Chonky epic fantasy at its absolute best
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Cover art by Stephen Youll |
Ah, at last we come to the Liveship Traders, which in my memory is the finest subseries within the whole Realm of the Elderlings saga. Where the Farseer trilogy excelled largely in depicting characters’ relationships – and, in my view, the tragedy of lost opportunities for connection – its actual character depictions themselves were a little shallow in places. Regal, in particular, was an awfully blandly evil villain. But no more here! In this book, we have a rich, churning cast of characters, each with their own goals, histories, motivations, and perspectives; and we have a much enlarged world, with sophisticated sociology and politics. And we’ve got magic talking ships. And sea serpents. And pirates. And monks. And society balls. And seafaring adventure and hidden beaches with mysterious oracle creatures and slaveship rebellions and lost buried cities and deadly magical artifacts that change your body and shorten your life and make you fabulously wealthy. It’s difficult to know where to start in praising this book.
Arbitrarily, I’ll start with the setting. This book is in the same world as the Farseer trilogy, but where that was focused in the far north, in the Six Duchies, this series is centered around Bingtown. And if the Six Duchies are decidedly medieval, Bingtown gives a lot more of a sense of colonial Philadelphia. It is a semi-independent city, sandwiched awkwardly between Jamaillia, its official sovereign power, and Chalced, that cruel, slaveholding nation mentioned occasionally in Farseer as a rapacious neighbour in the south. Bingtown sits at the mouth of the Rain Wild River, a deadly watercourse whose corrosive waters eat the hulls of ships that try to sail it, and whose proximity causes mutations and plagues and shortened lifespans. But up in the Rain Wilds there are ruins of cities of the Elderlings, full of magical artifacts and wondrous objects that bring fantastic prices in trade.
So the Bingtown Traders, historically, made a deal with the Satrap of Jamaillia: In return for braving the deadly Rain Wilds, they get exclusive access to the wealth that comes from it in trade (after, of course, paying their share to the Satrap). In the time since its founding, Bingtown has flourished, because the first traders discovered a key thing in the Rain Wilds, that makes navigating the Rain Wild River possible: wizardwood. It is the only type of wood that can withstand the corrosive river waters, and so people with ships made of wizardwood are the only people who can trade upriver. What’s more, after three generations of service, these ships, the titular liveships, become sentient: the figureheads become animated, and can move and speak with the memories of all the generations that their ship body has existed. This centrality of the Rain Wilds magic creates a fantastic cultural richness to Bingtown, whose population thus splits into the following subgroups:
1. The Rain Wild traders: those who have accepted the cost to body and life that comes from living far upriver, deep in the Rain Wilds, and are the primary source of the magical goods, including wizardwood, that underlie Bingtown’s wealth.
2. The Old Traders, those who made the original deal with the Satrap of Jamaillia, who live in Bingtown Proper, and serve as go-betweens, connecting the Rain Wild Traders with the rest of the world. Only Old Traders have liveships.
3. The Three Ships Immigrants, a secondary group of inhabitants of Bingtown. We know very little about their story, but occasional mentions suggest that they were refugees from somewhere, arriving in Bingtown poor but willing to work, and were accepted by the Old Traders. They are now integrated as a kind of commoner stock in Bingtown.
4. The New Traders, newer immigrants to Bingtown, who have been granted land grants by the Satrap in contravention of the original charter with the Old Trader families.
These last, the New Traders, are the source of some fantastic sociocultural tension. See, the original deal with the Satrap of Jamaillia was that there would be no new land grants offered to anyone else around the Rain Wild River. That was the exchange: The Rain Wild and Old Traders would take on the risks of making the Rain Wilds a prosperous trading city, and in return get exclusive access. The Trader council chose to welcome the Three Ships Immigrants (although not as equals); but they have not chosen to welcome the New Traders. The New Traders’ land grants violate the original charter that created Bingtown; and the New Traders themselves have not put in the sweat and pain and generations of mutations, early death, disease, and child mortality that the Rain Wild and New Traders have paid for the wealth they now enjoy.
And, worse still, the New Traders do not share Bingtown values. This is an striking source of tension to read with a modern eye. To a 21st-century Western reader, phrases like ‘They don’t share our values’ is code for something rather bigoted and horrible. But in this particular case, the values that are not shared include things like, ‘Bingtown does not allow slavery.’ By contrast, the New Traders are pretty ok with slavery. It’s forbidden in Jamaillia, but common in Chalced, and Bingtown sits rather awkwardly between those two nations. And because Bingtown has to eat, and farming is labour-intensive, and because Chalced is a valuable trading partner, slave labour starts looking like a pretty attractive option. They hide it in Bingtown under terms like ‘indentured servants’, but those indentured servants are all imported from the slave markets in Chalced, and they work for free, which is causing real economic unheaval among the Old Traders who are trying to make a living by the old ways. Some don't even try, and instead adopt these newer, cheaper, crueler methods.
Ahh, such a rich backdrop! So much more sophisticated than the Six Duchies, whose politics were really not much more complex than ‘Me want kingship oh no bad guys killing’. And because this cultural-political setting is so rich, it means that the characters have a thousand different ways to interact with the world.
So let's discuss the characters! They split into two groups. First, we’ve got the Vestrit family and their circle. Althea Vestrit is the youngest daughter of an Old Trader family, and has always expected to inherit the command of the family liveship, Vivacia, who is on the cusp of sentience. Althea loves Vivacia with all her heart, and has spent her life on the ship since childhood. She understands the business inside and out, and is the logical choice to inherit the ship on her father’s death. But when her father dies, right at the start of the book, it turns out that he has left the ship not to her, but to her elder sister, with the understanding that her elder sister’s husband, Kyle Haven, will command Vivacia.
And that brings us to Kyle Haven. My god, Kyle Haven. What an astonishingly awful person. He is so brilliantly constructed to be just terrible. As I saw on the r/fantasy subreddit not too long ago, it is entirely reasonable to ask something like, ‘Who is the worst villain in all of fantasy, and why is it Kyle Haven?’ Except I don’t really want to call him a villain, because that dignifies him with some degree of scope and power that he doesn’t have. He’s just a small, evil, vicious, cruel, stupid man, who makes life terrible for everyone around him in ways that are pretty trivial on the broad scope of politics – changing the world is not in Kyle Haven’s scope – but catastrophic on the personal level.
The first example of his vileness is his treatment of Althea. Not only does he insist on captaining Vivacia himself, he refuses to let Althea even sail with him on the ship – effectively banishing her from her home and a newly-sentient creature who is a combination of her child and her best friend. And then there is his son, Wintrow. Wintrow is a sensitive, intelligent, thoughtful boy, who has spent years as a novitiate at a monastery, in training to become a priest of Sa. He is happy there, in this life path which suits him down to the ground. But you can’t sail a liveship without a member of the family on board, and since Althea’s not present, Kyle decides that Wintrow will do the job. So he removes Wintrow from the monastery and forces him to become ship’s boy on Vivacia. Wintrow is too weak, too puny, too girly, thinks Kyle. This will toughen him up, thinks Kyle, and make him a man.
Oh, yes, because Kyle is also a raging sexist. It’s one of those Chalced values, along with condoning slavery, that are gaining traction in Bingtown. Wintrow is too weak and girly (when in fact he’s just gentle and thoughtful); and Althea is too masculine and coarse (when in fact she’s just experienced in sailing and trading).
The worst (as a person) and best (as a character) part of Kyle Haven is that he actually can make an entirely coherent case for his actions. It’s not convincing if you don’t share his values, but if you do, his behaviour makes perfect sense. Of all his faults, he is not a hypocrite. Observe: The Vestrit family’s finances are in dire straits; culture in Bingtown is shifting Chalcedwards, which makes powerful female matriarchs less common; Althea must marry someone wealthy, which will help; and Vivacia must make a lot of money trading. So it makes perfect sense, in his eyes, for Althea to focus on the womanly ways of marrying, and to leave managing the family business to him, a manly man. First order of business: Vivacia must carry the most profitable cargo possible. For Reasons, the Vestrits do not trade up the Rain Wild River, so what’s the next most profitable cargo?
Slaves.
Kyle Haven therefore turns a sentient liveship into a slaver.
He really is vile.
Contrast him, then, with the heart of the second group of characters, Kennit. Kennit is a pirate. If Kyle dreams too small to be a proper villain, Kennit is too --- something I can't articular --- to be a villain either. He acts as an antagonist, but however much you might be pulling for Althea's success, it's really hard not to root for Kennit at the same time, even when their goals are opposed. He's a deeply charismatic character, not only to other people in the book, but also to readers.
Kennit's one dream is to become King of the Pirate Isles, an awkward series of channels and islands and reefs that stretch between Bingtown and Jamaillia. He is smart; he is charismatic; he is driven, and he is lucky. He is not a good man, but again and again his luck turns out in ways that make him seem virtuous. For example, one of Kennit’s goals is to command a liveship. But because he has not had three generations of family wealth to pour into paying for one legitimately, he must take one piratically. This is a bit of a tall order: liveships do not serve anyone but their family, and they are faster than any conventional ship, and impossible to catch in chase. Kennit’s first mate, Sorcor, thinks that it is not possible for Kennit to take a liveship, and because pirates have a degree of democracy in their hierarchies, Sorcor could make real trouble for Kennit if he does not support this endeavour. So they make a deal: Sorcor is a former slave. Sorcor hates slavery. For every liveship Kennit tries to take, they will also take a slaveship and free the enslaved captives on it. Capturing liveships is hard, but capturing slaveships is easy, and so they are successful at none of the former but quite a lot of the latter.
So now, through no desire of his own, Kennit becomes known as the pirate captain that frees slaves. The people love him. And wait, there's more! At one point, he dumps a load of freed captives in the nearest settlement – because he really does not have any use for these weakened drains on resources, as he sees them, and wants to get rid of them as soon as possible. But it turns out that these settlers were themselves captured and enslaved, and came from the same village as the new load on Kennit's ship. And so now Kennit not only frees slaves, but reunites families in the process.
If this book were just about Kennit, the success after success would become monotonous. But set against the inimitably Hobbian pattern of catastrophe after catastrophe striking the Vestrit family, it’s rather nice to take a break from Wintrow’s mistreatment and Althea’s frustrations and Bingtown’s decline, and see what it’s like for someone to enjoy success in a Robin Hobb book.
Can you see how these plot elements coming together? Kennit, Kyle, liveships, slavery? Anyway, they do. In a predictable turn of events, to be sure, but with a satisfying sense of inevitable doom finally being unleashed upon fucking Kyle Haven who fucking deserves it. (I don't usually love to hate baddies in my books, but something about Kyle is so completely hateful it's almost enjoyable.)
Finally, I can’t end without saying something about Malta Vestrit, Kyle Haven’s daughter. In the same way that Kyle himself is just awful, but brilliantly so, Malta is also just awful, in a 13-year-old way. She is going to have one of the best character arcs in all of fantasy, so take a moment to enjoy what an astonishing brat she is in this book.
There’s so much more here! There are the sea serpents! There’s Etta, there’s Davad, there’s Brashen. There’s AMBER! there’s so much more here that I could rave about! But my wordcount has already grown too high, so I must stop typing. Perhaps in the next book I will get to those folks. Or perhaps not! Because new revelations await there. This is chonky epic fantasy at its absolute best.
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References:
Hobb, Robin. Ship of Magic. [Bantam, 1998].
CLARA COHEN lives in Scotland in a creaky old building with pipes for gas lighting still lurking under her floorboards. She is an experimental linguist by profession, and calligrapher and Islamic geometric artist by vocation. During figure skating season she does blather on a bit about figure skating. She is on Mastodon at wandering.shop/@ergative, and on Bluesky at https://bsky.app/profile/ergative-abs.bsky.social