Hello everyone. I am doing something a little different this week. I have recently come back from a wandering holiday and I stopped in this place called Haye-on-Wye. What an amazong place, full of bookshops! There are more bookshops than anything else, so in honour of that place, I will post about a book this time.
I picked up this book many years ago, with no clue who Robin Hobb was or no clue about her books. I honestly bought this book because I liked the picture to be honest. Having said that, I can assure you all that my decision was vindicated and my judging of this book by its cover worked out so well.
The book introduces us to FitzChivalry Farseer, a royal bastard who lives alone with an adopted son Hap and his ‘Wit’ companion wolf, Nighteyes. They live alone far away from the Royalty of Buckeep Castle and all of its politics. between occasional visits from a minstrel named Starling and even less frequently, Chade, his old assassin teacher, he has basically withdrawn from the world. The plot launches when Fitz’s oldest and closest friend visits him, the Fool, and convinces him that he is needed to help Prince Dutiful, who shares a special connection to Fitz. The prince is missing and needs to be returned for a wedding that will forge an alliance and end the recurring wars with the Outislanders.
Brief look at the world, Robin Hobb has created a medieval era world, where horses and swords primarily in use. She has added an ancient race of extinct magical beings (the Elderlings) and two different types of magic which bizarrely are on different ends of the snob scale. The ‘Skill’ is a type of mental magic, allowing primarily for thoughts to be heard over great distances. This is considered a royal magic and is only members of the Farseer line can use it. There are other applications of the Skill, including healing, but knowledge and teachers of this magic have been lost and the only other people who theoretically use it are extinct.
Then there is the Wit, a ‘dirty’ magic that allows people to interact with animals and even ‘bond’ with them as a partner. Considered a magic that is savage, many look at the Wit users with fear and persecute them. This magic has been used to even escape death by allowing you to escape into your partner but this has consequences of its own. Beyond animals, it does allow a primal ‘push’ that can repel people but this is never fully explained.
The Elderlings are an extinct race of skill users that have left artifacts and ruins behind. Not much else is known about them but the evidence supports they were far more advanced as a civilisation and also magically also. Many suspect that the Farseers are the only relatives of the Elderlings and thus why they have the ‘Skill’.
Robin Hobb does a magnificent job of making us really understanding her characters from Fitz’s point of view, she does make it seem that you’ve known the man all of his life and why he does what he does. Her ability is a mental window of the soul of FitzChivalry where you have access to Fitz’s thought processes, and even his emotions. Her style of using Fitz exclusive point of view really brings you into her world and filters everything through him. She is also talented at exposition, as this is her third book series but filled in the essential knowledge of the previous two series that I found that I was brought up to speed rather quickly and without preamble.
So in conclusion, after having the world summarised for you and the characters, you follow Fitz into another task at the behest of the Fool, where he encounters ‘Wit’, a conspiracy, Elderling teleporting stones and a kingdom to save. Between duty, tragedy and wonder, I’d recommend that you give this book a read. If you prefer a chronological experience, start with Assassin’s Apprentice