The character arcs are familiar, but it's all in service of building something new
We are on to the fourth subseries of this fantastic saga! The Rain Wild Chronicles is, in a way, atypical of a Robin Hobb series, largely because it is strikingly lacking in misery and structural complexity. The character motivations are straightforward and driven by no more than the usual amount of discontent with the status quo; the main character arcs mostly avoid catastrophe, except inasmuch as a lively flood or brief skirmish enlivens typical fantasy plots; and the plot is a very simple quest structure. We don’t even get the Fool, in any of his many identities. At the end, the evil are punished (hooo boy, are they ever!), the good are rewarded, dragons kick ass, and. . . fin.
By now, I’ve reread enough Robin Hobb to recognize that the character arcs are mostly recycled from previous books. This is not a criticism; more an observation. Hobb evidently had a lot to say about certain types of personal journeys, and she didn’t say it all the first time round. Take Alise Finbok, the dragon scholar who yearns to study dragons, yearns so hard that she insists that a study trip up the Rain Wild River be included as a condition in her marriage contract. This is her only point of joy in a loveless marriage to a husband who is powerful and overbearing, who oppresses her and belittles her and makes her feel small. When she finally gets the opportunity to travel to the Rain Wilds and observe the dragons, she is disappointed to find the creatures so different from how she’d expected them to be. Yet nevertheless she takes advantage of circumstances and manages to remake herself into a new person in their company. She is thus freed from her asshole husband, and learns what it is to be loved and valued for her own skills and self and personhood. This is a lovely character arc. It is also in many ways a repeat of Serilla’s arc from the Liveship Traders. Serilla, recall, begins her arc as the companion of the asshole Satrap of Jamaillian, who belittles her, ignores her experience and political acumen, and tries instead to treat her as a sexual object. She finds her purpose in her scholarship of the history and politics of Bingtown. When she finally gets the opportunity to travel to Bingtown, she is disappointed to discover that the life she’d imagined for herself there is not feasible. Yet nevertheless she takes advantage of circumstances and – with some false starts – manages to remake a new existence for herself, freed from the asshole Satrap, and – if not loved and valued – at least respected for her knowledge and experience. The worst parts of Alise’s story are really not all that terrible compared to Serilla’s. As I’ve said, these books lack the typical Hobbian misery that we see elsewhere, and Alise’s arc is shifted substantially upward on the despair-to-joy spectrum. But still: the shape of the arc is the same.
Likewise, Sedric, Alise’s childhood friend and the amenuensis-cum-secret-lover of her dastardly husband, gets his own dragon-fueled redemption arc that feels a lot like Malta Vestrit’s. But again, like Alise’s, it’s a bit gentler. Malta, recall, starts as the most glorious 13-year-old brat who has ever bratted, and ends as a full-ass Elderling, negotiating the fate of nations. Both Malta and Sedric begin their respective stories sheltered and selfish, accustomed to a life of pampering and wealth, and ready to make all kinds of foolish decisions to pursue that comfort without thinking through or properly understanding the consequences of their decisions.
The particularly interesting contrast between these two arises from how respective horriblenesses are tempered. Malta is a literal child at the start, and whomst amongst ust has not indulged in 13-year-old brattiness? Sedric, by contrast, is a full-grown adult. He regularly travels internationally, and has a firm grasp on politics and trade. He knows the consequences of his actions, or should know, and that expectation of competence makes his behaviour much harder to forgive. Consider, for example, his decision to accompany Alise to the Rain Wilds, where he will acquire dragon parts to sell to the Duke of Chalced. These dragon parts represent the sole chance of saving the dying duke’s life, so Sedric expects to get a huge payoff upon delivery.
What Sedric doesn’t seem to realize is that this is, on many levels, a terrible idea. Leave aside the ethics of butchering and selling sentient creatures for medicine, and think about the politics for a moment. The Duke of Chalced is dying. Dragon parts can save him. Dragons can only be found in the Rain Wilds. Last time Chalced tried to make trouble in that part of the world, Tintaglia fought them off, but Tintaglia is not here anymore. So why in the world would Sedric want to (a) demonstrate to the desperate Duke of Chalced that life-saving resources are to be found in the Rain Wilds, and (b) do it at a time when Tintaglia is no longer defending them against Chalced? Sooner or later, the saying goes, there is always war with Chalced. Sedric’s actions are going to make it much sooner than later.
Malta’s brattiness is tempered by the fact that she’s a child. What excuse does Sedric have? In a word: Hest. Hest is Alise’s asshole husband, but he is also Sedric’s lover, and he is a classic narcissistic asshole. He glamours Sedric with his handsomeness, his masterful exercise of wealth and power and taste; and he combines that glamour with a fair amount of manipulative emotional abuse. It is to please Hest that Sedric suggests Alise as a potential wife, and coaches Hest on how best to win Alise’s agreement for a marriage of convenience. It is to please Hest that he indulges in really foul semantic wordplay when Alise tries to invoke the clause in the marriage contract that dissolves the union in the event of infidelity. Oh no, says Hest, I’ve never slept with any other woman, right Sedric? And he is right: He’s not sleeping with women — because he’s sleeping with men. Sedric knows perfectly well that it makes no difference to Alise which people Hest is sleeping with. What matters is that she’s found evidence of infidelity and wants to invoke that contractual provision to dissolve her marriage. But because of her mistaken assumption that Hest is exclusively attracted to women, Hest wriggles out of the accusation. And because Alise has been friends with Sedric so long, she trusts him when he backs up Hest’s word; and so because of Sedric, she loses her opportunity to end her miserable marriage. Sedric is friendly, but he is not a friend.
As with Malta, Hobb does not insist that we feel sympathy for Sedric, at the start. The facts and actions and motivations are simply presented to us, and we are left to draw our own conclusions. Is Sedric a victim of domestic abuse, too enthralled to his abuser to do the right thing, for fear of the consequences for his own well-being? Or is he just a weak, sad man, who will prey on dragons and betray his friends to please an asshole he’s sleeping with? For my part, I am intellectually aware of the former interpretation, but emotionally I really lean toward the latter. Malta as a 13-year-old brat was gloriously, hilariously smackable. Sedric, as a full-grown failure of a man, is just sad.
Let us turn now to the themes. Thematically, this book is fantastic. We’ll start with Tintaglia. Recall that we left the Liveship Traders trilogy with magnificent Tintaglia shepherding a massive tangle of 100 serpents to cocoon and transform into dragons, ready to take to the skies. We left the Tawny Man trilogy with the discovery and rescue of Icefyre, another adult dragon, mating with Tintaglia and ensuring another generation of eggs on the way. But the consequence of these triumphs is that Tintaglia abandons the Rain Wild dragons. When they were her only hope for the continuance of her species, she had time to help feed the pathetic specimens that emerged on the riverbed outside the Rain Wild city of Cassarick. But now, with a proper dragon at her side, she has no use for them.
Yes, it is selfish. It puts the individual above the community. But this is how dragons are. They are not human. They do not have human-like loyalties to each other. And this ruthless, selfish independence works very well if you have the capacities of a dragon, if you can hunt and fly and feed yourself and defend yourself. Dragons are strong. Humans are squishy and weak.
So humans must form societies to compensate for their squishy weakness, societies where they combine their capacities and work for the good of the whole, rather than the individual. This is especially important in an environment as harsh as the Rain Wilds, where people struggle to bear children, become disfigured with growths and scales as they age, and sicken and die young. However, this harshness of the environment, and the need to focus on the collective good, engenders harshness in its treatment of individuals. Any child born too ‘changed’ from the start is exposed at birth, to die. The reasoning of this regularly practiced infanticide is that these infants will only ever turn out to be a burden to society, sickening early, and unable to bear healthy children of their own. Why, conventional wisdom asks, must society welcome and support people who cannot contribute to the next generation?
So life in the Rain Wilds is governed by these questions: How much of a burden of dead weight can a society bear? How much must an individual contribute before they are allowed to be a member of that society? Under what circumstances is it permissible to kill babies? It’s all very ‘Cold Equations’.
It’s an uncomfortable kind of conversation, and it’s not made any easier when we consider the case of Thymara, one of the primary viewpoint characters. Thymara is a young woman who ‘should’ have been exposed at birth. She was only given a chance at life because her father decided at the last minute to defy custom and expectation, and bring her back home, to raise her and train her in hunting and foraging and all the other life skills that Rain Wilders need to master for survival. It turns out that Thymara is an excellent hunter and forager. She brings in far more food than she eats. In her particular case, then, it would have been a mistake to leave her to die. Even if she never has a baby, and does not contribute to the next generation, her contributions are still a net positive to society.
But by even having this conversation, and pointing out that Thymara is a contributer rather than a burden, we are conceding an important point – namely, that it is reasonable to evaluate people’s right to live in a society as a function of their numerical contribution.1 This reasoning needs only a statistical evaluation of expected value in the long term aggregate to justify and indeed require infanticide. Sure, in Thymara’s case, to be sure, there is no danger of her being a burden, because she grew up to be a good hunter. But statistically it was unlikely, so in the long run, just to be sure of optimizing the collective good . . .
It’s the Tragedy of the Commons pitted against the belief that killing babies is bad. And every member of the Rain Wilds knows this. There’s a wonderful moment quite early on, where Thymara’s father points out how good a hunter she is, and his companions get all shifty and uneasy. Because every Rain Wild parent who’s ever left a child to die, after nine months of hope and fear and love and waiting, after hours of agonizing labour and the crushing grief at seeing one’s baby born with claws instead of fingernails – those parents are not comforting themselves with calculating expected values. These parents are not thinking well, in the aggregate, statistically these changed children consume more than they produce, so society as a whole is stronger if. . . No. Rather, these parents are looking at Thymara and thinking, if I had possessed the strength of character; if I had defied the rules, then my little one might be here today, like she is.
So: what does society do with these extraneous people, the ones who should be dead, the ones who cannot produce a new generation? Well, if you have a bunch of dragons wallowing on your doorstep, hemmed in by trees and flightless; sickly and stunted and unable to hunt, consuming far more than they produce, the answer is clear. You pull up your algebra notes, combine like terms, and offer the deadweights a job: Lead the dragons upstream, hunt for them, tend to them, and find them a new place to live, far away from here.
This gives us the heart of the plot: two sets of outcasts, human and dragon, must work together to find a new place to live. And they both engage in this endeavour whole-heartedly. They do not feel like they have been cast out of their homes, rejected by their society – though they absolutely have been. The humans are the rejects of the Rain Wilds, and the dragons have been entirely abandoned by Tintaglia. Nevertheless, they see it as an opportunity to build a new future.
But they approach this opportunity with a different end goal in mind. The humans are released from the constraints of the Rain Wild society, freed to negotiate a new set of customs, and figure out how far their new freedoms can take them. They envision an entirely different society, built from scratch, attuned to their own specific needs. By contrast the dragons don’t hope to build something new. Their entire abnormal life, stunted and sickly, flightless and wallowing in mud, has been an education in how the old ways were better. Yet they cannot recover anything resembling those old ways without the help of their human keepers, and so the very task of returning to their former greatness is going to require a certain amount of concessions to circumstances.
Next month, we’ll see how those concessions work out, and what kinds of negotiations the humans and dragons must make with each other in their quest for a new home, and the new type of society they must build together.
1 This type of reasoning is not restricted to fantasy settings. UK Home Secretary Shabana Mahmood announced this week that immigrants must now perform unpaid labour as a precondition for the right to live in the UK. ↩
References:
Hobb, Robin. Dragon Keeper [Harper Voyager, 2009].
