Which explains why I'm being unusually prolific. Also, I have, if not exactly snapped out of my morose mood, felt a bit more upbeat and decided to sod the unforthcoming job interviews. I have decided that having no job in the immediate future is not the end of the world. Yes, hallelujah, the world does not revolve around me. What an amazing discovery! I shall win a Nobel Prize for that most amazing of scientific enlightenment.
Anyway, I digress. While I've been on mandatory annual leave (yes, we get allocated annual leave in this A&E department, you can't pick which days you want off), I have been re-reading some old favourites. I suppose they have also contributed to me feeling a bit calmer, since my well-worn favourite books are like old friends to me. (Hah! You should have seen one work colleague's face when I accidentally let slip that I couldn't give away my books because they were my friends. On hindsight, I could have phrased it a little better, so as to sound less like a deluded simpleton).
Below, is the first of a series of books which have over different phases of my life brought me comfort, joy, sadness, laughter, rage and the odd epiphany. I hope that this would inspire you to pick up a new book and derive enjoyment from it the same way I did. Of course, if you are one of the handful of people reading this blog, you probably know me personally and I have already proselytised to you about them.
The Farseer trilogy (Assassin's Aprentice, Royal Assassin, Assassin's Quest) by ROBIN HOBB.
When I picked up Assassin's Apprentice in a small London library, I had been frustrated with the whole fantasy genre. I've always leant towards books with an escapist quality to it but by the time I was 18, I went through a phase of wanting to read 'proper books' instead of the mediocrity that I found in the more popular fantasy writers e.g. Eddings, Feist, Brooks. So I trudged through a whole load of Dickens, Dostoevsky, Fielding, Hardy and dear God, I even read Solzhenitsyn's The Gulag Archipelago. So by the time I hit those library bookshelves, I was gagging for a bit of escapist imagery - something, anything, to take my mind off the depressing things that humans do and have done to each other.
I picked up Robin Hobb because the blurb on the back of Assassin's Apprentice had the least mumbo-jumbo in it. The synopsis sounded simple enough - an illegitimate offspring of the crown prince is discovered, who abdicates his claim to the throne in shame. His 6 year old son is brought to court, as to leave him in the country would be "like leaving a weapon hovering at the King's throat." The shrewd old king puts it to his third son bluntly -
Thus the young fitz begins his rather strange and isolated existence in the House of the Farseers, being of, but not acknowledged royal blood. He lives above the stables with his father's embittered former right-hand man, yet receives all the tuition not given to a common stablehand e.g. reading, writing, geography, fencing, and the more sinister arts of assassination.'I asked you not "what do you make of him?" but "what will you make of
him?".......... A tool? A weapon? A comrade? An enemy? Or will you leave him
lying about, for someone else to take up and use against you?This morning and now he is a child. When next you turn around he will be a
youth, or worse, a man, and then it will be too late for you to make anything of
him. But take him now, and shape him, and a decade hence you will command his
loyalty. Instead of a discontented bastard who may be persuaded to become a
pretender to the throne.A bastard, is a unique thing. Put a signet ring on his hand and send him
forth, and you have created a diplomat no foreign ruler will dare to turn away.
He may be safely sent where a prince of the blood may not be risked. Imagine the
uses for one who is and yet is not of the royal bloodline. Hostage exchange.
Marital alliances. Quiet work. The diplomacy of the knife.'
Nothing much happens in the first third of the book as it deals mainly with the setting up of characters and the environment they live in. That doesn't mean that it is dull - in fact, anything but. Robin Hobb has a deceptively beautiful way with words and can truly paint a thousand pictures with so few words. The book is written in the first person and the central character, Fitz, is 6 years old at the beginning of the book and hardly the most communicative of creatures, but despite it, Hobb manages to portray the depth of emotional negligence and isolation Fitz experiences, his starvation of love and comfort and the undercurrent of fear that permeates his life. The people who shelter and feed and clothe him could easily be the ones to cut his throat someday.
But the above is the fuel that drives the relationships between Fitz and the other characters in the three books. The plot itself revolves around, yes that's right, saving the world through the two magics that reside in Fitz. Not in a major battle ala Return of The King (although there is that small matter of getting rid of the sadistic, paranoid, homocidal pretender-to-the-throne that is Fitz's royal uncle) but of how the small kindessess you take today can pave the road to a better world tomorrow, or the small evils you commit today can be the seeds to the rot and corruption that will eventually destroy the world.
Fitz himself can be a rather frustrating character and there are a few times when you want to smack him on the side of his head, but he is never dull and you certainly never lose your empathy for him. Should you, however, there are plenty of solid, well-fleshed characters around him. I think that is the beauty of Robin Hobb's writings. Every character comes across as human, with human nobility and human failings. Fitz may be the hero of the book but he isn't always heroic. No one is especially evil. Even those who torment Fitz the most do so not out of malice, but of necessity, survival or a duty to do their best by him.
The story starts when Fitz is an abandoned boy of six, and continues till he is twenty at the end of book three. The author originally ended it there but some years later picked up Fitz's story when he is an adult of 35 in another trilogy. Of course, it caused a lot of fans like me great excitement and I was a regular on the Robin Hobb message board discussing, analysing, arguing and salivating over the next new plot development. The Tawny Man trilogy, although in my opinion not as satisfying as the original trilogy, is nevertheless a worthy successor to the The Farseer series.
But I always tell people to start with the Farseer series. I recommend it because it is a gripping, haunting story that will in equal measure have you bawling your eyes out, stomping around in a rage and cheering the intrepid heroes on with tears in your eyes. In short, you will feel for them as if they were your friends.
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