In which Robin Hobb, believe it or not, is merciful
 |
| Cover illustration (c) Alejandro Colucci |
Hah, not so fast, I thought, cackling in anticipation as I settled down to read this. Except there is a hint of mellowing in Hobb's approach here. More than a bit. We actually saw the start of this process in the Rain Wild Chronicles, where familiar torments of misery and despair are not quite so tormented as they have been in the past. For all that there was cannibalistic torture and the disintegration of self and identity in the memory-drowning addictions of dead civilizations, nevertheless the Rain Wild Chronicles lacked something of the keen edge of the previous trilogies. And that — not blunting, but let's say softening — of edge continues here.
We open with Fitz happily ensconced in Withywoods. Nettle is established as skillmaster at Buckkeep, the other stepchildren are grown and on the verge of departure. Fitz and Molly are the beloved and established Lord and Lady of Withywoods. They host Winterfest celebrations, they welcome guests; Fitz administers the estate, Molly runs the house. It is delightful. It is peaceful. It is . . . doomed?
Well, so I thought, foolishly imagining I knew what Robin Hobb had in mind. But there are many, many hundreds of pages of peace and plenty and prosperity that elapse before doom befalls. And although there are worries included in those pages, they are decidedly mundane and expected. Some mysterious visitors. A bit of light murder. A baffling, uninterpretable message. Molly is slightly unwell and needs to go to bed. And that’s it.
And between each of these events, YEARS pass! YEARS! Years more of Fitz's domestic tranquility pass domestically tranquilly elapse between plot points. He ponders the passage of time, the process of ageing. He has late night text message Skill conversations with Chade. Molly starts showing signs of dementia, claiming that she is pregnant. Fitz doesn't believe her: she is well past menopause, and the claimed pregnancy continues past nine months, twelve months, twenty-four months. Fitz and Nettle have hard conversations about how to handle Molly's mental state. And, yes, it's distressing that Molly's losing her marbles a bit, but this particular type of hardship is not the unique misery that Hobb tends to inflict. These unhappinesses are real things that happens to real people all the time. Ageing and eldercare and dementia is hardly comparable to getting tortured to death in a dungeon by your uncle-usurper-of-the-throne!
Eventually, a bit of magic separates these real-world cares from our world, but in so doing they render Fitz's life better, not worse. Molly was pregnant, it turns out, with a real child. An odd child, to be sure — slow in developing in utero, and freakishly small after birth, to the point that other people don't believe that the little girl, named Bee, will live. But Bee does live, and although she continues slow to grow and slow to talk, and hesitant around Fitz because his wild Skilling distresses her, she is the joy of his life. And so more years pass of domestic tranquility. A far cry from being forcibly separated from your loved ones, watching from afar as your father-figure marries your beloved and raises your daughter as his own. WHAT IS GOING ON?
And then! And then! Molly dies! Oh no, disaster! She dies — peacefully, painlessly, in her garden, with her little girl next to her, of some entirely natural heart-attack type of thing. Not great for little Bee to see her mother die, but as far as deaths in a Hobb book go, this is nowhere near being flayed alive. Even Fitz's misery is lessened, because he has around him his daughter Nettle, his devoted staff of household retainers, and little Bee. Again, the worst thing Hobb can inflect on Fitz and Bee — widowhood, single parenting an orphan — is nothing worse than people in our world must endure all the time. It's not even in the same ballpark as getting your leg chomped by a sea serpent, leaving a rotting gangrenous stump behind.
And Bee! She is small, and has a speech impediment for the first part of her life, and her peers bully her, and the tutor that Fitz arranges for her is snotty to her when he discovers she is not as stupid as people say she is. And what does he do to punish her? He makes her write lines! Which Fitz immediately puts a stop to the instant he hears about her treatment. Bee never even has to work on her penmanship, let alone get beaten to unconsciousness, almost thrown off a tower, and suffer permanent damage to her ability to Skill.
Even the basic PASSAGE OF TIME is softened. We've already seen Molly having a much-wanted and beloved baby well past menopause. But Fitz gets even more. He doesn't even show his age! Due to an over-enthusiastic Skill healing he enjoyed back in Golden Fool, which keeps him looking young and virile, his appearance tops out at 35 at most. Just look at the cover art! Alejandro Colucci's brief almost certainly included the instructions, 'More DILF than GILF.'
Ok, so, sure, at the end the Fool reappears and in a tragic misunderstand Fitz stabs him, and must leave Bee so he can rush the Fool to Buckkeep for Skill-healing. And then the Fool's people, who it turns out have been torturing him for years, murdering his friends, and chasing him to recapture him for more torture, invade Withywoods, kill people, fog their minds, and abduct Bee in Fitz's absence. Like, yes, that's all bad. That's the kind of thing I expect in a Robin Hobb book.
But here’s the thing: I expect it to happen well before page 600 in a sub-700 page novel. Hobb is entirely capable of squeezing a lot of unhappiness into 80 pages. She makes a good showing of it here! But even she can’t make them rough enough to bring the average for this book back up to expected Hobbian mean. The mathematics of misery simply don’t allow it.
Is it a relief? A disappointment? I’m not sure. It’s not what I expected when I first read this book. I think a lot of the misery might have been self-inflected, as I perpetually braced for the never-dropping other shoe throughout the first half thousand pages. Come back next month to see whether book 2, Fool’s Quest, regresses to the mean.
——
References:
Hobb, Robin. Fool's Assassin [Del Ray, 2014].
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
