Hooray! I finished the family storyline on Assassin’s Creed: Odyssey! Now I’m trying to finish up the rest and after that I think I’m going to get Legacy of the First Blade so I can see what happens next.
Also it’s been a weird week.
Let’s talk about the Soldier Son trilogy from Robin Hobb.
---
The Soldier Son Trilogy Review/Talky Thing
I recently finished reading Robin Hobb’s Soldier Son trilogy. It was strange. I picked them up in the first place because I had read somewhere (I think TV Tropes?) that it was a fantasy novel that depicted a fantasy version of the American West, discussing in it colonialism and the subjugation of indigenous people. There was an American and a Native American analogue! It was cool idea to do with a fantasy novel in an alternate world, and I wanted to see how it was done.
Turns out, it was done in the strangest way possible.
The first book is, I maintain, very good, having only a few missteps. We’re introduced to our protagonist, Nevare Burville, who is the second son of Lord Burville, meaning that he is the Soldier Son (first son inherits, second son goes to army, third to the church) and destined to become a cavalry officer. There was a kerfuffle recently because the king of Gernia recently elevated several soldier sons in the military to lords, because they backed him when the old nobility wouldn’t; Nevare’s father is one of those that got elevated.
Thing is, a lot of Gernia’s territory is built on the plains, which previously belonged to the Plainsfolk. They had magic on their side, but the Gernians worked out that iron can cancel out magic, and started using iron shot in their rifles to take out mages. Now they’re a beaten down people, considered second-class citizens to the white Gernians, who insist that they’re teaching them how to be civilized.
There’s quite a lot of details that stuck out to me as interesting and worthy of potential. Nevare’s father seems like a good father, I suppose, but he’s also plainly sexist and racist from the first chapter, in which child!Nevare gets in trouble for defending a girl his own age that’s mixed race; his father doesn’t chastise him too much, but he’s quick to say that a girl on her own is just too much of a temptation for the boys in the settlement to help themselves, and that Gernians shouldn’t mix with Plainspeople because that makes them unclean somehow. And before sending Nevare off to military school, he lets Nevare go off camping with a Plainsman warrior for like a month to “learn from your enemy” making the man several promises he has no intention of keeping, and deciding to hunt the man down when it doesn’t go well.
Here’s a character who seem sympathetic to the main character, but as nice as he is to his family he’s still strictly upholding a very patriarchal and racist system without question. And of course it comes back to bite him. We can’t claim that Nevare’s father isn’t a racist, sexist douche because he’s nice to his family; the text doesn’t let us. I thought that was an interesting part of the book.
The Plainsman that Nevare spends time with, Dewara, is also quick to point out that all Plainspeople are not the same at all. He’s from a tribe called the Kidona, who generally don’t get along well with the others. It’s the Gernians that lump them all together as one people, and they’ve had to stick together in the face of a military trying to stamp them out.
This all sounds interesting, doesn’t it? Well, here’s the thing though: most of this series isn’t really about that colonialist struggle between Gernians and Plainspeople. After the first book, that’s all mostly dropped. No, actually it’s mostly involved with another group of indigenous people, the Specks, who live in the forest at the edge of the Gernian Empire, who are using magic to infect the Gernians with plagues to keep them from invading. And then Nevare gets sort of infected with their magic, and their magic is trying to get him to act in their interests but he wants to remain Gernian? And also the magic makes Nevare very fat, because Speck wizards are morbidly obese,and also the aristocracy of their people, who have feeders to bring them food and do basic tasks like shopping and hunting for them? And also the feeders can be a harem too? Also there’s an old Gernian god of death to whom Nevare owes a debt to because Reasons?
Like what the fudge.
And the thing falls apart at the ending, because the story’s resolution was that the Gernians discover some gold and have a gold rush, and the queen of Gernia decides that the Speck sacred trees are also sacred to her, so they’re no longer concerned with expanding outward and everyone can go home now, isn’t that great?
There came a point in the third book where I knew that I wouldn’t be satisfied with the ending. Because the whole story has turned into this conflict within Nevare of having to help the Specks while also wanting to remain Gernian, and there would have to be peace for this to be any sort of conclusion. I thought that if somehow the two sides just sat and talked things out and worked out their differences it’d come across as a bit corny; like, “Hey, don’t worry! We solved colonialism!” as if all it took was a few level-headed conversations. That would be silly. But it’d be better than what we got, which didn’t even involve an actual peace treaty or conversation; just, “Oh, we’re having a gold rush, so we don’t want to expand anymore, it’s cool. We solved colonialism!”
Except it’s not solved at all! Are we really going with the ending where the problems are solved because of human greed? What happens when the gold runs out, as it inevitably will? Are Gernians going to give up a decades-long conflict because they just found one spot rich in gold? And what about the Plainspeople? They’re still second-class citizens who are having their culture systematically stamped out! The first chapter shows them being oppressed. And yet their status is such a non-issue.
The series ends with Nevare getting a happy ending, which, yay, I guess, considering all the terrible stuff he had to put up with over the course of the story. But we’re essentially being told that the horrible crimes being perpetuated on the characters suffering under an imperialist military’s heel are no big deal because at least our white male lead got a happy ending!
I feel bad about coming down this hard on this book too! The first had so much potential, and I was hoping that this would let me launch more into Robin Hobb’s work; it is, after all, past time I tried to oread more speculative fiction by female authors. But overall the story of this trilogy just wasn’t good and it didn’t make much sense. Structurally and thematically it falls to pieces and halfway through the third book it just became a chore to read.
Maybe read the first book. After that, feel free to skip.
---
No comments:
Post a Comment