and eventually has to put himself into the dragon.  Verity Skill-swaps bodies with Fitz and gets it on with Kettricken, impregnating her with which is actually Fitz’s child, but it’s billed as Verity’s child.  So, not only does Fitz never get to see his daughter by Molly because she and Burrich think he’s dead and there’s no reason, apparently, to rock that boat, but he also gets to create another child who he can’t acknowledge or ever see.  Except on the coinage, maybe.  All of that (and so much more!) was hard to adjust to.  Realizing that the “hero” of the piece isn’t a hero at all and has had a really awful life, when you just wanted him to be awesome and win, is sobering.

But, I liked it.  I liked what Hobb did with it. She made Fitz real.  Bad luck is real.  Heroes may be a dime a dozen in the books, but in reality, things rarely go as well as you’d planned.  While Fitz had successes, it was his failures that were so mubh bigger, and isn’t that the way it is, so often?  We succeed to make ripples and fail to make tidal waves.

The books were written very well, and I enjoyed Hobb’s penchant for backstabbing and clever ploys.  More than once, Fitz got caught up in some scheme that I really hadn’t anticipated.  Over all, I really enjoyed the series.  I’m about to start the Tawny Man trilogy, which is apparently a continuation of Fitz’s story.  Maybe he’ll catch a break in this one.