Dragon Haven
by Robin Hobb (Harper Voyager)
Prolific fantasy writer Robin Hobb has described her two most recent novels, Dragon Keeper and Dragon Haven, as her return “after a rather long vacation” to the world of the Cursed Shores: the setting for three of her four previous trilogies.
It wasn’t exactly a vacation: during the hiatus Hobb produced the Soldier Son books, dark, uncomfortable explorations of colonialism, plague and body image that not all her fans enjoyed.
It’s much easier to pretend that the Cursed Shores have nothing to do with contemporary debates: a world split between the smug and comfortable trading town of Bingtown and its allied and rival cities, and the mysterious Rain Wilds, contaminated by acid rivers and lakes producing hideous birth deformations. Even Hobb herself colludes: “I don’t want to sound as if I’m writing ecological allegories or ‘message’ books. I’m not. To me, it’s always about dumping lots of disparate ingredients into a pot and stirring it up and seeing what sort of a story bubbles up.”
But allegories always lurk on the shores, because we always write from where we are. In Hobb’s world (‘ware: here be spoilers), trading advantage came from the Liveships: crafted from wood that had sentience and personality. Over previous series, characters learned that the “wood” was the cocoons of dragons. The enslaved dragons’ memories navigated the ships; but the wild dragon population had been reduced to near-extinction by the exploitation: a sentient race and all its memories gone. At the end of the previous trilogy Bingtown — hoping for profit and cowed by one surviving dragon — agreed to allow cocoons to hatch and restore the population.
But the dragons don’t emerge from their cocoons glittering and intelligent. They are weak, confused and stunted — but voracious and aggressive. These books deal with the aftermath. City elders recruit a bunch of expendable social outcasts to take the dragons up river in ostensible search for a part-remembered dragon haven where the environment may be more hospitable — or where all will perish along the way, keeping the city fathers’ hands clean.
That’s the familiar fantasy trope of unlikely companions on a quest. Such books proliferate; whether they are worth reading depends on the writer’s skill with world-building and characterisation. Hobb has built her fan base on the strength of the first: every successive book has added fascinating detail to the map and sociology of the Cursed Shores. Dragon Haven is no exception, carefully shading in the Elderlings: the world’s earliest civilisation. Her characters are compelling too. The stresses and dangers of the journey peel away the self-deception each has practised — as they always do. But scholarly Alise, fussy, self-loathing Sedric, lobster-clawed Thymara and the rest have substance: when the onion skins fall away, recognisable people, not stereotypes, are revealed.
And a bigger theme emerges.
“It’s wonderful,” says Hobb, “to play ‘what if’ with questions about how humanity would change if we had to share our world with another sentient species. What would happen to us if we had to admit, completely, that elephants have a culture and whales are intelligent and perhaps we don’t have the right to run this planet as if we were the only important inhabitants? And so I play with dragons … Fantasy [also] gives us a great playground for exploring relationships between individuals with unequal levels of power” — inequalities that, in this tale, derive from class and gender as powerfully as from species.
The weakness of the Dragon Keeper/Dragon Haven pair lies in their division. Hobb wrote one very long novel; the publisher divided it. But the narrative arc of Dragon Keeper does not work alone and several characters feel half-formed. Read both, or read neither.