One of these days, I’ll write a review for a recent, relevant book, and it might finally get half as many clicks as me shitting on RF Kuang (I’m so sorry, Rebecca). I’d actually been sitting on plans to review The Adventures of Amina Al-Sirafi for a good year now. Trouble is, the more books and series I read like Book of The New Sun and Robin Hobb’s Realm of the Elderlings, the more my grading system gets thrown out of whack, because they push what I consider a 5/5.
The Farseer trilogy follows FitzChivalry, a royal bastard who becomes trained as an assassin to serve the throne, as he stumbles into conspiracies and ancient mysteries, taps into forbidden magic, and saves his kingdom from ruin at the hands of raiders. I’ll be giving one score across the whole series, but I’ll dip into each book while trying to avoid major spoilers.
Book one, Assassin’s Apprentice, had the working title of Chivalry’s Bastard, which is significantly more evocative of the actual book’s contents and is cool as hell. It’s a slow start to a slow series. While I’ve heard plenty of people saying the pace put them off after 50 pages, Hobb’s prose got its hooks in me instantly. The warmth and sensory details of its opening scene still sticks with me over a year on. At the same time, the prose isn’t as difficult as Gene Wolfe’s or Tolkien’s. She has a lush and timeless style that I’ve shamelessly ripped off tried to emulate in my own writing.
We spend years with Fitz as he grows from a six-year-old dumped at a military outpost of the Six Duchies to a young assassin and King’s Man. If you like training arcs, you’ll love this book. We get pages and pages of his training in subterfuge and poisoning from the throne’s assassin, and Fitz is also trained in the Skill (and abused horribly, but that’s just how this series goes), a sort of telepathy-based magic system. At the same time, stable master and Fitz’s adoptive sorta-dad disabuses him from using his inborn talent for the Wit, an empathy-based beast-magic. In the background, raiders from the north begin attacking the coastal duchies. They’ve devised a way to strip their captives of their humanity, then set them loose on the coast again as violent savages.
There are a lot of threads. All of the above, though, will come into play again and again—and I haven’t told you of most of the plot details, like Fitz’s heinous, overly-ambitious uncle Regal (who’s a bitchy fop, of course I love him). While it felt as I read that I couldn’t parse what the plot was beyond Fitz growing up and learning, at the end the series I can see that it all was the plot, it’s just a very long one.
Royal Assassin, while a very beefy book compared to Assassin’s Apprentice, starts to hit the gas. The Red Ship Raiders’ attacks move to the forefront of the story as we follow Fitz into manhood. With enemies at home making moves for the throne and enemies on the coast, Fitz deals with it the only way a guy his age can: get into a toxic relationship and buy a cool wolf. King-in-waiting Verity, Fitz’s uncle and next in line for the throne, takes off to find the mythical Elderlings and enlist their help. Everything falls apart immediately.
While I usually read a light breather book between heavier reads, I jumped straight into Assassin’s Quest. It’s a 326K-word (maybe, I see several estimates) chunk of a book which I finished in about two weeks. Fitz sets off on a quest of revenge, then is Skill-jerked in a different direction to help Verity on his quest to rally the Elderlings’ aid. Hundreds of pages of buildup culminates in a climax that’s, admittedly, a little rushed, completely nuts, and had me reeling. I probably cried three times.
Throughout the trilogy, Fitz is put through the wringer again and again. Hobb kills the same dog twice, somehow. I was perpetually afraid people he loved would die, because why wouldn’t they? I even believed our first-person narrator might die, even if that made no sense with the framing device, because of how grim things got.
There’s always, however, a sense of security in some corner of the Six Duchies. Fitz has as many allies as he does enemies and people who love him, even as he tries to refuse that fact. Hobb gives us respite with characters who are likable and complicated. There’s light at the end of each book (save for Royal Assassin, but at least not all is lost). At points, Hobb catches me off guard with comic relief. A theme of empathy and connection to others runs strong through the series; that’s the basis for her magic systems, and it’s what the Red Ship Raiders take away from those they capture. Every time I feel she’s pushing me a little too far tonally, she steps back, and the result is a book that’s very cathartic at points. The ending left me missing Fitz and everyone else, though I’ll have to stay away a while longer to read the Liveship Traders series (and the thousand other books on my TBR).
Stepping back from the feelings the books left me with, I’ll give the Farseer trilogy a 4.5/5. There are points that could’ve been tightened up. A chunk of Royal Assassin is spent spinning wheels, and Assassin’s Quest probably could’ve done with a little less of its midsection. This still might be my favourite trilogy yet, and from what I’ve heard, the Liveship Traders trilogy might be Hobb’s best work of the series. If you’re a patient reader with a fondness for good prose and deep characters, who doesn’t shy away from some darkness, I can’t recommend dipping into Realm of the Elderlings with this first trilogy enough.
