Review: Assassin's Apprentice

Assassin's Apprentice by Robin Hobb
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

This is as close as any contemporary writer I know gets to George R.R. Martin’s Game of Thrones work. I mean that as praise – and I certainly enjoyed reading this – but it’s tainted a little by the fundamental problem of the genre: books that seem bulked up just to feel weighty.

Some people refer to what Martin and Hobb and their rivals are doing as “high fantasy,” fantasy that deals with the politics of competing kingdoms, but I wonder whether it might be better simply to call it “fat fantasy.” We’re invited to read, and read, and read some more about a world different from our own. The joy of it is getting lost in an imaginary place, one reminiscent of our own but also full of possibilities we can never know. That generally means magic, swords, and exotic creatures.

Some of the best-sellers in the field take that imperative of the genre, start at ’10,’ and then amp it up higher still. In the days when audio books meant bundles of cassette tapes you could get only at the public library, I went through a lot of those writers. Robert Jordan’s Wheel of Time, Terry Goodkind’s Sword of Truth, and Stephen R. Donaldson’s Covenant – to say nothing of R.A Salvatore or Brandon Sanderson whom I’ve skipped – all seem to follow the same pattern. While there may be occasional jokes, the books themselves are fundamentally humorless. They learn that from Tolkien, of course, but they don’t bring his deeper substance. Instead, we get lurid stories of entire worlds at risk from some dark evil.

Martin solved that problem by doing away with “good” and “evil” altogether. His battles are between equally flawed people. Joe Abercrombie does some of the same in his First Law stuff, and to his credit, he brings a sustained irony to the stuffy business. But, in some ways, Hobb is simply a better writer of “fat fantasy” right now than anyone other than Martin. Her books are loooong, but they’re subtle, too. And not even Martin is especially subtle.

What Hobb does best is take the convention and rebuild it from the ground up. The conflicts we see aren’t universe-shaking. They’re rivalries within and between kingdoms. The kingdoms aren’t glittering empires like Tolkien’s; instead, they’re reasonable states that flourish or fall because of a rich but accessible economy. Martin does something similar, of course, but his characters are facing apocalypse. Hers are just wrestling with saving their own lives and possibly keeping the kingdom from falling into the hands of a narcissist.

Her magic isn’t overwhelming. (Another positive feature of Martin and Abercrombie.) There’s a consistency in “the wit” and “the skill.” Each offers power but ultimately turns on making it possible for someone no longer to be alone. It’s a notion of radical communion, tempered by the possibility of the strong controlling the weak, and it gives the novels a dash of philosophy: what does it mean to be closed within ones self when it’s possible to imagine weaving into another consciousness. That plays out at the level of the ‘magic,’ but more impressively it plays out in the larger story as well. The conflict between princes is all about whether to trust others or not, whether, as Black Panther puts it, to build bridges or put up barriers when things get troubling.

And, most impressively, Hobb makes the “fat-ness” of such fantasy relevant as well. Instead of what they call “world-building” – which I take as providing material that ought to be in footnotes – she takes time to admire a world that already feels built. Her best descriptions aren’t exotic but homely. She makes the smells and sounds of a stable come alive. She describes rooms that aren’t that different from the ones of our own world. She talks of a loneliness that’s familiar in the midst of a world that gestures toward the strange.

Anyway, there is a story here, one that unfolds very slowly. Hobb is a gifted enough writer to pull that narrative tease off, though, and the final quarter brings it all to a head. (And, semi-spoiler, the end is a deeply satisfying gesture to the power of “the wit,” that first and more natural power that Fitz discovers.)

This is roughly 450 pages and, in the end, it really just sets up the volumes that follow. I’ve read one of those out of sequence, and I know it holds up as well. So, as a bottom line, know what you’re getting into. This is long and slow, but it’s as good as the genre has given us. I always feel a little guilty surrendering to this sort of narrative, but I also know – in the hands of someone as talented as Hobb – that I’m not going to get let down here.


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