I Got Those Mid-Trilogy Volume Blues

[mtvessel]

20 Sep 2005
The Golden Fool - Robin Hobb - Voyager 2002
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Of the current crop of big commercial fantasy writers, Robin Hobb is probably the best. Her series The Liveship Traders is quite simply the most entertaining three-decker fantasy I have read in a very long while. I have never had quite as much time for her Assassin series with the self-pitying Fitz (too many shades of Thomas Covenant for my taste), and I must admit that my heart sank when I saw Fool's Errand, the first installment of a second trilogy. Nonetheless, after the pointless first two hundred pages where Fitz sits around feeling sorry for himself and characters from the previous trilogy are reintroduced with painful slowness, it developed into an entertaining "rescue the prince" quest with some nice twists and good emotional climax that left me wanting more. Well, more is certainly what we get here. Seven hundred and twelve pages of it, to be precise. And it's still an entertaining read. There's just one small problem, and it is this: NOTHING HAPPENS.

Now of course that isn't entirely true - plenty of events occur, but none of them really move things along significantly. This is a frequent problem with the middle books of fantasy trilogies. Perhaps the most egregious example is The One Tree, the second volume of the second trilogy of the afore-mentioned Thomas Covenant series, which is essentially a gigantic wild goose chase through some of the outer reaches of Donaldson's world (and actually I quite liked it - it was nice to get out of the humdrum settting of the Land for a bit, and there are couple of nice little plot twists).

Hobb's solution to the mid-trilogy volume blues in the first Assassin series was effective if somewhat inelegant - in essence she wrote two stories, one set in Buckkeep and climaxing at the end of volume two, and the quest that takes up the whole of volume three. The climaxes are similarly arranged in the Liveship Traders series, but by keeping the action centred on Bingtown she avoids the tacked on feeling that the wanderings in volume three of the Assassin series engendered. I'm not quite sure what she was planning to do in this sequence, but whatever it was it doesn't work. The first half of the book is fine - the Narcheska Elliania, the Outislander princess whom Prince Dutiful is due to marry to secure a lasting peace, arrives in court with her intriguing uncle Peottre and her highly dodgy kinsman Arkon. Dutiful and the Narcheska engage in a somewhat strained courtship due largely to the fact that she doesn't fancy him much and he is more interested in starting a coterie with Fitz (boys will be boys...). To add spice to the mix, some Bingtown traders turn up trying to persuade Queen Kettricken to declare war on the Chalced States. All this builds up to the tense official betrothal ceremony which occurs in the middle of the book, where the Narcheska challenges Dutiful to go and kill a legendary Outislander dragon before she will marry him.

Fine, I thought. So the second half of this book will, like Fool's Errand, consist of a quest - in this case "find the dragon". The climax will be when Dutiful kills it (or more likely it all goes horribly wrong). But nothing of the sort occurs. By the end of the book they are still messing around in Buckkeep preparing for the trip, which evidently takes up book three. There is no grand and cathartic dramatic climax. Instead there is a lot of mildly inspiring but uneventful diplomacy as Kettricken tries to come to terms with the persecuted Witted community which produced the Piebalds who threatened her son in book one. Nice to have one's expectations vitiated, but frankly not very interesting.

So it looks like this trilogy has the same awkward broken-backed structure as the original Assassin series, only Hobb fluffed the requisite mid-volume climax. My feeling is that this is because she has too many plot irons in the fire caused by trying to mix epic magic and politics with everyday fantasy (a concept of which I of course approve, in principle). In addition to the politicking already mentioned, there is a great deal of soap opera-style kitchen-sink drama with Fitz's friends and relatives. Fitz himself is even more self-pitying, irrational and emotionally obtuse than usual, falling out with all his friends at some point or other and alienating his wayward adopted son Hap. Normally I would consider this to be idiot plotting, but in this case I think it may be quite a subtle depiction of the odd and irrational behaviour that bereavement can cause so I'll give it the benefit of the doubt. One soap opera element that didnt work for me was the relationship between Fitz and the Fool. In this book the Fool admits that he fancies Fitz, who being tediously heterosexual as well as emotionally maladroit handles it extremely badly. Somehow I found it hard to care particularly about their relationship, which is unfortunate since it forms the basis of the entire series. Nonetheless I'll read book three as and when I can lay hands on it - this one, in my view, is an uncharacteristic lapse.

Comments

[ingaborg.livejournal.com]

I know exactly what you mean about Fitz's emotional uselessness throughout the book. Luckily this is explained and to some extent justified later on (hope I've not given too much away, it's a neat twist and it nearly works)