Fool's Errand

Robin Hobb

Robin Hobb has, not surprisingly, done it again. Fool's Errand, the first book in the Tawny Man trilogy, is wonderful. The main characters from the Farseer books are back, but that doesn't stop her treading into Liveship Traders territory enough to draw in the fans of that series as well, and the whole makes for a wonderful introduction to the two books that follow it.

The time is fifteen years after the events in Assassin's Quest, and an unknown but short time after the events in Ship of Destiny (certainly no more than a year). Fitz has spent a good deal of the last decade and a half in seclusion, living in a previously-abandoned cottage not far outside Forge, renouncing both his heritage and the duties of his office following the Red Ship War. As we open, Kettricken is in the process of negotiating a trade alliance with the Outislanders that will involve the betrothal of her son, Dutiful, to a noble daughter of an Outisland clan. Fitz is approached first by Chade, then by the Tawny Man himself (if you don't know who the Tawny Man is-- and it's a pretty simple process of elimination if you're familiar with the first trilogy-- I'll not spoil the surprise for you), requesting he come back to Buckkeep as a teacher and mentor for the prince. Fitz, now living under the name Tom Badgerlock, refuses until a nameless rider beings bad tidings, and Fitz is once again forced to take up the role he has always played-- the Catalyst to the White Prophet.

That Hobb's writing is great swords-and-sorcery is no secret to anyone who's been reading her stuff. Now, though, she's got the full wight of twenty-five hundred pages apiece of two trilogies behind her, and five thousand rich, detailed pages of worldbuilding, and that just makes it all the better. Hobb does do the whole "flashback to reacquaint the reader with stuff" thing that's been so annoying in, say, recent novels by Terry Goodkind, but here it's far less obtrusive; Hobb doesn't assume that her readers have the same memory span as your average goldfish, and the premise of intelligence by the writer on the part of the reader is certainly refreshing. The only question is, if Hobb can spend five hundred pages on this, which seems a rather minor incident in the greater scheme of this story, how on earth is she going to get the whole thing told in only two more books? (A quick check at Amazon reveals part of the answer; they're both much longer than this seemingly introductory volume.) In any case, I can't wait to find out.