In which themes are thematic, brilliantly so
Cover art by Stephen Youll
One thing that Mad Ship does NOT do, in any possible way, is suffer from Book-2-itis. Instead, the plot thickens, and thematic resonances start flying thick and fast, in a way that your ninth grade English teacher tried so, so hard to make you recognize in Return of the Native or Hard Times or whatever piece of literature was being mistaught to you. Mr. Teagarten should have picked up some Robin Hobb if he wanted to make us see why recurring ideas and intertwining themes are so brilliant, but perhaps 850-page tomes is a bit of a big ask for a 14-year-old. (That said, I definitely was reading Robin Hobb in 9th grade.) Anyway, because I cannot discuss all 850 pages of this piece of magnificence in anything like justice, I've decided to talk about its recurring ideas and intertwining motifs. Or rather, a subset of them. The three I've selected are far from the only three, but they are the ones that made me stop and (literally!) take notes when they popped up. They are: the need to accept things you cannot change; the plot-thickening dangers of blind rescue; and the concept of personhood.
When last we left our Vestrits and pirates at the end of Ship of Magic, Kyle Haven (ptooey) had turned the liveship Vivacia into a slaver, and Kennit had captured her. In the sea battle that frees the enslaved captives, Kennit gets his leg chomped off by one of the ubiquitous sea serpents who always follow slave ships. (They do this because slave ships are deadly places, after all, the consequences of which deadliness get thrown overboard. Free lunch.)
Wintrow, with his unique position of both having been officially enslaved and also being the requisite family member whose presence is necessary for any liveship to sail, does not share the fate of the sailors who were complicit in the slave trade (i.e., serpent lunch). Instead, Kennit keeps him aboard Vivacia, and a fascinating kind of relationship triangle forms between the three of them. Kennit woos Vivacia with charm and respect and deference, exactly what she never got from Kyle Haven (ptooey), and never had the chance to receive from Althea. But Vivacia is a liveship, and needs to be with her family, and so she continues to reach out to Wintrow, who resents her presence but also feels an obligation to her. In a perfect world, Wintrow would give his allegiance to Kennit, so Vivacia would not feel torn between the two of them. Kennit knows this, and so alongside Vivacia, he also tries to woo Wintrow. In his logical conscious thinking, this wooing makes sense, a way of tying Vivacia more securely to his goals. But underneath that, Kennit sees in Wintrow the boy that he, Kennit, once was, the boy who was taken under the wing of a pirate and grew into the man he is now. For Kennit, that was salvation; and so in Kennit’s mind, he must do the same for Wintrow, as a duty to the boy he once was.
This triangle is one fertile ground to find the first theme: the struggle to accept (or refuse to accept) one’s fate. The point is first articulated by Etta, Kennit’s… lover? She identifies herself as Kennit’s whore, but it’s clear that her devotion and loyalty to him are strong and terrifying in ways that go far beyond sex worker and client. When she sees that Kennit wants Wintrow on his side, while Wintrow struggles to accept it, she takes matters into her hands. You can never return to the monastery, she tells him bluntly. That path is closed to you. You can either accept this life, and make what you can of it, or you can fight it and die pointlessly. One learns such things in a brothel, she says—but she says it without self-pity. She does not see herself as mistreated, though she undoubtedly has been. I do not think she could have developed such a violent loyalty to Kennit if she had known other types of real kindness. However, she has accepted her life, and works within its constraints to find purpose and strength. In her case, that purpose and strength usually leads to murderous protectiveness of Kennit’s interests. In Wintrow’s case, that purpose is to seek out the wisdom and ways of Sa, regardless of his proximity to any monastery.
This same lesson recurs with other characters. Kennit himself, struggling to adapt to life without a leg, must figure out how to be a one-legged pirate. And we see it again towards the end, as word of Vivacia’s capture finally makes it back to Bingtown, and Althea Vestrit and Brashen Trell mount an expedition to go after her. Such an expedition needs a ship, and the only ship is the titular mad ship, Paragon. Paragon is a liveship himself, but he has been beached for decades after a series of catastrophes at sea killed the family who sailed on him, left his face blinded from axe blows that destroyed the wizardwood of his eyes, and destroyed his logbooks—and with them his memories. And now Althea and Brashen and the Fool Amber are refitting him, preparing to sail in him, despite his madness and the risk that he might kill them as he seems to have killed his previous crews. In his moments of lucidity, he had accepted his fate to be a forgotten hulk, but he struggles to accept that he might have a part to play in the world once again.
Paragon also serves as a locus of the second theme: the idea of rescue, and the consequences thereof. We already saw it with Kennit: he rescues enslaved captives and reaps broadly positive consequences: acclaim, reputation, and, eventually, his dearest wish: a liveship of his own. But that liveship is going to be another link in a chain of consequences, because Bingtown will never let a pirate keep a liveship—hence Paragon’s refit, and Althea and Brashen’s mission. In Althea’s eyes, the rescue is aimed at recovering Vivacia (and maybe her nephew Wintrow). In Malta’s eyes, the rescue is for her father Kyle Haven (ptooey). And Malta has a unique opportunity to help, by means of indulging in a bit of rescue of her own. In the course of her magic-infused courtship with Reyn, the son of a prominent Rain Wilds trader family, she has become linked with the voice of a trapped dragon entombed in a buried log of wizardwood. This dragon haunts Malta’s dreams, demanding, threatening, begging for release. So Malta makes a deal: she will rescue the dragon if the dragon rescues her father. The consequences of that will have to wait for the third book.
But wait—a dragon, trapped in wizardwood? How did that happen?
The relationship between dragons and wizardwood brings us to our third theme, the one that I think is the truly brilliant revelation of this book, the discovery that both tarnishes and deepens the sense of wonder of liveships. Thus far, wizardwood has been seen as a rare, magical, magnificent substance that makes liveships into the glorious sentient creatures that they are. But in this book, we learn the whole truth: wizardwood is not mere wood, but instead a cocoon, formed when a sea serpent finishes its larval stage at sea, and returns up the Rain Wild River to hibernate and grow into a dragon. Historically the serpents were shepherded in this migration by the living dragons who guide them, and watched over in their transformation by the now-disappeared Elderlings who lived symbiotically with them. But centuries ago, the Elderling city by the dragons’ hibernation spot was buried in an earthquake, and the cocoons were blocked from the sun, unable to hatch. This is why dragons disappeared from the land; this is why they had to be built with Skill and sacrifice in the Farseer trilogy. The living dragons gradually died, and their successors were buried during the disaster, unable to hatch. For every liveship constructed from wizardwood, one of those cocoons was cut open, and the embryo dragon inside tossed away like trash. The magic and sentience that makes liveships what they are is in fact nothing more than the ghostly remnants of a dead dragon’s memories that the wizardwood absorbed from them. Liveships are dead before they ever quicken; and in their construction, an entire race of creatures was destroyed.
Can you imagine learning such a thing about yourself? To imagine yourself a living, thinking, sentient magical being, a liveship, who has a family, and memories, and agency in the world—only to learn that your entire existence is the consequence of a horrific genocide? That your ability to move and speak, to form memories, is not true life, but instead a simulacrum, a husk, a shell, an existence stolen from another being? Are you even a real person?
What does it mean, then, to be a person? In a way, this question has a kind of resonance with a lot of science fiction stories about the personhood of AI. In the framing of one of those tales—let's say, arbitrarily, Star Trek: The Next Generation’s “Measure of a Man”—a liveship’s identity, personality, agency, and sentience would unquestionably endow it with personhood. But what those stories lack is the horrifying cost of the liveships’ creation. To waken one, four lives must be given: the dragon, and then the three generations of family members whose deaths are needed to quicken the ship. Traditionally, those last three lives are given willingly, lovingly—but they don’t have to be. Paragon’s quickening happened prematurely, during the mysterious violent death that killed his crew and the last two generations of his family. In principle, a liveship could be wakened by taking a grandparent, parent, and child aboard and slitting their throats. Four people (including the dragon) must die to create this artificial person. Does that matter in determining personhood?
To the liveships it does. Or it can. Because under the right circumstances, they can gain direct access to the memories of the dead dragon whose husk was used to build them. When this happens, they realize—or perhaps decide?—that they are dead, that their lives as ships, as the person they had been, are false, a dishonor to the memory of what they might have been. They renounce their identity built from their liveship existence, but have nothing to replace it with other than the knowledge that their intended life as a dragon has been stolen from them. It is like a kind of madness, or a return to sanity. Or a shattering of delusions that is worse than madness. One finds oneself wondering if such a revelation is responsible for Paragon’s current state.
These three themes (acceptance, rescue, and personhood) wind together as sinuously as any sea serpent. Memory builds the personhood that defines the liveships, built from the bodies of dead dragons; but it also defines the sea serpents that follow behind the liveships, feasting on the bodies of dead humans—and, at times, the wizardwood of liveships too. Because the serpents’ memories are faulty. They have no adult dragons to guide them back to their nesting places, and so they stagnate, withering, losing themselves, forgetting their names. They cease to be people, and become instead beasts. Then toward the end, Wintrow comes across a trapped sea serpent, one which carries the memories that are necessary to keep the other serpents aware long enough for them to find their way back to the Rain Wild River. Being Wintrow, he naturally frees the trapped serpent (rescue again!), thus making it possible for these lost creatures to find a guide and make their way home before their identities are lost forever.
And finally, while I’m talking about what this book does so well, let me take a moment to discuss Malta. Remember Malta? The unspeakable brat? She begins her transformation in this book. The pivotal moment, as I see it, is on page 319, when she sneaks out to meet a suitor, the brother of one of her friends, named Cerwin. Certainly she goes about it in a very Malta-ish way. She flirted with Cerwin, and in her head she knows exactly how she wants Cerwin to behave. She wants him to be big and manly and passionate with her, to see her as a mistreated maiden sacrifice who must marry for the sake of her family’s welfare, while simultaneously calculating every facial expression, every gesture, every apparently unconscious movement. She presents herself as someone who needs rescuing, (rescue!), and presents an identity built upon lies (personhood!). Yet when Cerwin falls for her manipulations and asks how he can serve her, she does not ask for something selfish. She is smart: she asks him to persuade his father to come to a Bingtown Council Meeting to support her family’s agenda about slave trading and pirates. This is the moment when Malta stops thinking of herself, stops wallowing in frustration about what she cannot have. Instead, she accepts (accepts!) the hand that she is dealt and puts to use her wiles and manipulations and skills at bending people to her will.
Do you see? Do you see how it all intersects? And I’ve left so much out! And Book 3 has so much more! The more I write about this series, the more I am agog at this astonishing tapestry Hobb has woven. I’ll see you next month to talk about Book 3, Ship of Destiny.
Reference: Hobb, Robin. Mad Ship [Bantam, 1999].
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
