Saturday, June 04, 2022

2022/76: Assassin's Apprentice -- Robin Hobb

I’m going to be teaching you how to kill people. For your king. Not in the showy way Hod is teaching you, not on the battlefield where others see and cheer you on. No. I’ll be teaching you the nasty, furtive, polite ways to kill people. [p. 68]

The setting is a pseudomedieval world with two flavours of magic: Skill, which involves telepathy and coercion between humans, and Wit, which is more about the bonds between humans and animals. The nobility, in the Kingdom of the Six Duchies, are given names according to the virtues to which they should aspire: Shrewd (a king), Verity (a man), Patience (a woman), Regal (a villain). When Prince Chivalry's bastard child is deposited with the castle guard, he has no name. Growing up in the royal household, he becomes known as Fitz; forms a close connection with a dog named Nosy, until that connection is discovered; and is selected for training as an assassin.

There is a lot of detail in this novel, a lot of worldbuilding and politicking and machination. Hobb tells the story from the viewpoint of an older Fitz looking back on his youth, and sticks to a narrow first-person voice: no 'as I learnt later' or 'if only I had known that'. This means that there's considerable tension. I'm not sure it accounts for Fitz's precocity, though perhaps his pariah status and solitary nature inclines him to observe, reflect and extrapolate rather more than the average pre-adolescent.

The vast 'Elderlings' series of novels -- eighteen to date, mostly over 500 pages long -- is immensely popular, and has been recommended to me by many people. Assassin's Apprentice, I'm afraid, seems likely to be my sole foray into it. Fitz simply did not engage me, and the setting was so grim. Child abuse (emotional rather than sexual), animal abuse and death, child soldiers (what else is a pre-teen assassin?), enforced personality change (using magic to turn an enemy into a 'lapdog'), zombies ... No, thank you. I was intrigued by the character of the Fool, who does not seem quite human and who declaims prophecies in doggerel: but not enough to persevere with the multi-trilogy series.

Purchased in 2014 ...

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