Ship of Magic

Robin Hobb

Hobb, author of the critically acclaimed Farseer trilogy, took a break from the world of Fitz and his companions to write the Liveship Traders trilogy. Only a small break, mind you; the first two books, both of which weigh in over eight hundred pages, were both published in 1999. That's a whole lot of words. Ship of Magic is the first of the Liveship Traders novels.

The Vestrits are one of the Old Trader families who live in Bingtown, sandwiched between the sea, Jamaillia, Chalced, and the Rain Wilds. Jamillia is the country from which their charter comes, but the current leader has been ignoring his ancestors' promises to Bingtown, and in the process making things difficult. Chalced is a country of barbarians, where slavery is legal and women are treated much like perfumed cattle, and their ways are becoming more popular in Jamaillia. The Rain Wilds are a place of mystery, full of goods that command very high prices, but are also home to rampant disease and a mortality rate roughly akin to that in Europe at the time of the Black Death. Ephron Vestrit, current scion of the Vestrit clan, lays dying, while his ship is sailed by a greedy, careless son-in-law, Kyle Haven. The Vestrits, like all Bingtown Trader families, are into the Rain Wild families for generation's worth of debt, thanks to the commissioning of the liveships, worked in wizardwood, with sentient figureheads. Ephron's younger daughter, Althea, has been groomed to take over command of the family's liveship, the Vivacia, since she was very young; when Ephron dies, though, her older sister, Kyle's wife, inherits the ship, and Kyle starts making changes. Althea and the ship's former first mate, Brashen, go separate ways, but both wish to see the ship taken out of Kyle's hands. Kyle, instead, is bent on grooming his son Wintrow, a priest in training, to take over the ship, but he'd rather continue training to be a priest. Then you throw into the mix a pirate captain whose lifelong dream is to capture own a liveship, sea serpents, society parties, a mad liveship who's been abandoned on a rocky beach, the Others (half-man half-fish prophets), an illegal trade in wizardwood artifacts, and any number of other subplots and characters, and you can see why the trilogy requires 2,500 pages.

If you're familiar with Hobb from the Farseer books, you should know what to expect here-- well-defined characters, readable prose, and in general, all the things that make a massive fantasy trilogy worth your time. It's genre writing, and never really strays outside the conventions of genre, but it's very good genre writing, and that shouldn't put you off. Fans of fantasy literature will find a good deal to like about Ms. Hobb's second trilogy. If it tells you anything, I was planning on waiting a few weeks before startting Mad Ship, the second book in the trilogy; I ended up starting it about half an hour after I finished this one, instead.