Book Review – Royal Assassin
Author: Robin Hobb
Publisher: Bantam
Binding: Paperback
Publication Date: 1996
Royal Assassin, the second book of Robin Hobb’s Farseer Trilogy, picks up right where Assassin’s Apprentice ended. The noble bastard FitzChivalry Farseer, having foiled a plot against Prince Verity and his foreign bride Kettricken, returns to Buckkeep.
Hobb continues the development of Fitz’s character as he suffers through more young man’s emotional growth. Hobb’s strengths, the tactile first-person narrative and the fluid realism of Fitz’s mental connections with other characters, both flourish as Fitz’s mind becomes even more intertwined with Prince Verity and with a new animal character. This external mental contact parallels his emotional development in interactions with the youthful Molly, the exhausted Prince Verity, and the ailing King Shrewd. Hobb gradually casts Fitz emotionally adrift, as his three closest mentors, Chade, Burrich, and Verity, all spend long periods of time away from Buck. These struggles leave the narrative bleak at times, but they enable Hobb to build Fitz’s character through his brute perseverance.
However, Hobb’s consistent weakness, the glacially moving plot, struggles to carry the story through this character development. Fitz languishes in Buckkeep for the first 500+ pages of the novel. The continuing Red-Ship raids provide external pressure on the leaders, but the actual raids still feel distant from the narrative. Fitz’s brief summer as an oarsman reads like a contrived plot detour to allow the narrative to witness a few battles, but the impact of the raids never hits the reader until Fitz encounters a raid in person at Neatbay. The gritty counterattack there finally allows the reader to experience a raid directly, after a book and a half of characters talking about raids that took place off-screen.
Against the backdrop of the political tension between coastal and inland factions, the vicious royal intrigue feels far more natural in Royal Assassin than it did in Assassin’s Apprentice. The various royal conspiracies rush to a climax and Fitz descends into frantic countermoves. His assassin training finally sees practical use, for the first time in the trilogy. The ending of the novel would have been cheesy deus ex machina in the hands of a lesser writer. Yet hints in the Epilogue show that to Hobb, it is merely another character choice that has benefits and consequences.
Hobb’s intensely real depiction of Fitz’s character and the growth she steers him through manage to carry Royal Assassin on the strength of that developing character alone, without any fast-paced ordinary fantasy plot. However, the ending of the novel marks a radical shift for Fitz’s life. If the development of his character is to continue, Assassin’s Quest, the final book in the trilogy, must strike out in a new direction.
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