Customer Reviews

Fool's Fate (The Tawny Man, Book 3)

5 star:		(102)
4 star:		(28)
3 star:		(17)
2 star:		(8)
1 star:		(1)

 

 

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.

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.

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

I loved the Farseer trilogy. I enjoyed the Liveship Traders. I was disappointed by the end of this third trilogy. It was so much less than it could have been. After making such a huge deal over the friendship between FitzChivalry and the Fool, to have it end the way it did was frustrating. Rather than exploring new horizons, Hobb seems to have taken the easy way out and tacked a "happily ever after" on the end. I should probably mention that I never liked Molly's character, even in the Farseer trilogy, so her role in this final installment annoyed me no end. At the conclusion of this book, I was not left with any sensation of "Wow! What an ending!" but merely a "Well, now I can stop worrying about it." Hardly the response I expected.

Having said that, the book earns points for being well-written and finely crafted. The ending, while not the one I would have chosen, did follow logically from the events of the story. And perhaps it is a mark of how well developed Hobb's characters were that I cared so much about what happened to them. So 4 stars for the series overall.

After NINE books, I was looking forward to some answers to a few questions, one huge one of which Hobb leaves hanging, making me wonder if she's coming back to the series at a later date. I hope so, since the ending left me not only cold, but resentful.

The book is well paced and well written, and as with all Hobb books, I have teared up unexpectedly and then laughed a few pages later. The character of Thick is so gently drawn, and the Fool is one of my favorite fantasy characters, reminding me in a way of Agent Pendergast from Douglas Preston and Lincoln Child's books.

But Fitz, poor Fitz, "poor me" Fitz- he was never meant for a storybook ending. Life isn't that way, and I really, truly feel like Hobb copped out. I was left holding the book, looking for a postscript, SOMETHING, to remove my utter distaste and disbelief at what I had just read.

It's a magnificent series of books, all nine, but to me, the ending was a revolting letdown!

I'm surprised that this book has so many five star ratings, because I really thought it was the weakest of Hobb's efforts involving Fitz (six books). The writing is still good, and many of the characters interesting, but the book totally disengages itself from the premises laid by the others in the series. Throughout the entire course of the novel track, Fitz is supposedly learning about his responsibilities and his duties to his land and his people, gradually coming to terms with his place within that system. Yet at the end he just suddenly abandons it all, content with going back to a previously (and, in my opinion, correctly) dismissed young love. He basically does exactly what his father did, almost like relapsing into some sort of genetic predisposition for dullness.

There were so many more interesting options for this series to conclude with! I had always felt that Hobb was leading a romance between Kettricken and Fitz, and this to me would have been far more believable than running back to Molly given how well he actually knew either of them. I also agree with other reviews that the pacing of the book is too slow, and that Fitz is almost made peripheral (other characters are in fact responsible for most of the major events in the book). I could, however, tolerate a meandering storyline, and even endure reading about Fitz as a part-time nursemaid, if the ending were not so stupefyingly bland.

Maybe I just don't like the "a simple life is the best reward" perspective, but I really feel tricked in that we're being told that such simplicity was a false comfort the entire series, only to have it unceremoniously dumped on us at the end. Such a disappointment for such a great series.

This book is a jumble of words that takes all the messy things in life and swirls them into a storm all about you, and never sets them down again. All loose threads are tied off and yet life continues on, messy as ever, because that's just life. I do not want to recount the plot because those that stuck with the series through it's last eight books will know where it must go - Buckkeep, Icefire's icy island, Tintaglia's blue skies and back again. Knowing this was the last book in the story, the very last, I treasured each page. And such is Robin Hobb's writing, that I could have accepted a dozen moments in the story as the conclusion. There are so many moments of homecoming, looming gulfs of intrigue, hopelessness and bubbling hope, that a lesser writer could have accepted any one of them as the conclusion of this book. Then, they could go on and write another book, and then another, from any of the plot twists here.

Not Robin Hobb. This is a heart pouring out, not a milking cow of a book. The pacing is just what it should be. In every place where she could have gone faster, and summarized instead of showing every detail, and left me wondering forever what that scene could have been like had it been more complete - she went all out, holding nothing back. That's a gift and it is given in this book more times than I could count. It's like the moments in your favorite books that you go back to over and over and reread every year. Here, you can reread the whole book or any part of it and you'll never have enough, I think. Her talent awes me and makes me green with envy.

I could think of no more perfect conclusion to not just one, but three trilogies. It is, in every way, a satisfying and crowning achievement, not least for the fact that it leaves a door open for unexpected futures to intrude.

While I enjoyed each of these books individually, taken as a whole they are one of my favorite series of all time. Throughout each trilogy I would find myself yelling out loud at Fitz because he would make such a frustrating decision and, yet, I often could not imagine making a different decision myself. He is just so human. And I always wanted better for him than he got.

I have read several reviews of this final installment that found the story to be too neatly wrapped up. I disagree. Admittedly, there is a tidiness to the conclusion but, while I loved the frustration throughout the story, I really WANTED Fitz to be happy in the end. Conversely, it really isn't all that 'neat' of an ending. There are still complications. I thought it was a perfect finale.

There were so many times in this book when I was moved to tears by a touching moment between Fitz and one of the many people in his life - Burrich, Patience, the Fool, Chade, and...well...read the book. The book was especially powerful as it reached its climax which, of course, is about FitzChivalry, not Dutiful and his struggles with the dragon, Icefyre.

Hobb's characterization is almost unparalleled in today's market. Each character is rich, vivid and distinct. I cannot remember a recent book where so many characters were so well developed. Of course, Hobb continues with the excellent characters created in other books. I feel like I know Chade and Kettricken and Patience. But in these last two books she gently creates another brilliant addition, Thick, to the cast. Thick makes the story even more human than it already was, which I would have thought impossible.

Well done. A must read.

I began the Tawny Man trilogy with much anticipation, having enjoyed the Farseer trilogy previously. The characters in both trilogies are very well-delineated as is the world they inhabit. I appreciate Robin Hobb's ability to create believable characters and that she does not shy away from hurting them. However...

SPOILERS BELOW


In Fool's Fate I feel that any previous ideas Ms. Hobb had for the resolution of the relationship between Fitz and the Fool suffered a failure to launch. I believe the breakdown occurs when she allows the Fool to suffer such a horrible death. Even though she allows Fitz as the Changer to go beyond death to bring the Fool back, in doing so it is as if she decides that even their close bond could not overcome the way in which the Fool died. While I appreciated very much the scenes after the Fool's restoration where Fitz has finally accepted that he and the Fool have a love that transcends all differences, what I can't fathom is how Fitz can walk away from this knowledge and seek out a love relationship with Molly that is truly pallid by comparison. Fitz stayed away from Molly not just because his own "death" was an established fact for her, but because he knew she could not accept his bond with Nighteyes. His bond with the Fool, once acknowledged, is much the same: a love without limits between two individuals who are organically different. I for one do not feel that Fitz could walk away from that recognition and back to Molly without any indication of regret or understanding of why the Fool must leave. This is a glaring inconsistency to me. If it is the Fool's choice to withdraw the link he and Fitz share, then the Fool becomes the Changer. It is he who makes this decision. Would Fitz have chosen all those years before not to bond with Nighteyes simply because they are two different creatures with mismatched life spans? I realize this is what motivated Burrich to deny his Wit, but Fitz did not do so and never expressed any regret for his own choice, even when it brought him such grief. So why would the Fool pull away when it was he that always said that he placed no limits on his love for Fitz? I never got the feeling that the Fool feared for himself, so if he is trying to spare Fitz more pain then he is acting counter to his nature. He always trusted that Fitz would choose rightly and he knew that would mean suffering on Fitz' part. So why is it okay now for the Fool to prevent Fitz a pain that Fitz himself is willing to accept?

I agree with what some other reviewers have said. I think the Fool was supposed to be revealed as female at some point and that a very sweet, nontraditional romance was being suggested in the previous two books of this trilogy. But when Robin Hobb tortured the Fool and allowed Fitz to bring him back from the dead, there was no safe refuge for the Fool to flee to for healing as there once was for Fitz in his relationship to Nighteyes. That kind of experience was something the Fool had no resources for dealing with and it seems to me that making the Fool reveal himself to actually be female and therefore Fitz' true partner could not be done. It would not ring true to the Fool's death experience and the whole post-traumatic stress situation he manifests after Fitz brings him back to life. I am not actually sorry for that development. If the book had stopped after the scene with Girl on a Dragon and the Fool restoring to Fitz his early memories and pain, then I could probably give this book four stars. What irks me is the idea that once Fitz is "complete" through his bond with the Fool and his restored memories that he could then blithely take up a banal courtship of his lost love and be satisfied with that. He never expresses regret that he lost the opportunity to see the Fool one more time, nor does he show any distress that the Fool came looking for him while Fitz was lost in the Skill pillar. Does it mean nothing to him that his closest friend now believes he is dead, especially when that has been a thorn in Fitz' side with regard to all his loved ones believing him dead for 16 years? I suppose I could excuse this mysterious lack of emotion because of the transcendent nature of the bond between the Fool and Fitz. But once the Fool severed their Skill-link it seemed to me that what Hobb was suggesting was that Fitz felt once again as he did after Nighteyes died -- as if he were missing a part of himself. As indeed he is, because if he and the Fool complete one another then what the Fool does by removing their link is cruel. It is almost like a suicide. If the Fool is not supposed to effect change, how does he justify making this choice? It profoundly affects Fitz' future after all. It apparently renders Fitz blind enough to what he truly wants that he is able to accept the mundane traditional role of husband to a housewife as the epitome of happiness. I'm sorry, I just can't accept that as the "happy ending" to this epic. (And I state this as a happily-married housewife!!!)

There is also the problem of Fitz' place in Buckkeep. If he is willing to act as a shadow king, then why does he not do so after he finally recognizes and verbally accepts that role? If he is supposed to be Skillmaster, why are only a few token sentences given to that responsibility? Most of the ending of the book is an overly-detailed account of his correspondence with Molly and her boys, his obsession with courting her from afar, and how he travels to see her. If I am being forced to accept that Molly is Fitz' reward then I guess I see the point of making that the focus of the last 100 pages. But it left aside the political role that Fitz would have been playing behind the scenes of Dutiful's reign. Fitz is no Chade but I don't think he would have so completely lost interest in his responsibility to his Farseer heritage. Chade's Machiavellian attitude still needs balancing and it is as if Fitz has decided to ignore that fact in favor of pressing his suit with Molly. Yet another inconsistency that bothered me.

I am not sorry to have read this trilogy, but the inconsistencies and the ending of Fool's Fate left me feeling very dissatisfied.

Because her presence sure ruined the ending of this epic saga. For me, anyway.
Having just finished this incredible series, I'm left feeling dumbfounded at how Robin Hobb totally blew the ending. To call it `bittersweet' or `anticlimax' is only to paint part of the picture. If only Molly had died earlier, in childbirth or had some kind of accident. . . the ending would probably have been much better.


Just to recap: Molly was stated over and over again to be only a youthful love of Fitz's, And that she had finally discovered true love with a MAN, Burrich, almost twenty years ago. Someone who could take care of her and give her a horde of children. For crying out loud, she wasn't even that developed a character. I chiefly remember her from the first series as alternating between crying and frowning while stamping her foot and arching her back in ecstasy while she dug her fingernails into Fitz back during lovemaking. Not a whole lot else there really.

Spoilers ahead!

What Fitz got at the end, was hollow and meaningless, even if it was `happy'.
I have a feeling the author chickened out a bit near the end of this story, and all of the groundwork laid for the identity of the Fool was just thrown out because she either couldn't or didn't want to deal with it.

The Fool was supposed to be a woman. Period. The books had so many hints!
First, Starling called it back in book 3, and it was so obvious after that, it made more and more sense as the saga went on. The dream with the Rooster Crown in which a WOMAN with the Fool's voice led some kind of festival. That vision was the first `warning' to Fitz that the Fool was totally different than what he visualized. Then, the story of their relationship in the Tawny Man became about Fitz not seeing the truth on purpose and the complexity of their relationship with the sexual tension building and nether one admitting the truth to the other. Other hints:

The fact the Fool never let him see him undressed.
The fact the Fool covered his chest when showing Fitz his tattoo.
When Jinna the hedge witch read Fitz's palm and said that his true love had been there in and out of his life for many years, and would come back to him at the end. I thought it was the Fool, it made sense. Molly was absent for almost 20 years.
The female visitor from the Trader's town who told Fitz point blank that he was a moron and not seeing `Amber' as she truly was.
The fact the all White Prophets and their Catalysts are male/female pairings.
The list goes on.
The Fool was woven in and out of his life and did come back to him. He was even named `Beloved' !
Instead, Fitz had to go back to Molly in a somewhat painful fashion. I literally cringed while reading the entire nauseating last 20 pages of the book. Ugh.

It was a horrible clichéd ending to have given the readers, after the wonderful originality of the series and did not feel right, but forced. Come on, am I supposed to believe that Fitz pined for the memory of someone that basically either cried or b--tched at him for their entire teenage relationship? In between great love sessions, of course. And upon renewing their acquaintance, she isn't much changed except that she becomes a grandmother with more `womanly curves' while Fitz tries to woo her sorry a-s back to him. Also, they both just kind of sail past the complexity of Burrich in the mix and get over his death with almost painful relief. Burrich deserved better.
Fitz ends up kind of pathetic, really. What was so great about Molly was the nostalgic memory of her he had. The tripe about the Fool buying his memories back from Girl on a Dragon is a cop out to explain why a nearly 40 year old man never grew up in terms of romance.

I liked him with the Fool better.

Hobb built up a complex relationship and it was brushed out by `accident' that's very contrived, just like Burrich's convenient death so Fitz can finally have Molly. And frankly, at the end she's just not worth having.

Other points: Final reunions with people who thought him dead were glossed over. He and Burrich had so much to say to one another . . . this never really happened. The reunion with Patience was a little better, but the feeling of hurry begins to be more obvious at this point in the book.
I wonder if Robin Hobb was truly happy with the ending upon later reflection. If she was rushed, well - it shows. Too many pat and easy answers. Until the last half of this book, the entire saga was a masterpiece. But bringing Fool back to life only to have him walk away without saying goodbye was terrible and not at all what was so painstakingly laid out in the last 6 books.

All so Fitz could finally bag Molly after she sucked a bee stinger out of his ear. After 16 years. (not making this up)

And they lived happily ever after.

The End.

(I hope not!)