Storm clouds are gathering around Bingtown. Over generations, the town's seafaring traders have transformed it from a hardscrabble colony to a wealthy port of renown. They owe their riches to a monopoly on lucrative trade routes granted as a reward for settling the magic-blighted lands. Only they can brave the caustic waters of the most profitable waterways in intelligent liveships, but it comes at the price of losing unborn children to strange birth defects, a side effect of the mystical energies imbuing the area. However, a new satrap's willingness to bend ancient covenants in order to sate his prurient passions threatens their way of life. No family feels it more than the Vestrits. Patriarch Ephron Vestrit is dying, and his liveship, Vivacia, will gain sentience at his passing, a quickening concomitant with vastly increased financing costs. (Built of rare wizardwood, a liveship is so costly as to entail decades of debt.) Daughter Althea thinks she'll inherit the captaincy of the vessel, but her mother, Ronica, believes she lacks the savvy to see the family through fiscally lean times. Kyle Haven, husband to weak-willed oldest daughter Keffria, has trading experience, but also seems set on remaking the household in his own image. And domestic discord is far from the Vestrits' only danger. Flesh-eating sea serpents prowl the waters, and an ambitious pirate named Kennit deigns to rule the shipping lanes. Then there's the danger inherent in Vivacia herself, a vessel with a will all her own and a nigh century's worth of communal memory carried in her hull.
Okay, see that ungainly plot summary above? It embodies the biggest problem with Ship of Magic: its length. I wonder how many potential readers the genre has scared off with the titanic thickness of its books. Still, it's hard not to forgive Hobb once you realize that she's using the novel's breadth to build more than just a magical setting. She's setting up a family conflict so potent I actually felt my blood pressure spike while reading key confrontations. Fantasy usually goes big, fixating on kingdoms in peril and clashes on blood-soaked battlefields. Not so with Ship of Magic. You'd call it cozy fantasy if that descriptor didn't make it sound trite. It's anything but. The edition I read featured a cover blurb from George R.R. Martin ("Fantasy as it ought to be written"), and what an appropriate marketing choice. Though Hobb doesn't slaughter protagonists left and right, she deftly twitches the tangled strings of conflict to make relatively minor events shiver with strife. The bluing of dying man's lips. The prick of a tattooist's pen. A wounded sailor discussing how best to remove his mutilated finger. They raise more hackles than armed conflict. Perhaps the best testimony I can give is that, despite its length, Ship of Magic made me want to immediately turn to the next volume in the series as soon as I'd finished it.
(Picture: CC 2007 by Melissa Nilsson)
2 comments:
Yeah, I honestly feel like I prefer Hobb over Martin.
Martin has more flash and is, honestly, more compelling. But Hobb feels more fundamentally trustworthy; she's telling fresh, dark stories about characters all the time, whereas half the time Martin is just being a sly iconoclast.
She's stupendous. I mean, I look back over this review and am unsatisfied with it. She does so much right with economics and religious belief and geopolitics; I barely touched on any of it within 600 words. I guess that's why she gives herself so much space. It allows time of all those topics to develop.
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