Shaman's Crossing, by Robin Hobb
I really enjoyed Robin Hobb's first two trilogies -- Farseer, the story of a court assassin, and Liveship Traders, which was about a culture that could build and enchant living ships. My main complaint about the Liveship books was the way that Hobb would flit between literally dozens of PoV characters, sometimes after residing in their heads for only a paragraph or two. I found it distracting, and eventually it became hard for me to feel an attachment to any of the characters or to follow any of the plots. Still, the worlds were fascinating, and the characters complex; I did tire of the series after a while, and I never finished the final book, but I still got my money's worth out of them and will recommend them as light reading.
Shaman's Crossing, the first book in the new Soldier's Son trilogy, does not have the multiple-PoV problem; it has a single narrator throughout. Unfortunately, it has lots and lots of other problems. I wouldn't have bothered finishing it at all, but I happened to be stuck on an airplane that was showing a movie I'd already seen. And now that I have finished it, I'm wondering if I should have just watched the movie.
The novel is narrated by Nevare Burvelle, a hard-working, humourless young man from a rural family who is sent off to a military academy in Old Thares, the capital city of the kingdom of Gernia. According to Gernian religious law, a man's first son inherits his father's land, while the second son must become a soldier, the third must become a priest, and the fourth must become an artist. Nevare's father is a soldier, but due to some political shifts in the kingdom that Hobb spends several hundred pages explaining, he was elevated to the nobility as a reward for his military service. The 'real' nobles, the first sons of first sons, feel bitterness toward soldier-lords like Nevare's father, and that bitterness is expressed in a myriad of ways -- most directly, for Nevare, in hazing at basic training and corruption in the academy as a whole.
What, you may ask, does this have to do with shamanism? Over the course of this novel, very little. Near the beginning of the book, before Nevare leaves for the capital, his father puts him into the care of a 'savage' to teach him raw survival skills. I did enjoy this part of the story a lot; the relationship between the 'civilized' Gernians and the peoples they displaced seems to be loosely based on the contact between Europeans and Native Americans, complete with guns and sugar. In Hobb's world, the natives are genuinely magical beings, but their magic can be snuffed out through contact with iron -- a clever way of combining faerie-lore with a Wild West theme.
While Nevare is going through gruelling and humiliating training at the hands of the Plainsman, he goes into a kind of trance. The Plainsman commands Nevare to kill one of his tribe's enemies, a tree-woman from the so-called Speck tribe. Nevare refuses. The tree-woman 'claims' him, and tells him that he will eventually learn her magic and serve her people.
At which point she is forgotten about for 300 pages. What follows are endless tedious descriptions of boot camp, including huge gloms of terrible, wooden dialogue. I don't remember ever thinking of Hobb as a master of dialogue, exactly, but I simply cannot believe her writing was ever this bad: the as-you-know-Bobs can go on for literally pages at a time, as numerous indistinguishable characters rhyme off details about local history or what their daddies taught them about ethics. Though we're told, repeatedly, that the characters have personalities (Trist is manipulative; Gord is fat; Spink is poor; Rory is rural; Caulder is arrogant), their speaking voices are pretty much identical. Even Epiny, Nevare's eccentric cousin -- who does scandalous things like hold séances and walk around the house in her nightgown -- starts to sound like all the others after only a few sentences.
Other things bugged me about the book too. The main character is curiously sexless, feeling no urges (or even curiosity about girls), despite the fact that he's an eighteen-year-old male living in an all-male barracks far from home. He is promised to a girl from his hometown before he leaves, and occasionally he blandly fantasizes about marrying her and having lots of strong sons. Though I've complained elsewhere in this journal about authors who load their books with rape and kink as a cheap replacement for character development, I think this book goes too far in the opposite direction. A couple of embarrassed references to the Bad Boys in the platoon visiting prostitutes or buying dirty comics is the most that Hobb can bring herself to say about sex in the military.
And though I really liked the way that Hobb dealt with expansionism and colonialism in this book -- topics that contemporary fantasy does not take seriously enough, in my opinion -- I had trouble getting a sense of the technology level we are expected to imagine. In the scrubland where Nevare's father has his holdings, we're told that no tree grows thicker than a few inches. Meanwhile, the capital city has laudanum, pencils, eyeglasses, integrals (!), and bicycles, and the boys write innumerable tests on paper. Nevare completely lacks any sense of curiosity or wonder about this new world he's entered. On his boat trip to the capital, he is briefly overwhelmed with a sense of tragedy and loss when he sees large-scale logging going on in the large inland forests, but nobody seems to have told him what all those test papers are made of, and he forgets his depression soon enough. Instead of worrying about that, he describes all his classes in meticulous detail; in this, Hobb's book reminds me of Pamela Dean's Tam Lin, which bored me even more than Shaman's Crossing did.
In the end, the biggest problem with this book is Nevare. He is sort of good at everything, but he has no unique talents or interesting quirks. He is naive and nice and polite and obedient. He carefully considers every decision he makes, comparing it to what his father taught him and what he learned in his holy books, ploddingly explaining all his thought processes to us. He describes every event he lives through in simple declarative sentences. By the time his "shaman's" destiny comes to pass, I cared very little about him, and found it impossible to believe that any indigenous tribe would choose him to do anything significant for their people.
Such a shame. I know Hobb can do better. I've seen her do better. But I think I'm going to sit this trilogy out.
Shaman's Crossing, the first book in the new Soldier's Son trilogy, does not have the multiple-PoV problem; it has a single narrator throughout. Unfortunately, it has lots and lots of other problems. I wouldn't have bothered finishing it at all, but I happened to be stuck on an airplane that was showing a movie I'd already seen. And now that I have finished it, I'm wondering if I should have just watched the movie.
The novel is narrated by Nevare Burvelle, a hard-working, humourless young man from a rural family who is sent off to a military academy in Old Thares, the capital city of the kingdom of Gernia. According to Gernian religious law, a man's first son inherits his father's land, while the second son must become a soldier, the third must become a priest, and the fourth must become an artist. Nevare's father is a soldier, but due to some political shifts in the kingdom that Hobb spends several hundred pages explaining, he was elevated to the nobility as a reward for his military service. The 'real' nobles, the first sons of first sons, feel bitterness toward soldier-lords like Nevare's father, and that bitterness is expressed in a myriad of ways -- most directly, for Nevare, in hazing at basic training and corruption in the academy as a whole.
What, you may ask, does this have to do with shamanism? Over the course of this novel, very little. Near the beginning of the book, before Nevare leaves for the capital, his father puts him into the care of a 'savage' to teach him raw survival skills. I did enjoy this part of the story a lot; the relationship between the 'civilized' Gernians and the peoples they displaced seems to be loosely based on the contact between Europeans and Native Americans, complete with guns and sugar. In Hobb's world, the natives are genuinely magical beings, but their magic can be snuffed out through contact with iron -- a clever way of combining faerie-lore with a Wild West theme.
While Nevare is going through gruelling and humiliating training at the hands of the Plainsman, he goes into a kind of trance. The Plainsman commands Nevare to kill one of his tribe's enemies, a tree-woman from the so-called Speck tribe. Nevare refuses. The tree-woman 'claims' him, and tells him that he will eventually learn her magic and serve her people.
At which point she is forgotten about for 300 pages. What follows are endless tedious descriptions of boot camp, including huge gloms of terrible, wooden dialogue. I don't remember ever thinking of Hobb as a master of dialogue, exactly, but I simply cannot believe her writing was ever this bad: the as-you-know-Bobs can go on for literally pages at a time, as numerous indistinguishable characters rhyme off details about local history or what their daddies taught them about ethics. Though we're told, repeatedly, that the characters have personalities (Trist is manipulative; Gord is fat; Spink is poor; Rory is rural; Caulder is arrogant), their speaking voices are pretty much identical. Even Epiny, Nevare's eccentric cousin -- who does scandalous things like hold séances and walk around the house in her nightgown -- starts to sound like all the others after only a few sentences.
Other things bugged me about the book too. The main character is curiously sexless, feeling no urges (or even curiosity about girls), despite the fact that he's an eighteen-year-old male living in an all-male barracks far from home. He is promised to a girl from his hometown before he leaves, and occasionally he blandly fantasizes about marrying her and having lots of strong sons. Though I've complained elsewhere in this journal about authors who load their books with rape and kink as a cheap replacement for character development, I think this book goes too far in the opposite direction. A couple of embarrassed references to the Bad Boys in the platoon visiting prostitutes or buying dirty comics is the most that Hobb can bring herself to say about sex in the military.
And though I really liked the way that Hobb dealt with expansionism and colonialism in this book -- topics that contemporary fantasy does not take seriously enough, in my opinion -- I had trouble getting a sense of the technology level we are expected to imagine. In the scrubland where Nevare's father has his holdings, we're told that no tree grows thicker than a few inches. Meanwhile, the capital city has laudanum, pencils, eyeglasses, integrals (!), and bicycles, and the boys write innumerable tests on paper. Nevare completely lacks any sense of curiosity or wonder about this new world he's entered. On his boat trip to the capital, he is briefly overwhelmed with a sense of tragedy and loss when he sees large-scale logging going on in the large inland forests, but nobody seems to have told him what all those test papers are made of, and he forgets his depression soon enough. Instead of worrying about that, he describes all his classes in meticulous detail; in this, Hobb's book reminds me of Pamela Dean's Tam Lin, which bored me even more than Shaman's Crossing did.
In the end, the biggest problem with this book is Nevare. He is sort of good at everything, but he has no unique talents or interesting quirks. He is naive and nice and polite and obedient. He carefully considers every decision he makes, comparing it to what his father taught him and what he learned in his holy books, ploddingly explaining all his thought processes to us. He describes every event he lives through in simple declarative sentences. By the time his "shaman's" destiny comes to pass, I cared very little about him, and found it impossible to believe that any indigenous tribe would choose him to do anything significant for their people.
Such a shame. I know Hobb can do better. I've seen her do better. But I think I'm going to sit this trilogy out.