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

A chapter titled “Dilemmas” follows and opens with a brief rumination on the Wit and the Skill before portraying Fitz waking alone in his room and staggering off to make ablutions. He returns to bed and to a fitful sleep.

When he wakes again, he finds his chamber has been tended to. As he avails himself of it, the Fool enters and checks on him, bantering with him acerbically before leaving just ahead of Patience and Lacey bustling in to check on Fitz. They fuss over him, and Patience presses upon him the folly of his putative attempts to woo Molly, citing the entanglements of his royal–if bastard–blood and Molly’s own potential prospects. Fitz protests to no avail, and Patience and Lacey leave him to rest.

After contemplating the decor in his chamber again, Fitz dozes off to be wakened by a summons from Chade. Answering it, he finds the old man considering a scroll. He is also clearly considering political implications, as he walks Fitz through a general idea of a way people might seek to exploit him. They exchange news, with Chade offering detailed information on the problems Verity and Kettricken face. Chade also offers some rebuke to Fitz for his conduct with Molly, echoing Patience’s warnings about the political ramifications. He offers some commentary about his relationship with Chivalry and Verity before returning to the topic of Fitz and Molly, urging him to heed Patience’s advice in the matter He also reiterates his warnings to Fitz for his own safety.

After their meeting, Fitz makes his way into Buckkeep Town, walking idly and taking in the gossip the place offers. Along his route, he encounters a vendor selling animals to be used for sport–including a young wolf. Fitz haggles for the wolf, purchasing him and taking him outside of the town, purposing to get him strong enough to fend for himself.

The wolf is of paramount importance in the series, and the level of engagement between Fitz and the wolf cub in the chapter makes that importance clear. Earlier events–the episodes with Nosy and Smithy in Assassin’s Apprentice–make clear that Fitz bonds to animals swiftly and deeply, and he already seems to share a particular affinity for the wolf he has found in a cage in Buckkeep Town. There will be more to come for the two of them, as is clear even without knowing from prior readings what will happen in the novel.

Less significant to the overall narrative, perhaps, is something that I noticed as I read the chapter this time and that I do not recall having noted before. Fitz wants to disregard Patience’s advice (and the emblematic name makes a bit of a joke) regarding Molly, and, having been an adolescent boy in the throes of lust that might have had something of love in it, I can well understand that desire and the recklessness that informs it. That is not what I note, though; what I note in this reading is that Chade’s reaffirmation of Patience’s advice seems, if not to persuade Fitz, at least to mollify him. Admittedly, Chade has a particular authority over Fitz, but there is still something of the “guys will only listen to ideas when other guys say them” about the matter. How to read it–a reflection of the prevailing standards surrounding the composition, a yoking of such behavior to immaturity, or something else–is not necessarily clear to me as I write this, but it is something that might stand some investigation moving forward.

It’s one of the things that I have loved about Hobb’s works. There’s a lot to unpack in them.

Any chance you could send some help my way?

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

The third chapter in the novel, “Renewing Ties,” opens with a description of an old scroll detailing the encounter of the early Six Duchies ruler, King Wisdom, and the Elderlings after which the overall series takes its name. It moves to Fitz going back out into Buckkeep Castle before he finds himself drawn to a tower room to which Verity has summoned him via the Skill. The two of them confer frankly and surprisingly openly, and Verity seems to have great affection for his bastard nephew.

When Fitz leaves Verity, Lacey, Patience’s maid, finds him and bustles him to her lady. Patience quizzes Fitz randomly, and he begins to suffer again from the lingering effects of the poison that had been used upon him. Patience recognizes his infirmity and sends him off to rest–and he encounters Molly along the way. He is initially buoyed by the encounter, but as he elicits information from her, he finds himself rebuked for his seeming drunkenness and for the many lies he had told and allowed, and he learns that matters have been poor for her family. She leaves him despairing of his infatuation with her, and he staggers back to his room to sleep.

Again, I find myself reading affectively, sympathizing with the folly of an adolescent boy trying to make sense of lust and love at once, and I have to think that that correspondence informed my early regard for the novels; when I first read the Farseer books, I did so much closer to my own adolescence than I am now (though some might say I still need to grow up), and I was not much more adept than Fitz in such matters, if I was at all. It is as good a reason as any to start to make a fuller study of something, and better than most.

There are parts of me, even now that I am largely out of academe–I’ve given up the search for an academic job, and I’m not teaching in the current session at the one school where I do still get to stand in front of a classroom–that clamor for me to make some kind of insightful, scholarly comment about the chapter. And I could tease out something about, perhaps, a suggestion of something between Charim and Verity like that I have suggested lay between Burrich and Chivalry in the imagined past of the novel, or I could point out that Hobb subtly signals the ultimately untenable nature of chivalry through reflecting on Chivalry when Fitz’s eyes meet Patience’s and “She nodded slowly, accepting the lie [Fitz had told] as necessary, and looked aside. [Fitz] wondered how many times [his] father had told her similar lies. What did it cost her to nod?” Neither would be wrong, exactly, and either might be fodder for a short piece of commentary that might well be worth doing. So might a bit linking what happens in the chapter to more of the foreshadowing that is itself a common theme in the series of novels; looking ahead only to find later that such peerings were correct is something of a motif in the main Elderlings novels, perhaps the dominant one. (I’d have to do more work on that, though.)

At another time, I will have such things to write. I hope you will continue to read them.

I’d love to have your support.

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

The next chapter, “The Homecoming,” reflects briefly on the founding of Buckkeep before moving to gloss the progress made by Fitz, Burrich, and the stableboy Hands from the Mountain Kingdom back to Buckkeep. It is a wintry journey and slower than might be hoped, the more so because Fitz’s condition impedes their travel. Too, when they lay over in an inland town, Burrich and Hands hear much of the disgruntlement about the continuing threat of the Raiders and the appreciation the people seem to have for Regal; Burrich takes the opportunity to caution Fitz that his uncle still hates him and will have him killed if he can.

At length, Fitz and his party return to Buckkeep, where they are challenged by the gate guard. After a bit of banter, they are recognized and admitted, and Burrich has to caution Fitz again about returning to his subordinate place as a bastard princeling in a place where people care about such things. Fitz accedes to the wisdom, if with difficulty, as well as to the wisdom of allowing others to do for him what his condition prevents him from doing well. And after, when Fitz makes to report to King Shrewd and King-in-Waiting Verity, he is turned away by both and muses on the changes that have occurred while he was away and with the arrival of others before him.

The device of using rumors heard in passing through a town to gloss over events is a good one; exposition is often a difficult thing to do well, though it is also necessary, so any adept handling of it is good to see. But it is not as good as the depiction of the strange tensions of adolescence that Hobb depicts in Fitz; I am not so old that I do not recall the awkwardness of my own teenage years, though they were far less eventful for me than Fitz’s are for him, and I find myself reading affectively again as I sympathize utterly with a young man who, having had a taste of being something more, chafes at being returned to older, more constraining patterns. And I sympathize, too, with the desire to be open with someone, only to have that openness set aside–gently, perhaps, as Burrich does with Fitz, but still put aside. I have a person with whom I can be so open now, and I revel in it, but I recall not being able to do so. Again, though, it’s an affective reading, and something I ought to know better than to do.

Except that the idea that any would “know better” than to allow themselves to be moved by a character in a story is a strange one. To do the work of literary study, it is necessary to be able to remove reader from text to some degree, just as a physician must be able to look at the flesh of a patient as a thing apart from a person to some degree. Yet the physician who does not engage the patient’s humanity is decried, and rightly; no scholar, no practitioner, does well to separate the humane wholly. Acknowledging it is needed, yes, but ignoring it is certainly not.

Support the labor of doing this on this Labor Day.

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

The first chapter, “Siltbay,” opens with an in-milieu reflection on the position of King/Queen-in-Waiting, which serves the Six Duchies much as the role of Prince of Wales serves the UK or Dauphin served the French monarchy; attention is paid to the holders of the title under Shrewd. It moves into a Skill-vision, with Fitz occupying Shrewd and learning both of the attack on the place in the chapter’s title and what it truly feels like to be an old man. He observes as Shrewd reasserts himself and issues orders to send aid to Siltbay; when the old man turns his attention to Fitz in his mind, their connection is broken, and Fitz makes to return to Buckkeep.

There is a bit of annoyance in the chapter–not because of what it shows, because the descriptions are well written and finely balanced, and they offer a useful musing on the status of the conflict in which the Six Duchies finds itself. No, the annoyance comes at the whiplash attitude in it. At the end of the prologue, Fitz had been ready to retire from the world; what is, in effect, a nightmare, if one “real” in showing what “is” in the milieu, turns Fitz around. It reads as hurried, somehow, something of a deus ex machina, and if there is antecedent for such in the tradition from which Hobb borrows for the novels as a whole (about which there is some discussion here), that does not mean it is the most desirable thing to see in the present text.

A sense of being rushed is something I have noted in others of Hobb’s works (this and this offer some short discussions thereof; there are others). I think it attracts my attention because I like Hobb’s writing as much as I do (and it should be clear I do; I spent the time doing a master’s thesis on her work, as well as presenting any number of papers on her writing and buying copies as circumstances have permitted across decades–and such projects as the present one). I want it to be without flaw, and so when I see something that I have to regard as being less than it could be, I cannot help but mark it. But that failing is mine, not that of the author whose work I have spent most time reading and writing about. (I think; I’ve not logged hours, but I’ve certainly written on Hobb more than I have Asimov or Tolkien, who are the two most likely competitors.)

A failing that will not be mine will be an end to the rereading before I have finished it. As I’ve noted, the reading I’m doing now is slower than I’m accustomed to doing, but that it is slower does not mean I am going to be giving up on it.

It’d still be nice to have you chip in to help support this.

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

The second of the Farseer books, Royal Assassin, opens with a brief prologue, unlike Assassin’s Apprentice. In the prologue, titled “Dreams and Awakenings,” Fitz considers (in retrospect) various magics known to the Six Duchies. He notes both that magical knowledge tends to be transmitted orally and that it requires an inborn predilection for practice. He passes on to further consideration of the authority to treat a topic in writing, musing on it for a while before shifting topics again.

Fitz’s narration shifts to consider his continuing admiration for Molly, and he comments at some length about his work as the apprentice assassin for the Duchies, quietly working for the betterment of the Kingdom through performance of heinous deeds. And he arrives at his status following the end of Assassin’s Apprentice: recovering slowly and shakily in Jhaampe from being poisoned and abused, to his annoyance. He is not eased when Burrich notes the difficulty in treating him, though in their conversation, he begins to reappraise the man who might as well be his foster-father. And, amid fits caused by the lingering injuries and damage from the poison, Fitz makes to order Burrich back to Buckkeep before finally falling into sleep.

The prologue serves as an interesting way to recapitulate the events of the first novel in the series for the benefit of those who might be picking up Royal Assassin before reading Assassin’s Apprentice–while not reading as a dreadfully dull repetition to those who have moved directly into the new novel from the last one. It also does admirably to lay out the beginning state of affairs for the still-young FitzChivalry, while offering in its initial retrospection an assurance that Fitz will outlast the events of the novel. That is important because of the novel’s position in its series; it is the second book in a trilogy, traditionally the member of a trilogy that positions the protagonist in the worse possible position. But Fitz will survive, readers are assured.

Of additional note is the bit of philosophical musing Fitz advances in the first few paragraphs of the prologue, those presented as being the work of his pen as he writes in times in the novel’s future and those following close after, when he muses to himself and not upon the in-milieu page about what right he has to document traditions in which he does not take part–particularly when his right to attest in writing to those of his own experiences is in question. Some irony could well be read into writers voicing, even through fictional characters, a reluctance to write about topics at some remove from themselves, or arrogance could be read into it, since such a stance implies that authors believe themselves to be experts in the areas upon which their writing touches. It is not as if Hobb does not make other comments about the craft of writing in her work, as I’ve noted before, so it does not come as a surprise to see such comments in the earlier parts of her corpus, even if how to interpret them may not be entirely clear.

Can I count on your support?

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

The final chapter, “The Aftermath,” opens with a description of a tapestry in Jhaampe that serves as a sort of call-ahead to later novels. It then moves to a gloss of the fallout from the previous chapter’s events, focusing on the beginnings of Fitz’s recovery and Burrich’s. What happened to August receives note, as does Regal’s behavior that glossed over all his misdeeds.

Fitz recovers but slowly, and with difficulty, and Burrich accompanies him as he returns at length to Buckkeep. Matters seem to be improving there, with Galen dead and Kettricken’s presence enlivening things. And Fitz notes that it was Nosy who saved him from the pools, dying from the effort of it. He was a good dog.

In the following epilogue, Fitz returns to his narrative present–the novel has been recounted in an informed retrospective–to consider his lingering pains and condition. A boy in his keeping is noted, as is a friend with a quiet voice, whose “No” is the last word in the novel.

Most of the chapter is denouement and setup for the next volume; the epilogue is more or less all setup for later work. There’s not necessarily much to comment upon in either–but it is a good time to reflect on the experience of re-reading.

I welcome comments from my own readers, of course; I benefit from the work of others, and I try to acknowledge all of it I receive. (Check the embedded links and other citations in my work, please!) I know that the rereading has been a different thing for me; I’ve not usually read things in the way I’ve read the novel and plan to read the rest of them for this project. Reading for pleasure, I plow through novels, often chewing though hundreds of pages in a few hours before I recall that I am me and that I have a body that has needs that must be answered. Reading for scholarly work, I thumb through pages at high speed, seeking out tag phrases I recall or notes I’ve made in margins–when I’ve made them, which I’ve not always done–to develop the arguments I mean to make. Both are, if not rushed, intense and speedy things.

By contrast, the rereading has been a slower thing. I’ve proceeded a chapter at a time, pausing between each to write the gloss and to offer the reflections I have about what I’ve read. Sometimes, I begin to move to more scholarly activity, although generally informally; I’m not bound to any one style guide here, but have tended to embed links and move on. I have been trying to restrict myself to materials readily available; as I write this, I do still have some institutional access, but I know well that many of my readers will not, and I have no desire to exclude them. (Academic publishing is also a racket, but that’s a set of comments for another time and place entirely.) I’m sure it’s come across as vain or cute at times, but this is also ultimately a vanity project, not in support of a scholarly career as the project that inspired this is. So there’s that.

It’s been enjoyable for me so far, though, and I hope it’s been a pleasure for others, as well. I’ll be moving on to the next book in the sequence, Royal Assassin, soon; I hope you’ll come along with me!

Last chapter in this novel, though there’re more to come. Help me bridge the gap!