Robin Hobb "The Mad Ship"

The cover art

This is the second book in The Liveship Trilogy. I've spoken of the first book a bit in a previous post. I'll try to be vague when talking of this book since I don’t really want to give away the elements in this book, for it would ruin the reading experience (if one were to decide to read the book for oneself).

It had been a while since finishing the first book, so in the beginning I had to recall the things mentioned in the first book to understand this one. The little pieces of information started coming back bit by bit as I read… for the information, the book consists of separate (for now) storylines. One tale is continued, then another, then another, and then the first one is continued again. I'm not sure I explained this well, but I’m trying to say that you don’t get one big story from some story-teller’s perspective. You get many different viewpoints (within one little storyline you can get 3 or more different perspectives at different time; very insightful) and also you can have a peek at things happening at the same time in different places.

Anyway, Hobb's style is one that lets you in on the secret bit by bit, while everything seems logical at all times – since you see stuff from the people’s perspective, your eyes are the character’s eyes and the character’s knowledge is your knowledge. So someone explains things and it sounds logical, despite later finding out that there was much the explainer didn’t know… That way you feel as a part of the story, you’re there, you’re everywhere. It feels good.

Right now I have quite a point of comparison since I just started reading C.S. Lewis’s “The Magician's Nephew” and the whole world is offered to me on a plate. I sort of feel cheated… it would be so nice to explore and live in the world the writer creates… Lewis denies me that (well, it is quite a children’s book and they wouldn’t understand otherwise) while Hobb didn’t.

I don’t remember how I felt when I had just finished the first book in the series. Right now I feel good. I now know so much more than before reading (of how this world works, the mythology etc) and I've a clearer idea of how the stories are going to be linked together in the end (I'm quite sure they will be – that seems to be the ending style of this sort of technique). The book ended with a note that left open SO many possibilities and I don’t have the means to find out what happens next! That is kind of infuriating but also kind of fun.

I can now dwell on the book a bit, I can read other things (though they seem so foreign right now)… The Lewis books are small and easy to read, I think they'll go fast (during the bus ride – 30 minutes – I read approx 50 pages of 180). That gives my reading habits some diversity (reading big fat books takes a lot of time, you see – but I love it).

But the book, I get diverted as I try to talk of this book. People grow in that book. A little girl goes from a shallow gossiper to a woman facing very difficult situations. A boy who is unhappy about his destiny changes his way of looking at life and makes quite a difference.

There's been quite some talk of selfishness here (and how every action has a consequence). Generally the selfish (or wrongly calculated) acts have tended to end with quite a tragedy (the whole dragons & serpents ordeal, for example). It was stunning when the moment came in the book when it was revealed how a whole other race (so to speak) was stripped of its rightful heritage and faced extinction simply because one 'race' had claimed something that didn't belong to them. The trouble became known hundreds of years later, I think (I'm not too sure of the timeline), so the doers don't really face up to their doings. Their heirs do.

There is also talk of respecting the ways and contracts of the ancestors (can't help but remember Russia here - they didn't even need hundreds of years to pass)... are they really old and not fit in the 'modern' world? Does that hold back progress? Can one side simply choose to avoid them? That thing is still not settled, so I'm not sure what the author thinks. I'm not sure what to think, yet. What else was there?

Why don't people listen and believe? It's weird how words have become a means of using someone and now they're not believable. There is little trust because there are so much lies. So you lie and you lie and you lie (or you rave like a madman)... and when at one point there's a need to tell the truth, nobody listens. I've felt that myself, sadly. But I've also been on the receiving end of the lies, so I'm not too trusting myself. I'd like to trust. But you can't. You have to watch out, since you can't see if it's the truth or not. Grr.

What's going to happen now?

PS. I think I'm going to talk a bit closer about the plot after I finish book 3 (I'll try to think of a way to hide the spoilers - perhaps changing the color of the text. Maybe there's a "spoiler" tag somewhere for HTML?). I want to dwell on the plot a bit as well! But I don't want to spoil things. A dilemma. Really.