He goes by ‘Boy’ for his first years, then ‘Fitz’ and ‘Bastard’, then FitzChivalry Farseer, illegitimate son of Chivalry Farseer, son of the enigmatic King Shrewd. This is for the Bingo Family square; Fitz has a family, a name, a legacy–but he never knew his own father, his grandfather buys his loyalty rather than offering him affection, and one of his uncles wants him humiliated at best and dead at worst.
I read Robin Hobb’s Farseer trilogy when I was a teen with the time and energy to devour fantasy doorstopper trilogies (though I gave the fuck up on Wheel of Time after the fourth book of milling about). This holds up, with nuances I didn’t realise at 15; the world building is detailed and layered, the politicks and magicks are twisty, it’s queer at times–and like all the best fantasy, there’s a sense of impending doom that goes well beyond the immediate peril or big bad.
Here the peril is chilling; the kingdom of the Six Duchies is under threat from raiders who take hostages and demand a fee for killing them. Because the alternative is that the hostages are released back into their villages and communities wiped of all capacity for human connection and feeling, incapable of logic or reason or sense of time, driven only by physical hunger and sensation–they’re basically zombies, unable to care about even their own families.
But there are also dangers within the kingdom that begin in the shifting allegiances of the court, even within Fitz’s own family–a kaleidoscope of treacheries that Fitz finds himself at the centre of, not least because his grandfather the king had him trained as an assassin.
‘Good. Good. Now. You can call me Chade. And I shall call you?’ He paused and waited, but when I did not offer a name, he filled in, ‘Boy. Those are not names for either of us, but they’ll do, for the time we’ll have together. So. I’m Chade, and I’m yet another teacher that Shrewd has found for you. It took him a while to remember I was here, and then it took him even longer to nerve himself to ask me out. And it took me even longer to agree to teach you. But all that’s done now. As to what I’m to teach you,…well.’
He rose and moved to the fire. He cocked his head as he stared into it, then stooped to take the poker and stir the embers to fresh flames. ‘It’s murder, more or less. Killing people. The fine art of diplomatic assassination.’ (p. 69)
The series is narrated by Fitz and suffused with melancholy; his injuries, physical and psychological, hurt, and it seems that every bond, every scrap of family he finds, is under threat because of who he is and what his peculiar talents are. But isn’t the best fantasy elegiac? Frodo can’t live happily ever after in the Shire; Galadriel diminishes and goes into the West.
It’s a thoughtful, engaging series–if I had a criticism it would be that there’s a little too much about herbs and whatnot, and Hobbs has a tendency towards sketching sprawling narrative and mythos and geography at the expense of painting character; the royal family are fairly set into the roles determined by their nomenclature, for instance, and there may be a little too much mythology happening. I plan to reread the full series, but the next two books are long so I do quail a little. But I have a feeling it’ll be worth it.
Title from Radiohead’s ‘High and Dry’ (1995)