Read the previous entry in the series here.
Read the next entry in the series here.

Evidently, too, this is the 1500th post to this webspace. Hooray!

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After a brief quotation regarding secrecy, “The Felling of Fallstar” opens with a shift in season from Winterfest to summer on a day years after that finds Fitz seated in a tavern and reflecting on news from Hearth and Just, two of Molly’s children with Burrich. He considers gifts for family until interrupted by a Skill-sending from Nettle expressing concern for Chade, who has evidently fallen and is comatose. The sending contains a summons from Dutiful, now fully King of the Six Duchies, and an order to travel by portal-stone. Fitz balks, citing earlier experience, but the order is reiterated, and he makes arrangements to comply.

Fitz reluctantly leaves Molly behind to answer his king’s summons and goes trepidatiously through the nearest Skill-stone. He arrives at Buckkeep in as good an order as could be expected and hastens in.

Fitz, in his guise as Tom Badgerlock, reaches Chade’s side, where the halting coterie of which he had been part is assembled, along with Nettle and her half-brother, Steady. Fitz, overstepping, issues orders that Dutiful echoes, compelling compliance, and he assesses Chade’s situation, finding it grim. He confers with those present to learn more details, finding Chade sealed off from the Skill much like Burrich had been. Fitz posits reasons for the action and begins to puzzle at how to address the issue. Kettricken joins the conversation, and suggests that Fitz likely knows or can most likely guess the answer. Fitz makes an initial attempt and fails, after which he and Dutiful confer.

Attempts continue into the night, and Fitz stumbles into the answer to his problem amid continued conversation with Dutiful. Finding it, he pulls Skill-strength from those in his company and works to Chade’s healing, guiding it with the expertise of long anatomical study. Chade regains consciousness and makes some complaints before lapsing into sleep, followed soon by Fitz.

Fitz wakes to Thick tending Chade, and he reports to Dutiful and Kettricken. Kettricken again urges Fitz to spend more time at Buckkeep, which he refuses, and Fitz calls back on Chade. The two converse together for a time, both of them much as they had always been together. Fatigue begins to tell on the old man, and Fitz takes his leave.

The comment from Chade at the beginning of the chapter is an interesting one. The old man is correct, of course, even if it is something of a pat statement; the more people who know a thing, the less of a secret it can be. And I am put in mind of earlier events in Fitz’s narrative, such as noted here, pointing to how much knowledge is and can be lost simply because it is never made available to someone who might keep it. But then, that’s one of the things for which fiction is good; it prompts rumination, and thinking is always a useful thing to do and have done.

Something I notice the chapter doing is musing on the approach of age. There are motions toward it in earlier chapters, of course, explicit mention of Molly passing her childbearing years (to which Fitz’s slowed aging is explicitly juxtaposed) and Patience’s own advancing age. The maturing and going-out of Molly’s younger children is also attested

The present chapter makes note of Kettricken going entirely gray, although the remark is made that it is seemingly early. Chade, on whom the present chapter focuses, had always been older in the series, having been the older brother of Fitz’s grandfather, Shrewd; there had been several comments made about his fading powers in the Tawny Man trilogy, for example. To have him fallen and be unable to rise again, however, points directly toward a commonplace of aging (LifeCall and similar products having made much of it for many years in the consumerist programming typical of the last decades of the twentieth century); even more than in previous entries in the Realm of the Elderlings novels, Chade’s situation in the present chapter comes across as something of a shock. Donne’s Holy Sonnet 6 comes to mind.

Biographical criticism is always fraught–authors can well write of things not in in their direct experience, after all–but it is irresponsible to assert that the circumstances of writers’ lives will have no impact upon the writing they do. I note that the novel is published in 2014, at which point, Hobb was in her 60s. I grew up in Kerrville, Texas, a town that boasts a large population of people at or past retirement age. My own parents, even now, are in their 60s. Experience suggests to me that no few people in that age range give no small thought to their advancing years and the decline of physical and mental capacities that often attend thereupon. I have to wonder the extent to which such was on Hobb’s mind as she composed the text, though I know it is an idle wondering; whether it was, and how much it was if it was, doesn’t much change the effect of the text on the reader or how it is achieved, and that’s really where the focus of criticism has to be.

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