A review of Assassin's Apprentice by Robin Hobb

Title: Assassin's Apprentice

Author: Robin Hobb

Publisher: Bantam / Spectra

Cover art: (Michael Whelan) We don't like it at all as middle-aged adults who have to carry it around on a plane trying to disguise it; the art is so firmly entrenched in the "adolescent fantasy" genre it will turn away many, many adult readers

Length: 435 pages in mass-market paperback

Rating

5 out of 7 (Some of most drop-dead gorgeous writing anywhere but the plot is too straitly formulaic for our highest ratings.)

Variations on this Theme

The Tears of Artamon by Sarah Ash (4/7 Inchoatus rating)

The Belgariad by David Eddings

The Riftwar Saga by Raymond Feist

Tales of the Otori by Lian Hearn (4/7 Inchoatus rating)

The Earthsea Cycle by Ursula K. Leguin (6/7 Inchoatus rating)

"This really is a good book. It’s filled with interesting and vivid characters, a realistic setting, and plenty of intrigue to keep you interested. If you’ve tired of the cliched elf-filled fantasy that clogs your bookstore shelves, give Assassin Apprentice [sic] a try. You will be entertained."

--Pixel Planet

This review isn't necessarily bad--it's just so unhelpful! If  Inchoatus ever descends to the point where the most constructive and final thing we can say about a novel is "give it a try" and "you will be entertained" then one can say that we've run our course and should be put out to pasture. Most particularly charming is "This really is a good book." Really. We assume they mean, "We mean it this time" and one wonders regarding the reliability of their other reviews.

"Who is Robin Hobb? No one seems to really know for sure. 'Robin Hobb' supposedly is a pseudonym, and if so, it's a clever one ('robin,' as in 'Robin Goodfellow' and 'hob' are both names for forest sprites). The true identity of Robin Hobb has been rumored to be anyone from Melanie Rawn to Guy Gavriel Kay. Though it's within the powers of both Rawn and Kay to have written this book, I don't think either of them did. Whatever we don't know about Hobb, we do know this: Mr. or Ms. Hobb spins a compelling yarn."

--Sara Lipowitz, flowerfire.com

This is what set us off on our weekly insight regarding gender of author. Clearly, authorial identity is quite important to Lipowitz to the distraction of her review: the rest of the review is strictly plot summary with the odd comment tacked on to the end about fast-paced adventure. It's also out-of-date: there is a photo of Robin Hobb, plus her publishing history under the name Megan Lindholm (she is quite prolific) readily available at wikipedia. (Incidentally, the new pseudonym makes a review by Roland Green in Booklist particularly funny when he says the novel reads like a "first novel"--in fact, it was at least her eleventh at the time.) In our view, a work of literature should largely stand on its own irrespective of publishing pedigree or any other notion. We are not fans of biographical readings nor particularly interested in political or socio-economic interpretations where they are unwarranted. In its worst cases, these kinds of reviews can actually be harmful to the genre.

"As for psychological realism, Fitz himself is described in a very believable way. I don't know how it comes female authors often describe men's feelings better than male does, but it's a fact. Strangely enough, it is the women who are hard to understand. But maybe that is because it is all written from Fitz' perspective. That he doesn't understand women is quite obvious. How well Ms Hobb understands animals, I don't know. But she certainly has got a lot of ideas about how different animals think and communicate."

--Karl Henriksson

At least Henriksson is launching a useful discussion--female authors tend to write about men's feelings better than men do, he announces. Well, we might argue that a bit. However, the portion we disagree with is that gender in authors actually matters (and why, suddenly, when a female author publishes does this subject suddenly come up?). Great authors are able to transcend gender, in our opinion, and touch upon archetypes that reach everyone. Elaine Showalter would disagree with us on this, claiming a certain portion of feminine space that is female alone and that men can never touch (the seminal example: Jane Eyre by Charlotte Brontë). Her cordoned area set aside, however, we think that most critics would agree that the very great authors: Shakespeare, Chaucer, etc. are able to speak about women and from a women's perspective that is quite enlightening. On another odd note in this review, Henriksson announces we're in a "golden age" of fantasy. To this, we sharply dissent. Any era where Terry Brooks, Terry Goodkind, and Robert Jordan can publish seemingly endless serials of derivative novels to an all-to-willing public cannot be termed a golden age.

Hobb is an extraordinary author. Her writing is exquisite in every sense of the word: it is richly detailed, precise in every adjective and depiction of a moment, the flawless pacing and meshing of timelines. Her work has garnered a considerable following in a very short period of time and it is very well-deserved. The thrilling rush of her pacing, plot, and craftsmanship is something that's a match for one of the principal "thrill-rides" of all time: Ender's Game; except that Hobb's writing is much more finely honed than Orson Scott Card's and her work more fulfilling in many ways. At her best moments, her writing is as carefully constructed as George RR Martin's (A Game of Thrones) and if it is less sprawling in the sense of grandiose epic histories it is because we are tightly constrained in the first person of Fitz.

The novel itself contains an historical origin and that is the history of the Six Duchies. The historian is a presumably aged man named Fitz whose scholarly history duels intensely with a very personal autobiography over the same stretch of time. Headnotes in the chapter serve as historical treatments with the autobiographical pieces served as a narrative background filling in the rich details surrounding the dry histories. The retrospective (and often very acidic) attitude Fitz takes towards his own history is seasoned by the dry scholarly headnotes in ways that help create the perfect pacing of the novel and give it a nostalgic, regretful pitch whose somber flavor is a trademark of very good fantasy fiction. 

Apprentice opens with the delivery of a nameless bastard child to the garrison outpost of the heir to the throne of the Six Duchies (the federated kingdom that serves as the setting--we're not sure if "The Six Duchies" are accidentally similar in name to "The Seven Kingdoms" of Martin's A Song of Ice and Fire). This boy--unwittingly--brings about a great deal of political tumult in a very short period of time, upsetting the line of succession, the diplomatic relations of the time, the marriage of the heir, and the livelihood of the heir's lieutenant who now must serve as a surrogate father. The story will trace his childhood, his struggles at court, and a coming-of-age that ripples with all the self-discovery, regret, and longing amusement of the adult looking fondly back upon a childhood. Yet that childhood is charged with the intrigues of court and the wars of kingdoms that is another trademark of very good fantasy fiction.

Here, Hobb's writing is striking and resonant as the tolling of a bell. As an example, consider these first moments of the historian taking ink to paper:

My pen falters, then falls from my knuckly grip, leaving a worm's trail of ink across Fedwren's paper. I have spoiled another leaf of the fine stuff, in what I suspect is a futile endeavor. I wonder if I can write this history, or if on every page there will be some sneaking show of a bitterness I thought long dead. I think myself cured of all spite, but when I touch pen to paper, the hurt of a boy bleeds out with the sea-spawned ink, until I suspect each carefully formed black letter scabs over some ancient scarlet wound.

That, Dear Reader, is some of the finest writing that exists in contemporary fiction. Compare this to the notable Gene Wolfe in his opening to The Book of the Short Sun: 

Reviewing what I wrote yesterday, I see that I have begun without plan or foresight, and in fact without the least notion of what I was trying to do or why I was trying to do it. That is how I have begun everything in life. Perhaps I need to begin before I can think clearly about the task. The chief thing is to begin, after all--after which the chief thing is to finish. I have finished worse than I began, for the most part.

It is all in the pen case. You have to take out the ink and string it together into the right shapes. That is all.

Wolfe is regarded as one of the greatest in the genre and Hobb matches him in these very similar lines: in the regret, the doubt, and the shocking juxtaposition of this literal ink becoming something metaphysical in the minds of readers. For Hobb, all of her writing is redolent of these opening lines. These are crystalline moments of discovery and realization that don't have the shocking avalanche quality of Tolkien's eucatastrophe but rather behave more like the subtle idea of rainfall where each drop of crystalline rain shatters in small, pattering epiphanies drenching the reader in the youth's coming-of-age. Hobb is writing very firmly in "coming-of-age" concept and it is discovering yourself through the eyes of another that truly make such books remarkable and memorable. Where FitzChivalry is not quite a match for, say, Holden Caulfield of Catcher in the Rye, his deeds and his moments will resonate and soak the experience of the reader several days after the event of reading.

Hobb is equally adept at creating narrative voices. While she doesn't have the broad skill of Wolfe in creating voices or Tolkien's careful sense of diction, her characters speak appropriately to their upbringing and station (nothing is more irritating than hearing an unschooled servant speak in courtly tones). Occasionally in this novel, Hobb will give voice to the impressions of animals and here she seems most especially skilled in creating heated moments of sensation and emotion. Perhaps most refreshing of all, after the R-rated excesses of authors as good as George RR Martin, China Mieville, and Stephen R Donaldson to the depredations of pulp authors like Terry Goodkind and Robert Jordan, Hobb's work is entirely absent of profanity, of rape, of nudity, or any other of a host of ills that seem to besiege the fantasy genre. While her characters are not perfectly chaste, nor pure, nor free of evil, the author is at least circumspect and the heroes of the novel are true heroes.

This is only the first book in the trilogy, but as a novel by itself it creates a sense of self-contained purpose and closure. Where it falters is due to its own familiarity. The tale is one of noble birth saddled with ignoble upbringings, of latent talents in budding princes, of political turmoil in a court of a kingdom beset by foreign enemies, and of internal enemies corrupted by jealousy and envy. This is the well-trodden path of any of countless fantasy novels, a few of the more well known we listed. That it is so perfectly crafted makes it a fine book. Even its familiarity can lend a certain enjoyment to the reading (certainly, luminaries such as Shakespeare made very good use of retelling known tales in new ways). Yet it is hard for us to anticipate this book having any long-lasting effect on the genre when it is exactly so familiar. It is like going to a house where you are intimately familiar with the floor-plan and go to appreciate the décor and furnishings. Does knowing the floor-plan diminish the pleasure in viewing the artwork? No, of course not. But at the same time, this house is not going to change the course of architecture itself.

In the end, we give our highest ratings to those books we feel might change the course of the genre itself; whose imagination bursts out of the constraining walls in which critical theory and publishing houses hold it and recast the landscape. In short, we want to see the anxiety their influence will cause other authors (with nods again to Harold Bloom's work in The Anxiety of Influence). We just don't see Hobb's work--at this point in the trilogy at least--causing such an agon on future authors. Thus, we award it a (very good, for us) rating of 5 based upon its exceptional capacity as a fantasy thrill-ride but cannot give it a higher rating as a genre-shaping event--despite the fact that her writing is probably match for any that we have rated higher.

We look for mighty things to be coming from Hobb in future publications.

We cannot praise highly enough Hobb's craftsmanship. This is beautiful, artistic writing. Yet our critical opinion is geared towards the agenda of how future works will be forced to deal with the innovations of prior authors. Hobb's work, because it so firmly grounded in the formula of fantasy fiction--a road so well-trodden its rut has carved out for itself whole shelves of imitation works on popular bookstore shelves--we think that there is little here that will be passed on to future authors. People will read these books, adore these books, and Hobb's writing will be held up in writer's workshops as some of the finest examples in the industry. Yet without that burst of creative energy to propel the ideas in her novel out of this rut we don't ultimately see it as having a profound effect.

While adults can and should enjoy these novels, those most enthusiastic will be readers who enjoy coming-of-age novels and are either very well-versed in fantasy fiction of unused to fantasy fiction. Readers who have not been exposed to Raymond Feist, David Eddings, Terry Brooks and the countless others will find these books suffused with creativity and drama. Most particularly, readers who have read and enjoyed Leguin's Earthsea cycle and Lian Hearn's Tales of the Otori will find the emotional agon and more thoughtful perspectives of the protagonists very compelling. Those readers intimately familiar with these themes should read Hobb to discover how alive they can still become in the hands of a very skilled craftsman.

This is heroic literature and deals with ideal themes. It is also, as a coming-of-age work, geared towards the egocentrism of youths. For those readers searching for works dealing with more amoral or ambiguous ethical characteristics in the works, then they would be better served by other authors. Readers who are customarily derisive of fantasy fiction in general may take a look at these books to perceive that very, very good authors exist and thrive in the genre but will probably ultimately be unimpressed with the material and should try something a little more cutting edge in which to apply their more snobby literary sensibilities.