Review: Assassin's Quest

Assassin's Quest by Robin Hobb
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

I guess it’s a reflection of the low-bar I have in mind for “high fantasy” work that this strikes me overall as pretty solid work. I continue to be impressed with Hobb’s ability to paint a scene from her imagined world with the kind of relevant detail that makes it seem to come to life. Even at her worst – and this is the worst of the four Hobb books I’ve read – she has a gift for solid writing that puts her in the forefront of this genre.

I have long complained about the slowness that grips her work – I can’t believe a good editor couldn’t cut out 30 to 50 percent – but until now she has avoided the writerly sin that plagues others I’ve read in this vein. (I’m tempted to call it “Jordaning” after Robert Jordan who swelled his promising Wheel of Time stuff from what should have been a 1200-page book – still quite long – to 12 novels of 800-1000 pages each. Yeah, I jumped off that wheel, but not without the frustration that he had a shot at something as excellent as Dune, the first one, if only he’d had a clue how to stay focused.)

That is, she pursues tangents to the central story line that serve little purpose in moving the plot forward but that certainly thicken the spine of the published book. Here, she sends Fitz off on a “fool’s errand” to kill Regal. It takes up about the first quarter of the book, and it proves both fruitless and pointless. SPOILER: By the end of the book, we learn that keeping Regal alive and skilling him into submission is a far better revenge and a far more responsible move. Well before the end, we discover that Fitz should be on his way to find and serve Verity; anything else is self- and nation-destructive. I can see that from page one, and Fitz sees it eventually, but we have to go through 200 pages before he gets it.

That kind of digression – and it’s the longest but not the only, there are all sorts of 20-page experiences where they explore inconsequential places or build-up to events that aren’t worth the attention when they do occur – hurts the narrative, but it also hurts the premise. I don’t enjoy feeling “Jordaned” (in one book, he spent hundreds of pages marching an army across his continent only to have them get to the end and turn around – and they were an army so much less powerful than the forces of the world that it never made sense in the first place why they were involved) as a reader, but, more subtly, I find myself questioning the otherwise dependable perspective of Fitz. I like that he’s flawed, that he doesn’t understand other people and that he lets his passions get him into trouble, but I trust he is still bottom-line smart enough to get the big things right. In the first quarter of this, though, he’s just so foolishly caught up in his plan that I want nothing to do with him. If I hadn’t already invested 1100+ pages in him, I’d have bailed. (I might have bailed anyway if not for Hobbs’s generally fine writing at the basic sentence level.)

Alongside that core flaw there is the further frustration that this becomes increasingly a kind of “Deliverance meets the Lord of the Rings.” Fitz or Night Eyes endures terrible beatings all the time. We get arrows in the back, beatings to unconsciousness, and grievous loss of blood and strength. Our main characters come within millimeters of death every couple hundred pages, but they always rally. Hobb tells us about their suffering and maiming in gruesome slowness, but then, without any comparable attention to their recovery, they pull off feats of deep endurance the next time they’re called to do so.

I’ve led mostly with the complaints. In the end, I do think Hobbs’s vision has some compelling elements. SPOILER: Her notion of what it means to wake a dragon grows thoughtfully out of the theme she’s been pursuing throughout the trilogy: the challenge to find a way to connect with others. The magics of the skill and the wit accomplish some of that, but the work of opening up to someone else is itself a powerful magic. (The scene where he connects with Kettle, opening the burn of her skill-mind, is one to think about. In the end, beyond the magics in play, Fitz has to be able to hear a frightened other in order to bring her around.) One wakens a dragon then, by giving up ones entire humanity. You put your life – not your strength but your memories, joys, and hopes – into something inert and that quickens it. The process isn’t all positive. It means dying. It means, as we see from the resting place of the older dragons, turning eventually to a kind of stone that hungers for more life.

(A further SPOILER complaint: since it turns out to be so easy to wake the other dragons – to put blood on them and use some fire or some fairly simple combination – why does Verity have to sacrifice himself to become a new one? I get that it makes for a better story, but it’s a narrative clumsiness Hobb falls into. As a free editorial suggestion, wouldn’t it work to require a new dragon to wake the old ones?)

Anyway, it staggers me to think there are another nine or twelve after this one. I’ve enjoyed these three enough to finish them – and that’s no small matter given how long and sometimes tendentious they are – but I can’t see going on. I might take 15 minutes some time to read a few reviews and see what I missed, but I’m done. It’s a shame that Hobb, who really does seem more talented than the others in this genre, is invited to write such long works. I feel as if her work, and the whole genre, would be better served with tighter writing and a commitment to better editing.


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