My attention was drawn to Robin Hobb’s Farseer trilogy by Dorian, who mentioned and recommended them in the comments here a few weeks ago. I’d heard of Hobb – she’s a prolific fantasy author – but never read her until now. The first installment is not a doorstopper, really, at 392 pages, but the second and third are 648 and 838 pp., respectively, and I read all three back to back in an omnibus e-edition, so I am absolutely counting them for Doorstoppers in December. There are SOME SPOILERS AHEAD but not many, I promise, and they’ll be clearly marked.

Assassin’s Apprentice (1995): The protagonist of these books is FitzChivalry Farseer, who only acquires that name some chapters in to the first installment – until then he’s referred to as “boy”, or “fitz” as a common noun, which means “bastard”. He is the illegitimate child of the Six Duchies’ crown prince, Chivalry, who abdicates his place in the line of succession when he discovers that Fitz exists. Taken from a mother he doesn’t remember, he’s raised in Buckkeep, the capital, initially under the aegis of the gruff stablemaster Burrich but eventually moved into a room in the keep and given a gentlemanly education. Part of this education is his induction as the titular assassin’s apprentice: the secretive and pockmarked Chade, who kills with poisons, teaches Fitz all he knows. The book’s climax narrates Fitz’s first foreign mission, and how it goes sideways. He also possesses both the innate telepathic ability known as the Skill, and a capacity to bond telepathically with animals, known as the Wit. The Skill is rare, and desirable; the Wit is stigmatised, and those who practice it are usually executed if discovered.

A common complaint about Assassin’s Apprentice is that it’s too slow, but I think these readers may be putting too much of their expectations in the title. If you have no preconceptions about a book about an assassin, the pacing is fine. It helps you come to understand and care for the characters, it establishes atmosphere, and it accurately reflects one major thematic interest of these books, which is loyalty. This is particularly obvious in this first installment. Not Fitz’s: we know from the beginning where his loyalties lie. He is loyal to his grandfather, King Shrewd, a “King’s Man”, an alignment which will call for increasing levels of personal sacrifice as the books go on; he is loyal to Burrich, who raises him without sentiment but with unspeakable depth of feeling; he is loyal to his uncle Verity, now the King-in-Waiting, who is kind to him and has the sort of genteel gravitas that you’d want in a leader if you lived under a meaningfully monarchic system. But who is loyal to Fitz? That’s not always clear. Shrewd sometimes puts him in danger; Chade often refuses to explain things to him. His bastardy affects that: his other uncle, Regal, for example, dislikes him unreservedly from the start, simply because of his birth. Burrich, meanwhile, when he becomes aware that Fitz is Witted, makes it clear that the ability is an abomination, and that he won’t tolerate Fitz exercising it in his stable.

These books deal openly and well with emotional and physical abuse. Fitz and a handful of other Skilled noble youth are trained by a man named Galen, who first isolates them and then treats them with extraordinary cruelty. The effects are long-lasting: for the rest of the trilogy, Galen’s coterie will behave in ways that were conditioned into them during their training. This includes Fitz, who never even becomes a member of the coterie; Galen’s abuse of him is so intense that he actually destroys a significant amount of Fitz’s capacity. Later on in this series, it really matters that there are applications of the Skill that Fitz cannot use. Not only is the immediate experience of abuse – the swift reduction of a victim to abjectness and fear; the way many abused people develop a Stockholm-esque reliance on their tormentor’s positive regard – convincingly portrayed; Hobb doesn’t shy away from the serious long-term consequences of it.

There’s much more to talk about, and this is only book one, but before moving on, I should also mention the Fool. He fills the role of jester at Shrewd’s court, but much of what he says is obviously prophecy or perceptive advice in disguise as silliness. His appearance is deliberately marked as uncanny: he’s extremely pale, with nearly white skin and fine white hair, but also appears young, almost boyish. Fitz and the Fool’s relationship is crucial not only to this series but to the two trilogies dealing with the same characters that come afterwards. There is, indeed, much more to the Fool than meets the eye. In Assassin’s Apprentice, though, all we know is that he’s deeply loyal to Shrewd, fond of and an ally to Fitz, desperately lonely, and totally mysterious in origin.

Royal Assassin (1996): From here, the trilogy becomes very plot-heavy, and it’s hard to discuss those points without spoilers. Instead, I’ll mainly talk about some of the interesting thematic material that Hobb handles through her characters’ experiences.

Events at the end of book one [POTENTIAL SPOILER INCOMING] mean Fitz experiences disability/chronic illness at the beginning of this book, as a result of poison. Hobb deals with the onset of disability really well: realising that what initially seemed a short-term illness may well be a permanent condition or array of symptoms comes with a lot of emotions, including shame, anger, and frustration. Fitz is never defined by what he can no longer do (in ways that are, perhaps, slightly more to do with plot convenience than I would really like), but it’s interesting to see this covered at all in an epic fantasy novel, where the protagonist is still traditionally expected to be a heroic achiever. Women also really come to the fore in this installment, in various ways. There’s Patience, Fitz’s father’s wife, who uses her status as a noble widely considered eccentric to shield the vulnerable in a political environment that’s becoming steadily more dangerous; there’s Kettricken, princess of a mountain kingdom married to Verity at the end of book one, whose understanding of her role as Queen-in-Waiting develops and deepens throughout this book; there’s also Molly Chandler, a poor woman with whom Fitz falls in love, and whom he treats remarkably badly throughout the trilogy. Molly is our lens on gender and money in this world: women can earn and even fight – we see female small business owners and multiple female soldiers and farmers and so on – but class status is still an issue, one that can’t be easily overcome by love.

Addiction is also a major theme. Various characters use stimulants like carris seed and Smoke; recreational drug use is generally treated disparagingly, as a character weakness or a potential one. The Skill itself is described as producing an addictive euphoria, which its practitioners should constantly guard against. In general, Hobb portrays reliance on substances as dangerous. The casual use of carris seed and Smoke on holidays is widely socially accepted, but the degeneration of the court at Buckkeep is explicitly and repeatedly linked to their overuse, and our main villain, Regal, is not only an addict but the child of one (his mother, the late Queen Desire, is characterised as a heavy user). It’s a judgmental approach, though also an effective one.

Assassin’s Quest (1997): This is the longest book in the trilogy by far, and in fairness there is a lot to get through. Also in fairness, there doesn’t need to be this much to get through. Fitz’s narrow escapes start to get irritating: at least three instances of him being captured/seemingly doomed is one too many, and I can’t quite work out what Hobb gains (character-wise, plot-wise) from extending the portrayal of his arrogance and carelessness in these interludes. From what I could find online, this is also the installment to which other readers have had the most intense reactions. The climax and dénouement in particular seem to be frequent points of disappointment. Personally, I don’t think the plot resolution comes out of nowhere. Much has already been seeded to do with loss of the self (that addiction theme again) and the incredibly strong subsuming powers of the Skill. Kettle, a character who appears only in this volume, is a little bit convenient, but frankly I was quite pleased to have someone who was finally going to explain how some of these pieces fit together. I liked, too, that she’s an older female character who gets to behave heroically while also experiencing the realities of an aging body. PTSD, addiction and abuse are once again major themes; Hobb creates a particularly interesting dynamic when we finally realise what happened between Fitz’s father Chivalry and his uncle Regal, and Regal’s ultimate fate raises some significant, if probably unanswerable, questions about how to properly apportion blame in those circumstances. (This is necessarily coy to avoid spoilers, but if you’ve read these books, let’s talk about it!) Meanwhile [ROMANTIC-PLOT SPOILERS INCOMING], Burrich and Molly: yes. I approve. This is correct, and I refuse to accept what I understand is an alteration to this state of affairs in the sequel trilogies.

If you’ve made it this far, well done! The upshot of all this is that the Farseer trilogy is a set of wildly compelling epic fantasy novels, full of realpolitik and treachery as well as magic and questing. They also challenge tenets of the genre in a way that probably felt more surprising in the ’90s (around the same time that George R.R. Martin and China Miéville were, in very different ways, making similar challenges), but are still salutary: the focus on bodily vulnerability, whether through disability, illness, or injury, keeps the stakes real for every character, and Hobb does well on gender and class too. Her writing style isn’t complex or subtle – this isn’t John M. Ford – but it’s clear and engaging. There’s obviously much more to explore in this world, and luckily she’s written four more trilogies set there (well, three trilogies and a quartet, plus assorted other stuff). I’ll definitely be back, and probably soon.

Borrowed from my local public library #LoveYourLibrary

So here’s an odd thing. Darkmans is very bloody long – 838 pages in the paperback edition I read – which is, by any quantitative standard, a doorstopper. And yet by a particular qualitative standard, it didn’t entirely feel like one. This is not quite either a good or a bad thing. What I mean is that a book can be long and yet can avoid allowing you to settle, with a metaphorical ruffle of your feathers, into its world. The experience of reading Darkmans is not reminiscent of curling up in front of a fire and getting cosy, which is what we tend to associate with doorstoppers. Instead, it feels like riding a willful and cunning horse. You can run along for extended periods of time in reasonable comfort, but it’ll always buck and try to throw you before too long. The way you respond to the horse bucking, as it were, is going to be what determines the overall tenor of your experience.

Me, I decided to hang on tight through the bucks and keep applying the spurs (this metaphor is absolutely out of control), so what happened was I read 838 pages of exuberant formal and narrative chaos in two days. It was an experience, if not exactly the relaxing one that Doorstoppers In December is designed to promote.

First of all, we’re in Ashford, Kent, where the Channel Tunnel starts. History is a weird proposition in Ashford; it looks like one of those no-places composed entirely of new-build estates and ring roads, but all no-places are built on top of what used to be someplace. Barker’s concern throughout Darkmans is history as a concept, as constant revision and constant presence, something that pops out and hits you on the nose the more you try to keep it down. Her cast of characters is wide and interconnected, but we start with Beede and Kane, a father-son duo whose strained relationship is attributed by both of them to their differences in personality. Beede is a campaigner by calling, a man possessed by the idea of a better, slower, more authentic life, who does things like chair a committee to get a pedestrian light installed at a dangerous road crossing point or attempt to save a batch of antique tiles from a building knocked down for Channel Tunnel construction. Kane is a cynical drug dealer who couldn’t care less about most things and who resents his old man for existing. Both are romantically obsessed with Elen, a podiatrist whose husband Dory experiences periodic fugue states in which he behaves with erratic violence. Their small son Fleet is similarly troubled: he’s building a French cathedral he’s never actually seen, in lifelike detail, using matchsticks, and refers to his father as “John” when the fugues overtake him.

What’s going on with Dory? What’s going on with Fleet? Why do Beede and Kane seem to hate each other so much? What does Kane’s ex-girlfriend Kelly, a foul-mouthed chav stuck in hospital with a broken leg, have to contribute? What about Gaffar, a Kurdish delivery driver hired by Kane? All of these characters add their pieces to the mosaic, and all are demonstrations of the hazards and temptations of historical revisionism. As far as Dory and Fleet go, the strong implication is that both are being possessed by the ghost of John Scogin, a real historical figure who served as Edward IV’s court jester. Scogin’s violently psychopathic tendencies were enabled by the protected status of jesters, men who were permitted to speak truth to power – and thus to acquire their own power – in an era when that was a reserved privilege. Scogin’s ghost represents the Whackamole nature of history. He can’t be contained by theory, sentiment, or wishful thinking; he sows confusion, chaos, pain, distress. He’s the anarchy of what actually happened, the uncontainability of people and events. Beede and Kane’s relationship, it’s eventually revealed, is bad because of past actions: Beede allowed Kane’s mother to foster codependency with him, as she became ill with cancer and Kane was forced into caring responsibilities that a child should never have to shoulder. The narrative they’ve spun for each other since – Beede as a saintly do-gooder, Kane as a deadbeat – is uprooted by the Scogin-esque revelation of a very different story.

Kelly and Gaffar have similar trajectories. Kelly is the scion of an infamous local family, the Broads (her uncle, a dodgy building contractor, features in a subplot where he cons Elen and Dory over repairs to their roof). Nothing good comes from the Broads. Her brother has been in an overdose-induced coma for years, and dies in the course of the novel; her mother is portrayed as an overbearing, benefit-snatching harridan. Kelly’s story involves the discovery that she might be related to Dr. Andrew Boarde, an eighteenth-century bishop and biographer of Scogin. As it turns out, this is probably not true, but it matters deeply to Kelly; the idea that her family has experienced a tragic slide over generations is far more compelling than the reality that they have probably been petty criminals for centuries. At the same time, Barker doesn’t punish her for wanting more meaning in her life. She has a religious conversion experience in hospital, and while she retains her miniskirt-wearing, inventively-cursing personality, she also seems to find more purpose after being “saved”. Maybe historical revisionism has its place, Barker seems to be suggesting; maybe deluding ourselves isn’t an entirely bad idea. Gaffar, meanwhile, is one of the oddest characters in the book. He too has an understanding of his family’s history which appears not to be the whole truth, and he functions interestingly as a non-English counterpoint to the very English histories that otherwise populate Darkmans. The novel ends with him: he comes face to face with whatever the Scogin entity actually is, and sits down to gamble with it, in a closing image reminiscent of that famous chess scene from The Seventh Seal.

There’s so much going on that you might think it’d be easy to just surrender to the novel, but then there’s the style. One of Barker’s primary techniques is to show a character’s internal thoughts, often just a single-word reaction, on an intervening separate line between the more polished articulations of the narrating voice. Take this, for example:

He glanced down –

Damn

The tip of his spliff had dropped off into his lap. And there was still a small –

Fuck!

– ember…
He cuffed it from his jeans and down on to the floor. He checked the fabric – no hole, but a tiny, brown…

Bugger

He took a final, deep drag –

Nope…
Dead

– then tried to push the damp dog-end into the ashtray, but the ashtray, it seemed, was already full to capacity.

This, basically, is why the book is so long. The action is just “Kane finishes a cigarette”, but it takes up a lot of physical space on the page, and it yanks the reader’s attention back and forth between official narrating voice and irrupting character reactions. In that sense it’s a brilliantly effective way of formalising Darkmans‘s main preoccupation: embedded in the text itself is the experience of having an authoritative story disrupted and scattered, again and again, by something that represents the banal formlessness of reality. The constant use of parenthetical phrases achieves roughly the same end. Here, we’re with podiatrist Elen, musing on her work:

The foot was hardly the most glamorous of the appendages (‘yer dogs’, ‘yer plates’, ‘yer hoofs’). No one really gave a damn about it (although – fair’s fair – the acupuncturists had done a certain amount for the cause, and the reflexologists had sexed things up a little, but in Elen’s view, the short-fall still fell . . . well, pretty damn short). The foot had sloppy PR; it mouldered, uncomplainingly, down at the bottom (the fundus, the depths, the nadir) of the physiological hegemony. It had none of the pizzazz of the hand or the heart. The lips! The eyes (the eyes had it all their own way). Even the neck, the belly … the arse. Even the arse had a certain cachet. But not the foot. The foot had none (the foot had Fergie, with her lover, sprawled on a deckchair, in the Cote du Tawdry).

It’s distinctive, successful, and not particularly conducive to readerly relaxation. But then, Darkmans doesn’t want us to relax. I’m not entirely sure that its reiteration of its theme couldn’t have done with some variation, and I’m equally not sure that the past needed to be so relentlessly painted as aggressive; there are other mental frameworks for considering history, including as a means of positive emotional connection across otherwise unbridgeable gaps of time. What Barker does, though, she does with skill and guts. I’ve read three novels by her now, and this is far and away my favourite.

Borrowed from my local public library – which actually bought this title at my request! #LoveYourLibrary