Author : Robin Hobb
Description : I've discovered something about Robin Hobb, something that has recoloured my view of Golden Fool. Hobb writes slow-paced character studies that emphasize that character over the action. She writes about relationships, and she writes them very effectively. I still found Golden Fool to be too slow with the character interaction not as interesting as she has shown she is capable of. However, I now have a bit more of an understanding of it. That is because I read the third book in the series, Fool's Fate. This book is more of the same, but I found it much more interesting. Fitzchivalry Farseer is still going through rough times, but it seems to have more of a point to it than it did in the second book.
Fool's Fate seems very unusual in that the "climax" of the book takes place almost two-thirds of the way through the book, with the rest of it dealing with all the scattered pieces of Fitz's life that Hobb has left and how Fitz attempts to put them back together. This is where I realized what the point of this series was. It wasn't just the story of a dragon-quest and a political alliance. It was the story of how far Fitz has come since the events in the first Assassin series, a story of relationships. The dragon is important, but only in relation to Fitz and Dutiful and the past that Fitz has to face. The pace of the book is extremely slow, but Hobb's strong writing makes it interesting (unlike the second book, which I think just came across as too depressing to be interesting). The text is dense and you won't plow through it in a day or two. That could be a fault if you don't like that sort of thing. I do, when it's done well, so I loved it.
Another strength that Fool's Fate had that Golden Fool didn't have was that it didn't seem as contrived. Many times in the previous book, Fitz had to be spying a lot so that the reader could understand what was going on. He was constantly sneaking through the secret passages in the castle so that he could watch, for example, the Bingtown Traders come for an audience with the Queen. That's a hazard of writing in the first person, and I thought it let Hobb down in the second. Not this time. There is a little bit of spying, but not a lot. Exposition isn't quite as necessary in Fool's Fate, it being much more immediate to Fitz. He's also directly involved a lot more, so what exposition there is comes more from a character relating the story to Fitz. In large doses this would be tiresome too, but Hobb minimizes it.
All of the characters are extremely interesting and three-dimensional. The only one who gets short shrift is the villain of the piece. I realize that's because she isn't that important in the grand scheme of things, but considering how evil she is and some of the things she does, I found the cursory way she was dealt with disappointing. Her influence is felt more in the surroundings than it is directly by her actions, and this is actually quite effective. Consider her even, with both a huge plus and a huge minus. Every other character, however, is far up on the plus scale.
The only other character fault is Thick, but it's not because he's badly characterized. He actually gets a lot of development and is one of the most three-dimensional characters in the bunch. However, I just found him annoying. His constant whining about not getting on a boat, constantly being sick, his single-mindedness, all of it was just aggravating. If he doesn't reach your annoyance threshold, then you will like this book even more then I did. And I did like it a lot.
The relationship between the Fool and Fitz is very touching, a love that goes beyond lovers and even beyond family. I think that one of the strengths of Fool's Fate was that they weren't at each other's throats so much as they were in the second book. Their relationship colours everything else in the book, and the book lives or dies on it. They have their arguments in this one, but you don't feel like the heart has been ripped out of the book. What happens is almost tragic, and the way the relationship is left feels almost fitting. It's an ending and a beginning, and they have to decide whether being together will be part of that.
Finally, Hobb does a wonderful job with pulling together all of her series. If you read this series first, you will find out a lot of what happens in the first Assassin series, but that's not necessarily a bad thing. She ties together that series and the Bingtown Traders one into a cohesive whole, using elements of everything to leave the world in a different place than when she started. She also ends it fairly definitively, so there doesn't appear any chance of a sequel.
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