2016 read #51: Royal Assassin by Robin Hobb.

Royal Assassin by Robin Hobb
581 pages
Published 1996
Read from June 15 to June 20
Rating: ★★★½ out of 5

Already fantasy series bloat has set in. This is just the second book in what would become a still-ongoing series, yet it's well over two hundred pages longer than the first book, and much of that extra length felt like unnecessary bulk, impediments rather than plot development, faffing about instead of making stuff happen. The narrator mentions at several points that this seems to be the longest winter of his life, and at times it seems like the reader is forced to experience this first-hand. With so much dithering, the series' weaknesses become harder to ignore, in particular a primary villain stamped ready-made from the "simpering, sneering, sadistic, not-quite-manly, if you know what I mean" cliché that has been unfortunately coded into fantasy fiction since the days of Robert E. Howard. There's also a double-barreled cliché in the form of a Magical Albino who is also a jester speaking in prophetic nonsense, and a world imperiled by a mysterious race from a far land who seem motivated only by wanton chaos and destruction.

(Permit me a moment to note how many strands of this series are reminiscent of its near-contemporary, A Song of Ice and Fire: The Red-Ships vs. the Others, Forging vs. ice zombies, the Fool vs. Patchface, the Wit vs. Warging, the general tableau of petty dynastic politics against a background of existential annihilation. The cover of the third Farseer novel suggests that dragons will have a role in saving everybody in the end, as well. Thanks for the spoilers there, cover artist. Anyway, the Farseer Trilogy pulls its punches almost every time -- no one stays dead, so much like the later Ice and Fire books, nothing that happens seems to have any stakes behind it, but that does differentiate Farseer from the first three Ice and Fire books, at least.)

Despite all that, Royal Assassin didn't seem like that much of a step down from the first Farseer novel. Largely I credit the fact that when the payoffs do come, however long delayed, they satisfy. Fitz has too many psychic superpowers to be at a disadvantage for long, and for much of the book his greatest nemesis is his own adolescent obtuseness, but the wider plots swirling around him have a sort of compelling inevitability, setting our heroes back despite all their easy victories close to home. Fitz's royal opponent is a preening fantasy novel sadist, the threat to the world is a ravaging cliché from a thews-and-sinews serial, yet Hobb's prose -- never flashy, but quietly confident -- gives it an air of dignity and tragedy.