Trigger Warning: SPOILERS
For the last two years or more, I have been both wrong and right about Robin Hobb’s books on the Realms of the Elderlings. I was right that the less Six Duchies’ story, the better everything gets. But I was wrong that the author herself is homophobic. Or sexist on purpose.
Liveship Traders trilogy has proven to me that I was very wrong about the question of how sexism works in this universe, and what the author thinks of it. Rain Wilds Chronicles, a quartet on Rain Wilds and on discovering the ancient city of Kelsingra, has proven me wrong about the portrayal of LGBT characters in the whole series.
And I’m glad it has. And, of course, those books have so many other layers that I don’t even know with what I should begin.
The quartet tells the story of three and more characters connected together, such as Alise, a bored Tradesman’s wife pursuing her scholarly passion, Leftrin, a sailor, and Thymara, a rejected Rain Wilds girl who is offered an unexpected chance in her life. To those characters, other personas from their social circles are added. And at some point, we return to the perspective of the Vestrit family known from Liveship Traders trilogy. It’s very different from Fitz-centered books on Six Duchies, and it’s also different from the afore-mentioned trilogy. Because this time, Hobb explores the question of dragons and Rain Wilds even more thoroughly, and she does it in such a way that the reader can see the bigger pattern. Her quartet isn’t a set of adventure novels. It’s a series about a profound change in the world, a series about coexistence, about nature, about preserving endangered species, about love, about mysteries… There are political and ecological messages hidden there, but they are very subtle. It’s about defining a-new what means society and what rules mean, and her characters have to find answers on their own.
Reading the quartet, I wasn’t surprised that I like the way Hobb uses PoVs narration. I was surprised, though, how deftly she introduced and developed her LGBT characters. So far, one wouldn’t find a lot of them in her Elderlingsverse, except for Amber/Fool. And so, when it came out that the Bad Husband of one of the heroines is a gay, I was afraid that it was going to take some homophobic turns in the boks. And, luckily, I was proven completely wrong.
You see, Hest, Alise’s husband, is bad not because he’s gay, of course. He’s bad because he’s selfish, and he doesn’t care about his wife and about Sedric, his lover and his secretary. He agrees on Sedric accompanying Alise in her expedition to Rain Wilds because he’s bored with both of them. Needless to say, it’s Rain Wilds where all the characters meet and where the plot is unleashed. And there, Sedric meets Carson, a taciturn but supportive huntsman who is all but like refined men from Bingtown. And they end up with their own house, and all this is just so sweet and unaffected… And I’d say that their story is one of the best love stories and gay romance stories I’ve read. I mean, contemporary YA books too often portray LGBT relations as if they happened only to young people, and the rest of the world was all straight; I’d say that especially Leigh Bardugo has this problem.
And, honestly, a book where both young and adult people do important things to their world is refreshing after such works as Bardugo’s or Rowling’s altogether. Hobb’s universe feels so vivid, among other things, because their characters’ concerns resemble those of people of different ages and backgrounds. Fears about being accepted. Fears about one’s bussiness. Fears about sustaining one’s social position. It’s not always about epic quests and it is not always about Young Hero(ines) Doing Everything. It’s about humans, about humans who do not only extraordinary things, but common and daily things too. And most of them are just… people. Even villains aren’t cartoonish. And those characters we’re rooting for aren’t perfect. Leftrin is coarse and opportunistic sometimes, but never with Alise whom he comes to love. Alise is clever and determined; if she doesn’t have a self-whining period. Other characters are equallly complicated, and so their relations are. They feel like humans, not like archetypes.
And it’s also about dragons, very much about dragons. Let’s not forget about them in the great scheme of things!
Dragons in Hobb’s books remind me of those of LeGuin. They are wise. They are powerful. And they are out of any human notions of morality, splendid in their own ways, often selfish to our perception. But that’s why they ring so true, and that’s why they are so lovable, like those elements without which one cannot imagine a good fantasy novel. Hobb’s dragons aren’t cheesy. Their stroy isn’t schematic. There’s a bigger plan to it, a cycle of life, and there is a hell bunch of mysteries. And I prefer this over the n-th story on dragon riders. There is so much of colour and flavour, of descriptions brimming with impressions thanks to them.
However, there is one problem I have with this quartet, and the said problem puts some fragments of the Farseer books into new light.
Now I can see that the author doesn’t have a problem with informal relationships. Neither she is homophobic. But she has a problem with teenagers falling in love and having sex, no matter if we speak of gay or straight couples. Every time such relations occur in Hobb’s books, they are described as a distraction, as something initiated too early. And, well, I don’t agree, because teenage people are teenage people. You may not believe it, but they had premarital sex even back in Boccaccio’s times. Then, why they can’t have it in a fantasy world?
I don’t know. But beside it, this is a fine books series, more than fine.
Left Hand of Fiction 