A magnificent tapestry of genius, marred by an unfortunate dog turd in the corner
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| Cover art by Stephen Youll |
Robin Hobb is rightly acknowledged to be a wizard of characterization, and I have seen many people opine that The Liveship Traders is the best entry in the Realm of the Elderlings series. I agree with both statements. I cannot stress enough how much I agree with these statements. In fact, I agree with them so hard that I'm not actually going to go into much depth about characterization per se here, because they have already been discussed by everyone else with an ounce of sense and taste. Instead I'll talk about two other elements of this fantastic book, by this fantastic author, the culmination of this fantastic series. To wit, I'm going to poke at what I think underlies her fantastic characterization, and then also dissect why That One Thing about this book feels like such a betrayal of the otherwise untainted fantasticness. Be warned: this will include discussions of rape.
But first, let's revel in what works. My argument here is that the characters in this book sing so sweetly because they're all scaffolded by a thematically consistent structure: deal-making. It's in the title, actually: The Liveship Traders. These people, the inhabitants of Bingtown, live and die by trading. They founded their city on a deal with the Satrap of Jamaillia; their current troubles originate in the Satrap's decision to renege on that deal; and as we find out, the solution to their troubles requires making new deals. Everything is deals. And every deal, in this book, is centered around a tripartite choice:
You can preserve your life. You can preserve your dignity. Or you can preserve your identity. Which do you concede, and which do you protect? Not every deal allows you to preserve all three.
Everyone comes up against this choice, at one point or another. And the decisions they make as they negotiate their way through the story forms the foundation of their character.
Let us start with Malta Vestrit, who finally reaches the apex of her arc in this book. We have already seen her first steps in deal-making in Mad Ship, most notably her negotiation with Tintaglia, the dragon. In that deal, she agreed to help free Tintaglia from her buried cocoon in return for Tintaglia's help rescuing her father (Kyle Haven, ptooey). In other words, Malta's first bargain is a straightforward trade: survival for survival.
But as her development proceeds, her deals become more complex, making use of the full tripartite structure of values. In the aftermath of the earthquake that indirectly frees Tintaglia, Malta has been flung together with the deeply pathetic and incompetent Satrap of Jamaillia, Cosgo; and throughout this final book she must make deals of increasing complexity, all of which require compromises between survival, dignity, and identity. First, when she and Cosgo are picked up by some Chalcedeans, the stakes are small and personal: she must swallow her own dignity and hide her identity, pretending to be Cosgo's slave girl, because only by propping up his own dignity can she ensure his survival. And only if he survives, and is recognized as the Satrap, can he have the power to protect her, ensuring her own survival. Later, when Cosgo meets Captain Red, one of Kennit's pirates, Malta again takes the lead in bargaining, this time not just for personal survival, but to enlist the aid of the pirates to return Cosgo to his throne. Cosgo is fully ignorant of this calculus. He fumes, "'This is degrading! You would reduce my life and the fate of the throne to the squabbling of merchants... But what else should I expect from a Trader's daughter? Your whole life has been buying and selling." Malta, taking no shit from him, returns, "Merchants broker goods. Satraps and nobles broker power. You, noble Magnadon, deceive yourself if you believe there is a great difference in these mechanisms" (pg. 580-581). She is a Bingtowner through and through in this moment: She recognizes that everything can be negotiated, at all levels, from personal survival to the fate of nations. Indeed, when Cosgo eventually meets Kennit, it is Malta who leads the negotiations for a treaty between the Pirate Isles and Jamaillia proper. She is magnificent. All hail Queen Malta!
We get the same tripartite deal structure with non-human characters. Consider the sea serpents, who we know now are baby dragons, on a desperate quest for their old spawning grounds. They eventually find their way to the liveship Vivacia, who, recall, is now under the control of Kennit, and also has a dead dragon in her. The serpents make a deal with this dead dragon, who calls herself Bolt. Bolt agrees to lead the serpents to their spawning grounds, if they lend their strength to Bolt's ends—which, at the moment, involve serving Kennit. Sea serpent armies are useful things for pirates on a mission, after all. But the serpents are uncertain that Bolt will be able to follow through on her end of the bargain, because, as one serpent says, "To help us, she will have to beg help of the humans. While she insists she is all dragon, I do not think she can humble herself to do that" (pg. 456). In other words, the serpents will make a deal that concedes their dignity and identity for survival, but they are not certain that Bolt can do the same. Bolt is already dead; Bolt does not stand to gain survival, so the serpents doubt that she would concede her identity and dignity as she must do to uphold her promise. She has nothing to gain by this bargain.
This tripartite structure of bargaining becomes more complex in Serilla's character arc. When we first met her in Book 2, she'd been envisioning a future for herself in Bingtown, that magical city that she'd studied from afar for so long. However, en route to Bingtown, she disagrees with Cosgo, and Cosgo responds by withdrawing his protection from her. She suffers exactly the fate that Malta negotiates so skillfully to avoid: without Cosgo's protection, there's nothing to prevent the ship's captain from kidnapping her, an unprotected woman, and holding her as a sex slave. (The captain is from Chalced—the super-duper sexist slaving bad nation. Not to be too ethnically essentialist about it, but boy does Chalced suck.) It's rough, and it leaves a mark. Even after Serilla manages to escape the captain's power and scrape together some sort of power for herself as the voice of the Satrap in Bingtown, she is haunted by what she had to endure. Yes, she survived, but she survived because she prioritized survival, and in so doing gave up her identity and dignity.
The Serilla who escapes the Chalcedean captain is no longer that same accomplished scholar and respected voice in Jamaillia's government—and that loss explains a lot of what she does in her brief period in power in Bingtown. She bargains with the wrong people, and makes the wrong deals. Rather than seeking to find a path for the good of Bingtown as a whole, smoothing over the roiled waters of New Trader against Old Trader, Satrap loyalists against conniving Jamaillian traitors, she instead makes deals that protect her position and status as the voice of the Satrap. She has survived, and is now scrabbling to recover dignity—but at the expense of her identity. Or maybe not! Whether she was ever the expert on Bingtown matters that she fancied herself to be is an open question, but after the Chalcedean captain was through with her, she is emphatically not that person anymore. Her character arc is about how she can regain an identity for herself, renegotiate it, in light of what she endured.
Serilla's arc, as well as the importance of being willing to renegotiate one's identity, is mirrored by Bingtown as a whole. Bingtown's original foundation was a concession of dignity and survival against identity: they agreed to crushing fees and tariffs owed to Jamaillia, and died early deaths for generations, in order to build the Bingtown that we now have. There's a lovely moment early in the book featuring a meeting of the Town Council, when it seems that Bingtown's troubles are purely internal. Ronica Vestrit arrives early at the neglected Traders' Concourse, whose upkeep was traditionally the responsibility of Trader families. It's fallen into disrepair, but Ronica begins cleaning it, and slowly other Traders arrive and begin to help her. When the meeting begins, Serilla expects to control matters (insisting on her dignity), but the Traders themselves don't quite realize that, and their old habits emerge: consensus-seeking, self-governance, shared responsibilities. Bingtown's core identity asserts itself, despite Serilla's attempts at control.
So, naturally, in proper Hobbian fashion, things promptly get worse. A Chalcedean fleet, allied with the conspirators who kidnapped the Satrap and set off the whole mess in the first place, arrives to besiege their waters. In the same way that Serilla was held captive by the Chalcedean captain, so too is Bingtown now besieged by the Chalced fleet; and in the same way that Serilla had to concede identity and dignity for survival, so too must Bingtown consider what it will give up in the face of Chalced and the conspirators' challenge.
Roed Caern, an Old Trader who allies with Serilla, suggests that preserving the 'real' Bingtown, the heart of Bingtown's identity, means preserving the Old Traders and only the Old Traders. The New Traders are not Bingtown, he says. They don't live in Bingtown, they don't die in Bingtown, they don't pay the price in survival and dignity that 'real' Bingtowners pay. They live in Chalced, they are loyal to Chalced. They do not deserve to remain in Bingtown—especially not now when Chalced is the aggressor! And given what we, the readers, have seen of the prices that Old Traders have paid—the plagues, the deformities, the early deaths—and given what we've seen of how horrible Chalced is, this is a persusasive argument. Until, of course, you hear Roed's proposal: gather together the New Traders, force them to leave, and slaughter them all if they refuse.
It's easy to tell a story about remaining true to one's identity in the face of challenges, as Bingtown did when they cleaned the Trader's Concourse; but what makes Hobb's take so much subtler is how she pokes at the underside of that platitude: what is one's identity, truly? What does it mean to be true to it? What kinds of atrocities can be condoned in defense of it?
Later, Ronica pursues an alternate course. She meets with the rest of the groups that live in and around Bingtown: the Rain Wild Traders, the Three Ships Immigrants, the Tattooed (i.e. enslaved people from Chalced who have been imported by New Traders). She makes a different deal with them: if they rally together to defend Bingtown against Chalced and claim its independence, in return the new Bingtown will be kinder to them. Slavery will be truly outlawed, not just relabeled 'indentured servitude,' and they will be able to own land and build their own lives. This alliance is the opposite of Roed Caern's offer: concede the idea of 'traditional' Bingtown identity, and in turn its people—all its people—gain dignity and survival.
But this is Robin Hobb, remember. Such a lovely conclusion would be too easy, so instead we get a dragon. Tintaglia has very different ideas about human dignity and identity from these Bingtowners. Humans are naturally subservient to dragons, thinks Tintaglia. Of course they must praise her and serve her and acknowledge her as their overlord. But wait a moment, think the Bingtowners, dragons can do useful things like chasing Chalcedean warships away from Bingtown harbour. So the Bingtowners decide, in inimitable Bingtown fashion, to Make A Deal. And in this deal, we see them concede their dignity, bowing down before Tintaglia, in favor of survival. And their identity, so newly renegotiated, doesn't survive untouched either. Bingtown may claim independence from Jamaillia, but its self-governance will not be complete, because now humans live in a world of dragons, who will always claim mastery over them. It is a bit of a blow to this new city-state, but they are Bingtowners still; and Bingtowners negotiate. And so they bargain with Tintaglia, and in so doing, they illuminate the core part of Bingtown identity that has been preserved: they are traders. They make deals.
Do you see? Do you see how it all ties together? Everything is bargains, negotiations, about what is conceded and what is defended. It structures the plots; it structures the characters. It is a web of intricacy and brilliance.
And because it is so intricate and brilliant and consistent and structured, I must now take a moment to talk about Kennit. Specifically, Kennit's decision to rape Althea towards the end of the book.
What?
Why?
First, it was entirely gratuitous. You can just feel how every scene involving the rape, the lead-up, and the aftermath could easily be chopped out of the book entirely. It sits very uneasily on top of this otherwise tightly woven tapestry of the narrative. It's like a dog turd on the carpet. It doesn't match, and it makes everything around it gross.
But second, it's wildly out of character for Kennit. Everyone says so. Althea says, "He raped me," and they say, "Kennit? He would never!" Yes, this is a whole Believe Women plot point, and yes, there is a place for such plots in books. But not, I maintain, in this particular book. Because I myself do not believe Kennit would do such a thing. I saw him do it on the page, and still I thought, "Kennit? No! He would never." It goes against everything about his character that we've come to know so well throughout the book.
(Arguably) Worse, it undermines the effectiveness of the end of his character arc. His journey, the secrets of his childhood, his bond with Paragon, his identity as a Ludluck, leading up to his eventual death—all that could be incredibly moving and powerful: the complicated legacy of a complicated man who died a complicated death. His fantastic character arc, as we discover, turns out to be built around his own negotiation of the foundational tripartite bargain structure: his childhood identity is erased so that he can survive; and his adult identity is built around a ferocious defense of dignity, because his survival came at such a cost. Even his bond with Paragon is core to that, because Paragon preserved all that remains of his identity, in keeping him alive during his horrific abuses at the hands of Igrot the pirate. Kennit dies in Paragon's arms. How can this not bring tears to your eyes?
Well, the instant Kennit becomes a rapist, I no longer care about it. Any of it. All that character work, wasted. I look at it and think, "Huh, what an incredibly skillful revelation of his motivations and backstory. Gosh, I really wish I cared." But I don't. Rapists don't deserve that from me.
And I just don't understand why it's there in the first place! If the goal here was to make him a villain, rather than just an antagonist, we've already got thematically consistent hints that he's a bad dude. First, he negotiates in bad faith. He does not intend to keep his bargains with Malta. Leave aside all the piracy and killing of people; a man's clearly a villain if he negotiates in bad faith with a Bingtowner! And, more subtlely, in re-inventing himself, he does not renegotiate an authentic identity, but builds an entirely new one, while insisting that Paragon, the only clue to his old name, must be destroyed. That's not cool. You don't get to sidestep a whole third of the tripartite foundation of this book's thematic structure! And you definitely shouldn't be killing a liveship. In a trilogy called The Liveship Traders, a person who kills liveships and does not trade honestly is pretty clearly the villain. He does not need to be a rapist.
So: Kennit-the-rapist was a very unfortunate decision. It is so wildly unfortunate, and so clearly uncomfortable with everything else in the whole-ass trilogy, that I have decided in my head-canon that perhaps it's not Hobb's fault. Maybe the publishers didn't trust Hobb or her readers, and wanted to force her to shove in some gratuitous on-the-nose signal that Kennit is a villain, because heaven forbid a book written in the 90s not have a rape scene in it; and goodness knows we can't trust readers to pick up on who the villain is if we don't bonk them over the head with it. And it is out of the question for a book to have a complicated antagonist instead of a villain! Hence the rape. Thusly I have decided in my revisionist-head-history.
So I shall step around this turd on the carpet, and instead admire the colours, the pattern, the wool, and the complexity of the design that make up the rest of this book. The master-weaver Robin Hobb cannot be held responsible for the leavings of an incontinent dog.
Reference: Hobb, Robin. Ship of Destiny [Bantam, 2000].
CLARA COHEN lives in Scotland in a creaky old building with pipes for gas lighting still lurking under her floorboards. She is an experimental linguist by profession, and calligrapher and Islamic geometric artist by vocation. During figure skating season she does blather on a bit about figure skating. She is on Mastodon at wandering.shop/@ergative, and on Bluesky at https://bsky.app/profile/ergative-abs.bsky.social
