2016 read #47: Assassin's Apprentice by Robin Hobb.

Assassin's Apprentice by Robin Hobb
356 pages
Published 1995
Read from June 5 to June 9
Rating: ★★★½ out of 5

It's been a while since I've finished a book, hasn't it? After the astounding badness of The Wind Whales of Ishmael, I floundered for a few days, unable to lose myself in any of the mediocre fantasy novels I had on hand. I sunk quite a bit of time into struggling through Emma Bull's Bone Dance before admitting defeat. (Maybe I'll finish it later on, but I wouldn't get my hopes up.)

Lots of people have recommended Robin Hobb's Assassin novels to me, the Farseer trilogy in particular, so to get out of this slump, I decided to give it a go. It's interesting to compare Apprentice to Hobb's earlier work, as well as to the state of epic fantasy in general circa the mid-'90s. Wizard of the Pigeons (written as Megan Lindholm) was an early urban fantasy novel published nearly a decade previously, but nonetheless there are certain strands of continuity between the two, most evident perhaps in Hobb/Lindholm's preoccupation with drug use as a coping mechanism, and the way the central characters' minds can be turned against them, manipulating their sense of reality. It surprised me not a bit that the author of Pigeons would produce a book like Apprentice when she turned to more traditional, secondary-world fantasy. (I should note that I haven't read the more traditional fantasy novels written as Lindholm.)

Epic fantasy was undergoing something of a boom in the '90s, with Apprentice coming onto a scene newly populated by The Eye of the World (1990) and Wizard's First Rule (1994), followed soon after by A Game of Thrones (1996). Apprentice's focus on dynastic politics nudges it a bit closer to Game of Thrones than to the others, and Hobb's prose quality, while not profoundly literary, blows the rest of them out of the water. Its relatively small cast of characters and focus on a single strand of plot, however, give it the feel of an older fantasy novel -- a perception heightened by the villainous mind-altering marauders on their Red-Ships, which could have sailed almost unimpeded out of a midcentury sword-and-sorcery serial. The book's Big Bads, despite the existential peril of turning innocent villagers into libertarians, kind of hold Apprentice back; I was most engaged when Fitz was relating the quotidian dramas and small details of a bastard child's life at court, and found my attention wandering whenever the magical threat sailed into view. Our bastard-born narrator's mastery of multiple forms of magical mind-power felt a bit cheap, as well. We get it already, he's a magical superhero. He was more interesting living in the kennels and barely speaking a word.

Perhaps it isn't fair to reduce Apprentice to a point of comparison, as it deserves high praise by epic fantasy standards: It has a unique feel and stands on its own, unlike the Tolkien fanfic of Jordan or the Randian masturbation of Goodkind. I don't know how many of these books I'm going to read -- Hobb has written a lot of them -- but I look forward to finishing this trilogy, at the very least.