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91 of 95 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
reads like life, and yet not quite like life, February 28, 2004
This review is from: Fool's Fate (The Tawny Man, Book 3) (Hardcover)
I find I shouldn't leave the Fitz books without saying goodbye in a review. The series as a whole is perhaps my favorite story to come out in the last decade. Fitz is a splendid protagonist, the Fool perhaps the greatest fantasy character of all time. The Assassin trilogy in particular renewed my faith in the emotional power of story, after I thought I'd been pretty well jaded by adulthood. I could hardly put those down; I could hardly put Fool's Fate down, but read most of it off in one compulsive and completely irresponsible afternoon. Hobb makes you read. I think it's because she drives the story with major secrets, but keeps feeding you partial resolutions throughout, so that you can hope the end of the next chapter is a good stopping place (you tell yourself you hope this, but of course, you don't), yet when you reach that resolution, another tension has begun. She interlocks her plot-tensions brilliantly--a wonderful writer. Fool's Fate reads less like a novel than like an autobiography. Fitz, Dutiful, Chade travel oversea to slay the dragon Icefyre (or to prevent the slaying, as the case may be) and win for Dutiful the lovely, cool, and politically-advantageous hand of Narcheska Elliania. The dragon element of the plot--indeed, the novel's ostensible driving force--is resolved with 200 pages to go, however (as opposed to Assassin's Quest, the final book of that trilogy, when Verity flies off with 20 pages to go); the remainder of the book finds Hobb clipping off, one by one, all the taut ropes of Fitz's life, so that we see Fitz, at the end, slack and content in a situation of his own deep liking. When I was reading the book, I liked this, because I've been with Fitz from the beginning, and am frankly more interested in him than I am in the quest for the dragon. I want him to find answers for his life, for my sake and for his. But in the end, I have two complaints about the extended denouement: Hobb answers too many of his life's questions, and she does not answer them in sufficient depth. I give you, for example, the Old Blood/Piebald scenario, which we had been led to care about in the first two books of this series, but which resolves itself in this book thoroughly and with scarcely a mention. Fitz wasn't there to see it. As an autobiographical ploy, this makes sense (a lot of things which affect our lives we aren't around to see to completion), yet as a device in a novel, it leaves the reader unsatisfied. The ending is far too cursory; months, seasons, years go by in pages. What this amounts to is a lack of integration between Fitz's personal life and the novel's plot, a notable difference from the Assassin trilogy, where Fitz's life and identity were the plot. Perhaps because of this, Hobb's justly-lauded emotional machinery begins to clank (especially apart from the excellent character Thick). Sometimes I just didn't buy the character motivations, felt instead like "of course this had to happen for plot purposes," as if plot led character, not vice versa. Despair and the joy of discovery--the source of much tumult and plot-generation in the first four books--are gone. Perhaps Fitz is too old for either of those things. One hopes not. Do these complaints mean that you shouldn't read the book? No, no. Hobb is still Hobb; there are lovely--even perfect--plot twists (e.g., the relationship the Fool wants with Fitz), delicate emotional moments (e.g., a reconciliation between Thick and Fitz), a richly-detailed fantasy world (welcome to the Outislands), and a lot of people you can't help but come to like.
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50 of 52 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
A Fantastic Finish, March 29, 2004
This review is from: Fool's Fate (The Tawny Man, Book 3) (Hardcover)
Every now and again you encounter a character so profoundly moving and real that you have a hard time believing he's fictional; one who shakes you up and alters your world to the point where it makes you feel silly for getting so involved in a book, and then you reread your favorite scenes and it happens all over again, and eventually you have to stop feeling silly in order to just focus on feeling. This book gutted me. The Fool is incomparable. But don't just pick up Fool's Fate without having read the rest of the series. Start with the Assassin books, skip the Liveship Traders if you're in a hurry (I was), then read the Tawny Man series in order. If you read Fool's Fate on its own, you may still be struck with Hobb's fabulous storytelling and the intricate nature of her world. But you'll miss the opportunity to slowly fall in love with her characters as they grow and develop. Do not deprive yourself of getting to know the Fool through Fitz's eyes. I think I'm in the minority; I hope that Hobb will never write another book in this series. Fool's Fate left me with such a bittersweet sense of completion that I don't see how a new tale could compare. I love the Fool, and I miss him, but I won't let my "reader's greed" for a sequel interfere with the Fool's powerful final sacrifices, and the beauty of untouched, lingering possibility.
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34 of 36 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Fitzchivalry comes a long way...and what's with that name?, August 6, 2004
This review is from: Fool's Fate (The Tawny Man, Book 3) (Hardcover)
I've discovered something about Robin Hobb, something that has recoloured my view of Golden Fool. Hobb writes slow-paced character studies that emphasize that character over the action. She writes about relationships, and she writes them very effectively. I still found Golden Fool to be too slow with the character interaction not as interesting as she has shown she is capable of. However, I now have a bit more of an understanding of it. That is because I read the third book in the series, Fool's Fate. This book is more of the same, but I found it much more interesting. Fitzchivalry Farseer is still going through rough times, but it seems to have more of a point to it than it did in the second book.
Fool's Fate seems very unusual in that the "climax" of the book takes place almost two-thirds of the way through the book, with the rest of it dealing with all the scattered pieces of Fitz's life that Hobb has left and how Fitz attempts to put them back together. This is where I realized what the point of this series was. It wasn't just the story of a dragon-quest and a political alliance. It was the story of how far Fitz has come since the events in the first Assassin series, a story of relationships. The dragon is important, but only in relation to Fitz and Dutiful and the past that Fitz has to face. The pace of the book is extremely slow, but Hobb's strong writing makes it interesting (unlike the second book, which I think just came across as too depressing to be interesting). The text is dense and you won't plow through it in a day or two. That could be a fault if you don't like that sort of thing. I do, when it's done well, so I loved it.
Another strength that Fool's Fate had that Golden Fool didn't have was that it didn't seem as contrived. Many times in the previous book, Fitz had to be spying a lot so that the reader could understand what was going on. He was constantly sneaking through the secret passages in the castle so that he could watch, for example, the Bingtown Traders come for an audience with the Queen. That's a hazard of writing in the first person, and I thought it let Hobb down in the second. Not this time. There is a little bit of spying, but not a lot. Exposition isn't quite as necessary in Fool's Fate, it being much more immediate to Fitz. He's also directly involved a lot more, so what exposition there is comes more from a character relating the story to Fitz. In large doses this would be tiresome too, but Hobb minimizes it.
All of the characters are extremely interesting and three-dimensional. The only one who gets short shrift is the villain of the piece. I realize that's because she isn't that important in the grand scheme of things, but considering how evil she is and some of the things she does, I found the cursory way she was dealt with disappointing. Her influence is felt more in the surroundings than it is directly by her actions, and this is actually quite effective. Consider her even, with both a huge plus and a huge minus. Every other character, however, is far up on the plus scale.
The only other character fault is Thick, but it's not because he's badly characterized. He actually gets a lot of development and is one of the most three-dimensional characters in the bunch. However, I just found him annoying. His constant whining about not getting on a boat, constantly being sick, his single-mindedness, all of it was just aggravating. If he doesn't reach your annoyance threshold, then you will like this book even more then I did. And I did like it a lot.
The relationship between the Fool and Fitz is very touching, a love that goes beyond lovers and even beyond family. I think that one of the strengths of Fool's Fate was that they weren't at each other's throats so much as they were in the second book. Their relationship colours everything else in the book, and the book lives or dies on it. They have their arguments in this one, but you don't feel like the heart has been ripped out of the book. What happens is almost tragic, and the way the relationship is left feels almost fitting. It's an ending and a beginning, and they have to decide whether being together will be part of that.
Finally, Hobb does a wonderful job with pulling together all of her series. If you read this series first, you will find out a lot of what happens in the first Assassin series, but that's not necessarily a bad thing. She ties together that series and the Bingtown Traders one into a cohesive whole, using elements of everything to leave the world in a different place than when she started. She also ends it fairly definitively, so there doesn't appear any chance of a sequel. This is a good thing, as it would be nice to see her try something new. I know she has written as Megan Lindholm, but it would be interesting to see where she goes as Robin Hobb. Here's to another book, but definitely in a different world. Give the whole series a try, reading the second book with an eye to what I said above. You'll probably enjoy the second book a lot more than I did, and then you'll have this wonderful conclusion.
David Roy
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