Fool’s Assassin, by Robin Hobb
I read this ages ago, but never got around to writing it up. So I may be misrecalling some stuff. Luckily, however, I read it on my Kindle and made liberal use of the note function, mostly to write stuff like “YOU IDIOT” and “Did you consider asking her, dumbass?” and “WTF! Idiot.”
This is something like the tenth book in a series with sub-series and related series and so forth. I would definitely not start here.
I’m not sure where I would advise you to start, or if I would advise you to start. There are two trilogies (“Assassin’s Apprentice” and “Magic Ship”) in which I loved the first book, had mixed but generally positive feelings about the second, and disliked the third. But they’re not standalone at all, so you can’t just read the first books because they end on cliffhangers.
Also, be aware that part of what I disliked about the third books was that they either failed to resolve mysteries or plotlines set up in the first books, or resolved them in ways which I found anti-climactic or annoying, so reading the third book just to find out what the hell was up with [X plotline you care about] may not result in a happy experience.
Spoilers for Assassin books:
If you are a whump fan, though, there is a truly amazing amount of that in the Assassin books. I personally wanted more comfort. But if you’re OK with a lack of comfort, Fitz spends his childhood basically in a closet under the stairs, gets stabbed, shot with an arrow with subsequent infected wound and fever and amateur surgery, beaten almost to death, poisoned, operated on without anesthesia, gets addicted to a drug, is repeatedly telepathically whammied, loses pretty much everyone he loves, discovers that basically every bad thing that’s ever happened is personally his fault (and if it's not, he believes it is anyway), is a total failure at TWO kinds of magic AND being an assassin AND at life, is thrown into a dungeon, is hazed, is buried alive, sees many people he loves die, sees his true love marry someone else, sees someone else he loves turn into a reanimated dragon statue and fly off forever, gets “Son, I am disappoint” lectures from all his father figures (he has lots) and also from multiple other people minus the “son” part including several who appear for one scene solely to tell him that he sucks and is a loser, and is followed around by a bard who appears to be a parody of a tabloid reporter and she is exactly as annoying as that sounds. And in case that wasn't enough, some of this stuff happens more than once. For instance, he's poisoned and beaten half to death multiple times.
And then there’s more books that resolve some things but not others, and are incredibly padded - in one book, Fitz spends something like 300 pages angsting over whether or not to leave his cottage. Every now and then he breaks up the monotony by making some tea.
I felt like a compulsive masochist just picking this book up, but I had managed to get invested in a certain relationship between two characters (Fitz and the Fool) in the very first book, and wanted to know what was up with it despite my near-certain knowledge, based on something like nine previous books, that the book would be incredibly slow, the characters’ refusal to talk to each other or pick up on incredibly obvious stuff going on would drive me batty, and it would probably end with their relationship not having progressed at all. Spoiler: I was absolutely right! Also, if you thought Fitz made some stupid decisions in previous books… you ain’t seen nothing yet.
Whump fans note: If you wondered if anything could top a character being tortured to death, the answer is yes.
Cut for detailed, irritated spoilers, mostly involving weapons-grade stupidity and also tragic yet somewhat hilariously OTT whump.
A number of years have passed since the love between Fitz and the Fool was sufficient to resurrect the Fool after he was tortured to death. Despite this, Fitz marries Molly, settles down to a peaceful country existence, and spends the next twenty years never bothering to try to look up the Fool.
Fitz’s steward informs him that some random creepy strangers got caught trespassing on his property.
Steward: “So, shall I kick them out and have them followed to make sure they actually leave?”
Note that Fitz endured something like forty assassination attempts in the previous books, was trained as an assassin (to be fair, he was terrible at it) and is currently living under a fake identity because so many people want to kill him.
Fitz: “Why are you so suspicious? Invite them into my home!”
Needless to say, a messenger who just arrived is bloodily murdered before he gets a chance to deliver his message. Also needless to say, the “guests” vanish.
Steward: “I should warn your wife that there might be lurking murderers so she can take precautions, right?”
Fitz: “No! She’s not feeling well, so definitely don’t worry her by telling her than someone was just murdered in her house.”
Steward: “But we should at least hire some guards, right?”
Fitz: [ACTUAL QUOTE] “I scarcely think that’s necessary.”
ALSO ACTUAL QUOTE: Years later, I would marvel at my stupidity.
My note: NO SHIT.
Then Molly, Fitz’s wife, announces that she’s pregnant. But she doesn’t deliver or show signs of pregnancy. Everyone thinks she’s gone insane. Including Fitz. I should mention that it has been previously established that he has TWO DIFFERENT TYPES of telepathy, either of which could be used to sense a fetus. There are in-story reasons why this might be a bad idea and/or not work, but it should at least occur to him that he could maybe use them to check. It does not occur to him.
Two years later, to everyone’s surprise, Molly gives birth to a tiny, pale child. Fitz is surprised but otherwise makes nothing of this. The Fool, with whom he had a bazillion adventures and who he once was practically life partners with, is also abnormally small and pale, and told Fitz that his life was weird from the get-go, beginning with birth. No parallels occur to Fitz.
Then someone tries to assassinate Fitz! Fitz catches and disarms the assassin, who is a kid. The kid has a sob story about how they’re in training by Chade (who trained Fitz as an assassin when he was a kid) and Chade sent them as a test, and of course Chade knew Fitz would never be hurt. Fitz accepts this and releases the kid without checking with Chade or doing anything whatsoever to check on the truth of this story. I forget if he later marveled at his stupidity but he should have,
Meanwhile, Fitz’s weird baby, Bee, grows slowly and doesn’t speak. People think she’s intellectually disabled, but Molly says she’s not and she just needs more time. Fitz thinks Molly’s nuts but well, she’s a mom and she loves her kid. It does not occur to him that given that she was right about being pregnant and everyone said she was crazy, maybe she’s right about her kid AGAIN and should not be assumed to be crazy. Especially given that she gestated the kid for two years - maybe she’s just developing slowly, LIKE SHE DID IN THE WOMB.
Then there’s a switch to Bee’s POV. She’s extremely smart, she just can’t speak. Then she trips, falls, and tears the membrane that’s been preventing her tongue from being able to move. After that, she can speak.
In YEARS of her being mute, it never occurred to anyone to take a look at the inside of her mouth?! They should all marvel at their stupidity.
Molly dies. Fitz wanders around in a grief-stricken haze for years. This gives Bee the impression that she doesn’t love him, so she avoids and doesn’t speak to him. For a minimum of FOUR YEARS, multiple people know that Bee can speak, but no one bothers to tell HER FATHER for no reason whatsoever.
Aaand then not much happens for about 200 pages, until Fitz finally gets a grip and starts acting like a Dad to his teeny-weeny, pale, precocious daughter.
Up to this point (something like 600 pages) Fitz thinks about the teeny-weeny, pale, precocious Fool maybe three times, vaguely hoping that he’s OK wherever he is but not bothering to check. (Not bothering to check is at least in-character in this book. Like, dude, while you were so busy patting your wife on the head every time she pointed out that your daughter was mute but intelligent, it never occurred to you to use one of your TWO types of telepathy to see for yourself (even if just to say “Wish I could but it’s too dangerous”) or open her mouth and see if, for instance, her tongue is attached to her mouth and cannot move?)
And then! With 1% of the book left to go, the Fool finally turns up! He is in bad shape, but we don’t know all the details except that clearly it would have been good if Fitz had considered 1) asking about him, 2) looking for him, 3) rescuing him. The Fool notices that Bee is in deadly danger from… I forget, murderers or a runaway horse or something… and picks her up to save her life. She is not alarmed by this, does not scream or struggle, and in fact starts talking to him.
Fitz misses the part where Bee was in danger (much like he missed every single other significant event in the entire book), bu sees her being held by and conversing with what appears to be a creepy homeless dude. He goes totally berserk and without even saying “Hey! Put down my daughter!” or “Bee, what’s going on?” takes a large knife and stabs the Fool repeatedly!
(1. Way to traumatize your young daughter even if she WAS being molested.
2. Also, ridiculously out of character. Yes, Fitz has killed people. But he was a stealthy assassin, not a berserker. In ten books covering forty years, this was his first fit of spontaneous, public, psychotic, homicidal rage.)
The Fool collapses, bleeding to death! Bee explains that he was saving her, not hurting her. (“Jeez, Dad, can’t I take you anywhere?”)
Fitz is horrified to realize that the man he just repeatedly stabbed for no sane reason is 1) his best friend, 2) hideously mutilated and scarred, 3) starving to death, 4) BLIND.
Despite being rather busy dying, the Fool explains to Fitz that he was imprisoned for the last TWENTY YEARS, and the one time he sent a messenger the guy was murdered (by the suspicious characters Fitz stupidly invited in). In all this time he was tortured, starved, mutilated, and BLINDED, and would have died but survived by sheer dint of hope that Fitz would rescue him, except of course Fitz was too busy being stupid to give him a thought or notice that he was missing, but the Fool escaped and made it to Fitz at long last only to be repeatedly stabbed by him.
The torture and stuff was because Hobb needed to up the angst ante and this was difficult given that in the previous book the Fool was tortured TO DEATH and had to be resurrected of some plot thing I forget but was totally Fitz’s fault. Also, everything they did in the last nine books turns out to have been the wrong thing to do and was actually helping out the Dark Side.
There are probably more sequels out by now but I am unlikely to read them. My main interest is the nature of the Fool and Bee, and prior experience tells me that this will either never be explained or the explanation will be most unsatisfying. (So if you have read them, I would be mildly curious about spoilers.)
Fool's Assassin: Book I of the Fitz and the Fool Trilogy
Crossposted to http://rachelmanija.dreamwidth.org/1253730.html. Comment here or there.
This is something like the tenth book in a series with sub-series and related series and so forth. I would definitely not start here.
I’m not sure where I would advise you to start, or if I would advise you to start. There are two trilogies (“Assassin’s Apprentice” and “Magic Ship”) in which I loved the first book, had mixed but generally positive feelings about the second, and disliked the third. But they’re not standalone at all, so you can’t just read the first books because they end on cliffhangers.
Also, be aware that part of what I disliked about the third books was that they either failed to resolve mysteries or plotlines set up in the first books, or resolved them in ways which I found anti-climactic or annoying, so reading the third book just to find out what the hell was up with [X plotline you care about] may not result in a happy experience.
Spoilers for Assassin books:
If you are a whump fan, though, there is a truly amazing amount of that in the Assassin books. I personally wanted more comfort. But if you’re OK with a lack of comfort, Fitz spends his childhood basically in a closet under the stairs, gets stabbed, shot with an arrow with subsequent infected wound and fever and amateur surgery, beaten almost to death, poisoned, operated on without anesthesia, gets addicted to a drug, is repeatedly telepathically whammied, loses pretty much everyone he loves, discovers that basically every bad thing that’s ever happened is personally his fault (and if it's not, he believes it is anyway), is a total failure at TWO kinds of magic AND being an assassin AND at life, is thrown into a dungeon, is hazed, is buried alive, sees many people he loves die, sees his true love marry someone else, sees someone else he loves turn into a reanimated dragon statue and fly off forever, gets “Son, I am disappoint” lectures from all his father figures (he has lots) and also from multiple other people minus the “son” part including several who appear for one scene solely to tell him that he sucks and is a loser, and is followed around by a bard who appears to be a parody of a tabloid reporter and she is exactly as annoying as that sounds. And in case that wasn't enough, some of this stuff happens more than once. For instance, he's poisoned and beaten half to death multiple times.
And then there’s more books that resolve some things but not others, and are incredibly padded - in one book, Fitz spends something like 300 pages angsting over whether or not to leave his cottage. Every now and then he breaks up the monotony by making some tea.
I felt like a compulsive masochist just picking this book up, but I had managed to get invested in a certain relationship between two characters (Fitz and the Fool) in the very first book, and wanted to know what was up with it despite my near-certain knowledge, based on something like nine previous books, that the book would be incredibly slow, the characters’ refusal to talk to each other or pick up on incredibly obvious stuff going on would drive me batty, and it would probably end with their relationship not having progressed at all. Spoiler: I was absolutely right! Also, if you thought Fitz made some stupid decisions in previous books… you ain’t seen nothing yet.
Whump fans note: If you wondered if anything could top a character being tortured to death, the answer is yes.
Cut for detailed, irritated spoilers, mostly involving weapons-grade stupidity and also tragic yet somewhat hilariously OTT whump.
A number of years have passed since the love between Fitz and the Fool was sufficient to resurrect the Fool after he was tortured to death. Despite this, Fitz marries Molly, settles down to a peaceful country existence, and spends the next twenty years never bothering to try to look up the Fool.
Fitz’s steward informs him that some random creepy strangers got caught trespassing on his property.
Steward: “So, shall I kick them out and have them followed to make sure they actually leave?”
Note that Fitz endured something like forty assassination attempts in the previous books, was trained as an assassin (to be fair, he was terrible at it) and is currently living under a fake identity because so many people want to kill him.
Fitz: “Why are you so suspicious? Invite them into my home!”
Needless to say, a messenger who just arrived is bloodily murdered before he gets a chance to deliver his message. Also needless to say, the “guests” vanish.
Steward: “I should warn your wife that there might be lurking murderers so she can take precautions, right?”
Fitz: “No! She’s not feeling well, so definitely don’t worry her by telling her than someone was just murdered in her house.”
Steward: “But we should at least hire some guards, right?”
Fitz: [ACTUAL QUOTE] “I scarcely think that’s necessary.”
ALSO ACTUAL QUOTE: Years later, I would marvel at my stupidity.
My note: NO SHIT.
Then Molly, Fitz’s wife, announces that she’s pregnant. But she doesn’t deliver or show signs of pregnancy. Everyone thinks she’s gone insane. Including Fitz. I should mention that it has been previously established that he has TWO DIFFERENT TYPES of telepathy, either of which could be used to sense a fetus. There are in-story reasons why this might be a bad idea and/or not work, but it should at least occur to him that he could maybe use them to check. It does not occur to him.
Two years later, to everyone’s surprise, Molly gives birth to a tiny, pale child. Fitz is surprised but otherwise makes nothing of this. The Fool, with whom he had a bazillion adventures and who he once was practically life partners with, is also abnormally small and pale, and told Fitz that his life was weird from the get-go, beginning with birth. No parallels occur to Fitz.
Then someone tries to assassinate Fitz! Fitz catches and disarms the assassin, who is a kid. The kid has a sob story about how they’re in training by Chade (who trained Fitz as an assassin when he was a kid) and Chade sent them as a test, and of course Chade knew Fitz would never be hurt. Fitz accepts this and releases the kid without checking with Chade or doing anything whatsoever to check on the truth of this story. I forget if he later marveled at his stupidity but he should have,
Meanwhile, Fitz’s weird baby, Bee, grows slowly and doesn’t speak. People think she’s intellectually disabled, but Molly says she’s not and she just needs more time. Fitz thinks Molly’s nuts but well, she’s a mom and she loves her kid. It does not occur to him that given that she was right about being pregnant and everyone said she was crazy, maybe she’s right about her kid AGAIN and should not be assumed to be crazy. Especially given that she gestated the kid for two years - maybe she’s just developing slowly, LIKE SHE DID IN THE WOMB.
Then there’s a switch to Bee’s POV. She’s extremely smart, she just can’t speak. Then she trips, falls, and tears the membrane that’s been preventing her tongue from being able to move. After that, she can speak.
In YEARS of her being mute, it never occurred to anyone to take a look at the inside of her mouth?! They should all marvel at their stupidity.
Molly dies. Fitz wanders around in a grief-stricken haze for years. This gives Bee the impression that she doesn’t love him, so she avoids and doesn’t speak to him. For a minimum of FOUR YEARS, multiple people know that Bee can speak, but no one bothers to tell HER FATHER for no reason whatsoever.
Aaand then not much happens for about 200 pages, until Fitz finally gets a grip and starts acting like a Dad to his teeny-weeny, pale, precocious daughter.
Up to this point (something like 600 pages) Fitz thinks about the teeny-weeny, pale, precocious Fool maybe three times, vaguely hoping that he’s OK wherever he is but not bothering to check. (Not bothering to check is at least in-character in this book. Like, dude, while you were so busy patting your wife on the head every time she pointed out that your daughter was mute but intelligent, it never occurred to you to use one of your TWO types of telepathy to see for yourself (even if just to say “Wish I could but it’s too dangerous”) or open her mouth and see if, for instance, her tongue is attached to her mouth and cannot move?)
And then! With 1% of the book left to go, the Fool finally turns up! He is in bad shape, but we don’t know all the details except that clearly it would have been good if Fitz had considered 1) asking about him, 2) looking for him, 3) rescuing him. The Fool notices that Bee is in deadly danger from… I forget, murderers or a runaway horse or something… and picks her up to save her life. She is not alarmed by this, does not scream or struggle, and in fact starts talking to him.
Fitz misses the part where Bee was in danger (much like he missed every single other significant event in the entire book), bu sees her being held by and conversing with what appears to be a creepy homeless dude. He goes totally berserk and without even saying “Hey! Put down my daughter!” or “Bee, what’s going on?” takes a large knife and stabs the Fool repeatedly!
(1. Way to traumatize your young daughter even if she WAS being molested.
2. Also, ridiculously out of character. Yes, Fitz has killed people. But he was a stealthy assassin, not a berserker. In ten books covering forty years, this was his first fit of spontaneous, public, psychotic, homicidal rage.)
The Fool collapses, bleeding to death! Bee explains that he was saving her, not hurting her. (“Jeez, Dad, can’t I take you anywhere?”)
Fitz is horrified to realize that the man he just repeatedly stabbed for no sane reason is 1) his best friend, 2) hideously mutilated and scarred, 3) starving to death, 4) BLIND.
Despite being rather busy dying, the Fool explains to Fitz that he was imprisoned for the last TWENTY YEARS, and the one time he sent a messenger the guy was murdered (by the suspicious characters Fitz stupidly invited in). In all this time he was tortured, starved, mutilated, and BLINDED, and would have died but survived by sheer dint of hope that Fitz would rescue him, except of course Fitz was too busy being stupid to give him a thought or notice that he was missing, but the Fool escaped and made it to Fitz at long last only to be repeatedly stabbed by him.
The torture and stuff was because Hobb needed to up the angst ante and this was difficult given that in the previous book the Fool was tortured TO DEATH and had to be resurrected of some plot thing I forget but was totally Fitz’s fault. Also, everything they did in the last nine books turns out to have been the wrong thing to do and was actually helping out the Dark Side.
There are probably more sequels out by now but I am unlikely to read them. My main interest is the nature of the Fool and Bee, and prior experience tells me that this will either never be explained or the explanation will be most unsatisfying. (So if you have read them, I would be mildly curious about spoilers.)
Fool's Assassin: Book I of the Fitz and the Fool Trilogy
Crossposted to http://rachelmanija.dreamwidth.org/1253730.html. Comment here or there.