The Liveship trilogy

The trilogy format is something of a fantasy convention, and often it can seem like an unnecessary attempt to stretch out the skeleton of a story. With the Robin Hobb novels, I genuinely think it is not the case.

‘The Liveship Traders’ is the second series, following ‘The Farseer’ Trilogy and occupying the same other-world realm. Hobb’s series do inevitably entangle the stories of fiercely believable human characters with starring roles of dragons and, more frequently, their pre-evolved serpent form. This is a water-borne epic, with most of the action being concerned abovedecks or ashore in pirate towns and seaports. The serpents are the sea-monsters of old; the more comprehensible Kraken of the standard sea-faring tale.

We follow the lives of separate characters, and each chapter is so engrossing that we spin from fearlessly pirating with the complex, conflicting, homophobic Kennit and his desire to rule the ever-changing pirate shores; to then a high society of trading and debutantes that puts Gossip Girl to shame, following the fall of the Vestrit family fortunes with the loss of their liveship; and the liveships themselves, complete with eerie talking figureheads. There are so many characters to follow and so many separate story arcs, it would be easy to get lost in the individual complexities of one set, and thus lose interest in others and skim over their parts, but the characters are each themselves so involving that it is near impossible to miss anything.

Althea Vestrit rebels against the constraints society puts upon her, dressing as a man and taking to a ship to try and earn the right to claim back her father’s liveship from first her callous foreigner brother-in-law and second the pirates who stole it from him; Reyn Khuprus represents a peculiar race of folk from the acidic shores of the Rain Wild River, all distorted by their world to be faintly scaled and serpent-like; he is arranged to marry Malta Vestrit, the young sparkling darling of her family, spoilt rotten by her father and absolutely dedicated to the importance of her looks and her debut – the sweet, slow-boiling romance between the two accompanies Malta’s coming of age, as through countless tribulations she comes to realise there is more to life than a pretty dress and dainty slippers.

To cast a dragon in a novel is always a risky business: it can easily end up too Eragon. To cast a dragon with a personality and with dialogue is even riskier: to what point do you risk humanising something that often dominates a backdrop where humans are, in that comparison, insignificant? The dragon Tintaglia, arising in book three, is executed by Hobb to be self-important, but ultimately dependent on the humans. She over-tips the balance Althea desperately strived for: in a dragon community, in a world where dragons not humans are top of the food chain, every female is a Queen, and it is a Queen who must save the last dregs of her species: it is just convenient that the stories of the humans complete beneath her great blue wingspan.

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