A lot of fantasy carries an agenda. Specific types that come to mind are feminist fantasy, notable authors including Marion Zimmer Bradley and Tamora Pierce; environmentalist fantasy; Christian fantasy, which I don't typically enjoy unless it's done more subtly than is usual; there's probably even gay fantasy out there, which I've only encountered in The Mists of Avalon and then my aversion to it was violent. Now that I've finished the Soldier Son trilogy, I can point out the hints of an agenda beneath the story, but Hobb does something distinctive with her agenda: she portrays both sides.
The basic premise: Gernia, a somewhat generic fantasy kingdom on the surface, has the usual trappings of medieval nobility. Lords, commoners, even a pretty basic monotheistic system not unlike the Judeo-Christian one. One twist that Hobb adds in is the specific ranking of a Lord's children. The first son is the heir, the second son the soldier, the third son the priest, and the list goes on. Also, as Gernia expands, it has encroached on the territory of two somewhat primitive native groups. One, which has already submitted to defeat, is a tribal, nomadic race of plainspeople that reminded me vaguely of Native Americans. The other, which has emphatically not submitted to defeat, is a race known as Specks. Both races have magic that can be negated by the presence of iron, and the culture of the Specks is strongly based around the forest they live in. However, the king wants to build a road straight through said forest, and the Specks are not okay with this.
At this point I got a bit doubtful about the possibility of this being yet another 'save the trees! Industry and expansion are bad!' fantasy, but I kept reading anyway. I'm glad I did.
[Minor spoilers to follow.]
The main character is Nevare Burvelle, a solder son of a minor Lord who dreams of growing up and achieving glory. Through a succession of circumstances, he finds himself effectively split in two by a Speck entity known as the Tree Woman, and seized by a brand of Speck magic that continues to bend his destiny according to its will. One half of him continues as a normal soldier son - he attends an academy for training - and we don't find out what happened to the other half (or that there was an other half, actually) until midway through the second book.
By this time, Nevare has been expelled from the Academy, basically for getting fat, a strange phenomenon that he can't control. Later we learn that it is (like many other things in the trilogy) the fault of the 'magic', which is explained very vaguely and seems to be a sort of deistic force. The reason for this is that the Speck Great Ones, the magic-users of the their forest clans, accumulate magic by eating a lot and therefore getting enormously fat. As an aside, I quite admired that Hobb was okay with having her main character get this way, because I can think of a lot of Mary-Sues that stay in possession of a practically perfect physique no matter what happens to them. But back on topic. In the second book, he meets the other half of him, known as Soldier's Boy, and discovers that his personality has effectively been split into a Gernian half and a Speck half.
The Speck half ends up overpowering, and Nevare spends a lot of the third book trapped in his own head as a helpless observer while his other self mercilessly attempts to halt work on the King's Road, which is progressing through their forest. The two sides continue to conflict throughout the book, and it turns into the Gernians vs. the Specks - with one half of Nevare on both sides.
What I really liked about this conflict was that Nevare forms relationships with people from Gernia and continues to feel loyalty for his country even though they ridicule him for his appearance and ultimately try to kill him. His other half forms relationships with people of the Specks, going so far as to fall in love with the Tree Woman. The conflict is emphatically NOT clear-cut, and it's not good vs evil as much as it is the desires of two conflicting cultures. The theme of preserving the environment was a bit blatant at times, but in the end it's not really the sole goal of 'save the trees!' that mattered, so I was okay with it.
I do recommend these books, but there's some strong adult content especially in the later two. I found it off-putting at times, and skimmed those parts. Hobb is very good at suspense (I know because I stayed up pretty late last night finishing the last one) and her writing style is vivid and refreshingly NOT overladen with flowery description. (*cough* Christopher Paolini.) She may be one of the only authors I know who writes fantasy from a first-person POV, and it works very well, only becoming just a tad confusing when Soldier's Boy and Nevare are both occupying the same head. There's also just a hint of feminist fantasy, but the one character that's all headstrong is basically considered a weirdo and everybody else is fine with the concept of an arranged marriage.
If I were assigning stars out of five, I would give the trilogy as a whole four.
The three are:
Shaman's Crossing
Forest Mage
Renegade's Magic
I'm determined to get better at this whole book review thing. I always end up wandering off on irrelevant tangents and forgetting key plot points and making stuff way too long. Here's another option, of the first book, but with the next two available.
On to reread Inkheart, and then reread Inkspell, and then finally Inkdeath.
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