A review of Assassin's Quest by Robin Hobb

Title: Assassin's Quest

Author: Robin Hobb

Publisher: Bantam / Spectra

Cover art: (Stephen Youll) The horror! The horror! Looking like some woebegone actor from a Gilmore Girls casting call we get this absurdity. Perhaps it's Fitz (although Verity gets the silver hand, not Fitz) with the dragon in the background with that... that yellow. Hobb continues to suffer from her cover art more than anything else.

Length: 757 pages in mass-market paperback

Rating

6 out of 7 (Despite a couple of wobbles, Assassin's Quest creates a full triumph out of The Farseer Trilogy. It is a match for George RR Martin, Stephen R Donaldson, and some of the best writing in the fantasy genre.)

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)

"But all the wonder in this make-believe world can't cloak the bittersweet lesson at the story's heart: that the pursuit of truth demands a price in loneliness only a few can or will pay."

--Publisher's Weekly

Hot damn! When the pros get it right, it's just a pleasure to read. There are two excellent things about this statement. First, it's a true and accurate statement of the book. What Fitz shows us, without any of the sneering that characterizes books that sets mob against mobility (see Terry Goodkind for the most egregious examples of this sneering) we find the loneliness and sacrifice that characterizes power. Suffering abounds for the elite in ways the peasantry cannot imagine. Second is that PW dared to announce this--a high literary theme--and attach it to a fantasy book. As we've been saying and re-stating with all we can, there is some excellent, excellent work going on in speculative fiction that would be a shame to ignore. This series--mostly based on the merit of this book--proves it.

"A hero who invariably triumphs over all challenges is a sure sign of a second-rate writer. Hobb isn't afraid to let FitzChivalry fail, yet his failures do not diminish him. He is sometimes stubborn, often wrong, and frequently tormented by regrets, but he remains likable, intelligent and interesting. Hobb doesn't shirk either from an even harder task: acknowledging that the journey must scar the hero, and sometimes others must benefit from his labours."

--Katherine Mills, sfsite.com

As with any great work of literature, the characters must drive the story and linger with us. Too often, the setting and the imagination is deemed everything in speculative fiction. The genre is riddled with praised works who are long in setting and very short in characters. Inchoatus routinely punishes those books. Mills, in her review, very accurately acknowledges that Fitz drives The Farseer. While this may seem obvious (the tale is, after all, told in the first-person from Fitz with himself as the main protagonist) what is important about The Farseer is that it is Fitz that is important. Not the imagined world of the Six Duchies, not the Wit, not the Skill, not the red raiders or anything else that has to do with what places this book in the fantasy genre. It is for Fitz that we read. What Mills is sensing about this work is that important aspect of literariness that propels this work in to something that really is important.

Quest finishes The Farseer trilogy and ends one of the more remarkable offerings in fantasy literature that has been recently published. Despite any other criticisms we might have of the trilogy as a whole, it has at the very least raised it’s head above the standard offering and distinguished itself in style, in writing, and in imaginative force.

Quest takes up precisely where Royal Assassin left off: Fitz has received a kind of resurrection at the hands of Burrich and Chade after his torturous ordeal with Regal and his failed attempt at a well-intentioned coup d’etat. The opening section which serves as a bridge between Royal and Quest is an astonishment in itself. Royal Assassin portrayed Fitz in his culmination of the hero: he grew from bastard whelp to political force and popular noble and then fell with a swiftness, certainty, and brutality that is perhaps unrivaled in any hero’s quest we know of. From once being courted by dukes (at the end of Royal Assassin) in the opening chapters he is now barely human and it is quickly apparent that he has not only lost his prestige and his ambitions of power (such as they were) but also he has lost his courage, the very right to association with his countrymen, and elements of his own humanity. This fall is probably the single event that will linger and dwell in readers’ minds many years after the reading.

Where once the reader longed for Fitz’s ascension, Hobb opens now with the reader longing for his return to humanity. For Fitz is not really human; not anymore. Not after dwelling within Nighteyes for so long. The third part of the tale begins with a desperate attempt by Burrich to reclaim Fitz’s human sapience lost in the turgid roiling of immediacy and sensation that characterizes Nighteyes and the rest of the animals with whom Fitz has communicated with Wit. This turns out to be a thankless, grueling, and long task for Burrich as once again his patience, loyalty, and nobility are all on display Readers who deeply ponder this books will begin to understand that sacrifice comes not from only the nobility but from servants such as Burrich; his patience and the easy assumption with which the thankless nobility regard the dedication of his life towards their pursuits is a tale that echoes through many other mainstream works (perhaps most famously in The Remains of the Day).

As Fitz recovers (as we know he must) he also faces decisions about what to do. He can no longer live among people who know him for it is well-known he is Witted and his popularity has entirely reversed such that he is now a pariah. In Fitz’s recovery and his decisions about what must come next we come to one of the two flaws within this book. Hobb spends a lot of time with Fitz’s recovery, which is fascinating; the more so because it is new ground and very interesting. But then Fitz lapses in to one of the most familiar, well-trodden, and technically useless tropes of heroic literature: that of the hero railing against his fate and longing (selfishly) to be left alone. This has been seen before in Fitz and after his bid for power fails can perhaps be forgiven. But after his own loyalty towards the Farseer throne in Verity and Shrewd—not to mention his heroism in battle—have been so deeply explored (and knowing that Fitz must eventually return to his appointed path as there will be no story without it) this bout of complaining/whining is unwelcome, unpleasant, and does not thematically support the story. Despite being one of the best fantasy series written, Hobb seems unable to refrain from falling in to these traps that undermine her work.

The book truly gets underway when Fitz decides on a course of action and begins his quest. In his travels, the magnificence of Hobb’s writing comes to full flower. His relationship with Nighteyes, with the common people of the realm, in his travels and shifting companions, and his eventual meeting with The Fool, with Ketricken, and with Verity make for some of the most compelling writing yet seen in The Farseer and that is saying a lot. Once again, Hobb shows herself as a match for the best that even George RR Martin (A Song of Ice and Fire) has to offer. There is a realism—both in battle, in politics, and in economy—that pervade the travels of Fitz that is a pleasure to read.

All through The Farseer we have been very complimentary of Hobb’s technical skill and Quest does not disappoint. As the quest comes to a conclusion all the meticulous and careful groundwork she has laid through all three novels comes to bloom in some very unexpected ways. The theme of The Farseer comes to mean a kind of sacrifice that these nobles make for their people: in the explicit suffering of Fitz, in the romantic suffering of Ketricken, in the stricken nature of The Fool, and most amazingly in the sacrifices that Verity must make in the end. Their suffering (particularly when contrasted with the excesses of Regal) come to mean something quite important to the reader and becomes the very essence of the heroism that so many people crave so desperately in speculative fiction. It is the glory of these heroes (coupled with Hobbs’ craftsmanship) that propel this trilogy so pwerfully to its conclusion. When we speak of the importance of speculative fiction—particularly in the sense of (Northrop Frye’s) “high mimetic” fiction where we see people who are something more than merely human, we find the Farseer line.

By itself, rating Quest as a 6 may be just a bit of an overreach due to the wobbly beginning and an overly tidy epilogue that glosses the end of the war but as a culmination to The Farseer Trilogy as a whole it deserves every bit of its positive rating and should be held on equal footing with Martin and Donaldson (The Chronicles of Thomas Covenant) as one of the best fantasy works to have been published in recent memory. 

Where The Farseer began as a somewhat formulaic fantasy trilogy Hobb has stretched the tale in to new directions and broken new ground. It is tremendously refreshing to read a series unabashedly trditionally heroic and romantic (in the chivalric sense)  yet has a storyline that goes in new directions. We have a protagonist in Fitz who fully matures as an adult and must deal with adult themes. We have a war where the economic and psychological damage is as compelling as the carnage. We have battles that take place remotely and in a guerilla fashion without the trope of mighty sieges and liberated cities. Hobb has certainly worked from a traditional genre and borrowed from former authors but it is also the case that her work has introduced themes of heroic sacrifice and political turmoil that have not been fully explored before. She has opened new ground for future authors and by our standard where we rate books by their effect on future authors (c.f., Harold Bloom’s Anxiety of Influence) we feel her work can stand up under any criticism favorably. There is no question that future protagonists will have to stand up to Fitz as an example of the genre's most perfectly crafted hero.

As in any highly regarded and very good series of books, readers of the prior books who have enjoyed Hobb so much will have bought and read Assassin’s Quest before they’ve bothered to read any review of it. By these people, we believe that Quest will probably be regarded as the best of the three books. We also feel that this book could probably stand on its own and read in isolation. As with any third novel in a trilogy, loss of the background will result in many of the nuances of the work lost on the reader (certainly the romance between Molly and Fitz will be incomprehensible) yet it does not crucially depend upon the prior books. In a refreshing change, Hobb has written three books that work tremendously well in concert with each other but whose movements can also stand on its own. Readers who would like to explore this work need not necessarily read them in order. As a final credit to Hobb, this is an excellent book with which to introduce readers who are unfamiliar with the fantasy genre and do not believe there are any worthwhile publications within it; The Farseer Trilogy is a direct rebuttal. These books remain an excellent choice for younger (teenage) readers.

Quest is the longest book in the offering and those readers who have been very impatient with Fitz’s caviling about his responsibilities will be rather disappointed with the first third of the book (as we were to a certain extent). We don’t think the book should be avoided but certainly there will be some people who will turn away. Fans of the huge, large-scale battles that have been rendered so well in Return of the King, A Clash of Kings, and The Gates of Fire will not find that sort of display here. The Farseer Trilogy has never been about these enormous wars and epochal battles. We think these people should expand their horizons a bit but also recognize that sometimes people crave the familiar and predictable. If that means big battle scenes, this book should probably be saved for later. If you get embarrassed about cheesy cover art (because of the cover of this book is C H E E Z - Z E E E ), you’ll have to read it with a paper bag cover.