Book Review: The Liveship Traders

Title: Ship of Magic, The Mad Ship and Ship of Destiny

Author: Robin Hobb
Year Published: 1998-2000

Genre: Fantasy

The Liveship Traders is the second trilogy set within the world of Robin Hobb’s ‘Realms of the Elderlings’, for which there are currently fifteen books. While you don’t need to know anything about the first trilogy – The Farseer Trilogy (a.k.a. the Assassin books) – in order to understand this one, The Liveship Traders contains major spoilers for its predecessor so you may want to read The Farseer Trilogy first. In fact, if you’re a fantasy fan and you haven’t read the Assassin books, don’t bother with this review and just go read them now. The first book is Assassin’s Apprentice. Go on. You can thank me later.

Anyway, back to The Liveship Traders. Though it’s comprised of three books (Ship of Magic, The Mad Ship and Ship of Destiny), The Liveship Traders is better characterised as one somewhat very large novel. To put it another way, what you have here are three books, each being some 900 pages long, none of which work as standalones – so be ye warned.

The name of the trilogy essentially describes its premise. In the Cursed Shores, there is substance known as wizardwood – a sentient wood that can only be sourced from the Rain Wilds. A ship built from wizardwood will “quicken” and come to life only after three family members from successive generations have died upon its deck. At the start of the trilogy, the liveship Vivacia is about to quicken – an event to set in motion everything else in the series. The plot is almost impossible to describe without spoilers, so pro-tip: don’t read the blurbs. The Liveship Traders involves multiple plots and characters and is a slow burn sort of deal in the bestest sort of way. If you like seafaring adventure stories, fantasy, and being patient, this is the series for you.

Hobb has built a fully realised fantasy world both traditional and unique; its features are rich but not obnoxiously so; everything in the world, from its seal hunters, its religions, its cultures and its magic, simply belongs. Hobb brings a spark to traditional fantasy elements like mythical serpents, to innovations like wizardwood and even to the small domestic rituals shared between Bingtown folk and the Rain Wilders. The Rain Wilds in particular inspire a sense of wonder – something all too often lacking in fantasy fiction.

In addition to a multitude of settings, we are witness to a multitude of points of view. As a sample of this variety, we have Wintrow, the boy in training to be a priest; Althea, the tomboyish daughter of the Vestrit family; Kennit, the ambitious pirate; Paragon, the mad ship; Ronica, the pragmatic Vestrit matriarch; Brashen, the disgraced Bingtown son; and Malta, the girl you want to smack in the face. Personal, political and fantastical plot lines are woven together masterfully for all these characters, and if you ever get weary of one story-line, you know that a fresh point of view is not far away. Similarly, there is a mixture of light (ooh~ island exploration~) and dark (sexual violence) material. The Liveship Traders is one of those rare series where the tone, plot, setting and characters are balanced, so that you rarely feel overwhelmed or underwhelmed by any one aspect.

My only issue was that the ending seemed way too unrealistic (and yes, I do realise this is a series about talking ships).

Being a human myself, I found it very hard to believe the way everyone just capitulated to Tintaglia’s demands – I mean, I understand why, but these people seemed happy to cause and ensure the eternal subjugation of their entire species forever. I may be exaggerating a bit, but well, as far as I can tell, this does not seem like people at all.

Well, most people anyway.

While this plot-point is a minor proportion of the story as a whole, it altered my esteem for the entire series – a series that, up to this point, had been pretty consistently awesome. Otherwise, The Liveship Traders wrapped up in a relatively satisfying, albeit open-ended way.

<Spoiler alert, obviously>

While this may be a tired comparison, I’d say that if you enjoy Game of Thrones, you’d probably like this series too. It’s similar in that it covers a broad scope of characters, settings and dilemmas and it’s different in that it’s actually finished. In any case, your priority here should be to read The Farseer Trilogy – not only will it enhance your reading of The Liveship Traders, but it’s also excellent. I mean, it’s less “balanced” than The Liveship Traders, but if I’m to be completely honest, its wildness is precisely why I like it better of the two.

Alex’s Rating: 4/5

Book Review: The Goldfinch

Title: The Goldfinch

Author: Donna Tartt
Year Published: 2013

Genre: Drama, Crime, Contemporary fiction

Recently named winner of the 2014 Pulitzer Prize for fiction, The Goldfinch tells the story of Theo Decker, a boy who survives the bombing that takes his mother’s life. In the chaos that follows, Theo is taken in by a posh New York family and, well, suffice to say that a painting of a bird is involved, and things don’t get easier for our teenaged hero.

Tartt has a gift for language and detail – based on her descriptions, I find myself wanting to see New York in real life. From the very beginning, when Theo and his mother are caught in the rain through to Theo’s time spent alone in Hobie’s furniture store, you can almost believe you’re there with Theo himself. Theo’s remembered places and experiences are both dreamlike and solid at the same time; they feel real even when they’re unrealistic. Despite its heft, the book is easy to read; there’s a cushiony feel about the prose that makes it easy to sink in to; it’s almost comforting in a way.

Any yet, there were many times I found it hard to immerse myself in his story. Why? Multiple reasons, really. Perhaps dumbest of all is the whole business with the timeline. When is the book set? It’s not clear. Such a simple matter, and yet so irritating. We start with Theo as a grown man in Amsterdam before the narrative segues into his childhood. I had thought that this meant that the Amsterdam stuff was happening present-day-ish, but then aspects of Theo’s adolescence felt too modern. Instead of concentrating on Theo’s story, I found myself distracted by thoughts like: So the accident happened after 9-11? Is the Amsterdam stuff happening in the future then? When did Unleashed come out? Isn’t that kind of text-speak outdated? Why is there old digital clock font in a modern-day text? What?

Similarly, other aspects of the writing threw me out of the story. Particularly during the accident at the start, I wasn’t sure if Theo was retelling a story or if we were living it with him in real-time. This might seem trivial, but it does change how you interpret events. Another issue I had was with Theo himself. He’s meant to be a teenage boy, but there’s something about his observations that make him sound like a mature, well-to-do white woman. It’s more than precociousness (and boy is he precocious); I mean, improbable art history expertise aside, what thirteen-year-old boy recognises when someone is dressed in Valentino and knows that the lipgloss stick thingy is a “wand”? It would seem that this book was written by someone even more out of touch with today’s youth than yours truly, and that’s a worrying thought.

Another aspect of Theo that felt unrealistic to me was his ordeal with drugs. I can’t place my finger on it, but something about the casual but meticulous way things are described feels very researched and calculated. It’s as if the author’s trawled Internet forums about substance abuse and included her findings in the book as something ~edgy. Now, I know nothing about the author and her history. For all I know, she’s had experience dealing with substance abuse and knows what she’s on about. As a reader, however, something about it just did not feel genuine.

So too did the parts of the book dealing with art and art appreciation. The detailed and technical art discussions sounded like excerpts from someone’s essay rather than actual thoughts or experiences of actual people. Unfortunately, I got the impression that the author wanted to show off how cultured she was – which is sad, as I suppose the intent here was to inspire.

Other than the style, I also found the plot and characters a little unsatisfying. I am fine with the whole concept of this being one of those direction-less, that’s-how-life-is sort of books, but what I did not expect was for the narrative to jump from setting to setting and genre to genre. On the one hand this was exciting. You got new characters and drama and action and humour and a bildungsroman crime caper all in one – the book was never boring. On the other hand, it was also frustrating. Every time I thought the author was going to go deeper into a relationship or situation, things moved sideways instead. As a corollary, many of the characters never rise far above their stereotypes.

I’ve complained a lot, but a lot of this comes from how good the book is. I was so captivated by Theo’s experience that it became really noticeable when things felt unnatural and wrong. And here, I guess, I come to the controversy that is the ending. Feel free to skip this paragraph now, but I don’t think it’s much of a spoiler to say that there is no ending. In the last chapter, Theo engages in some navel-gazing that does nothing to wrap up the plot. To me it felt like a cop out. It’s as if the author couldn’t or wouldn’t decide how she wanted things to go, so they didn’t go anywhere at all. Instead, we get a discussion on the book’s ~themes~. The worst part of this is that Theo’s undergraduate introspective philosomaphising isn’t even riveting, though I may have been blinded by anger at this point. The words sound pretty though.

The Goldfinch is a richly detailed account of one troubled boy’s life, tenderly and lovingly drawn. However, I find it hard to recommend: it annoyed me too much with its pretentiousness, its implausibility and its failure to provide narrative closure. In short, The Goldfinch a good book, but it’s not great, and you can probably find something better. Then again, what’s my opinion worth? There’s only one Pulitzer winner here and it sure as hell ain’t me.

Alex’s Rating: 3/5

Book Review: Fooled by Randomness

Title: Fooled by Randomness: The Hidden Role of Chance in Life and in the Markets (2nd edition, updated)
Author: Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Year Published: 2005; first edition 2001

Genre: Non-fiction, Economics, Philosophy

So the two take-home lessons from this book are:

1. People underestimate the role of chance in their lives; and
2. Nassim Nicholas Taleb is smarter than you.

Of course, there are more nuances involved, but that’s the general gist of it. Fooled by Randomness basically tells us about the role of probability in life, how people perceive this role, and how they are wrong. The author posits that people tend to see patterns where there are none and attribute to skill what has happened by luck. The book explores a number of interesting logic concepts, including that of hindsight bias, survivorship bias and a number of others whose technical names I don’t know. These ideas are generally associated with how people construe “success” and are usually explained in the context of trading.

Now, in matters of probability, finance and philosophy, I am about as knowledgeable as Jon Snow; I don’t have an interest and I really only read this book because my brother recommended it. As such, I’m probably not the target audience here and I can’t (won’t) assess how “sound” the author’s ideas are, especially when he discusses theories made by people I’ve never ever heard of, and especially when he doesn’t explain said theories fully. To give you an indication of my level of knowledge (or ignorance), I had to look up what “bullish” and “bearish” meant, and was slightly disappointed to discover that the terms had little to do with animals.

For me personally, the most interesting ideas were the concept of “it ain’t over ‘til it’s over” – you can’t judge a thing until it’s done – and how the time frame you take as a reference point alters the significance of any event. The only explicit bit of “financial” advice I could spot was in the author’s musings over the “black swan event” – the rare but disastrous random event – and how he prefers to guard against this while being accepting of other smaller losses. So if you’re reading this to get rich then, well, good luck. Anyway, that’s how I interpreted it all, though what would I know? I mean, what you’re reading now are essentially the thoughts of a peasant.

The writing has a distinct style that reeks of the author’s personality. You may like it, you may hate it. I was surprised at how dense the prose was, right from the get-go. The author, who has had a long career as a trader (I don’t even know what that means), fancies himself an intellectual who is above those other, lesser, money-grubbing, MBA-holding kind of traders. He comes across as arrogant, self-indulgent and pretentious, and adds so many philosophical/classical/historical namedrops and references that at times I found it impossible to understand what he was on about (but then again, I am a peasant). Even so, Taleb has a certain charm; he’s interesting and funny and he writes to the reader as if to a fellow comrade-in-arms – as if you, like him, are one of the intelligent elite (unless of course, you’re a journalist, have an MBA and/or are a liberal left-wing “pseudothinker” – then he despises you). At the same time, you get the feeling that if you ever met him in real life, he’d probably think you’re an idiot.

As mentioned, the author discusses a number of interesting concepts. However, the problem for this idiot is the way these concepts are presented and how the style and structure of the book affect them. Taleb occasionally spells them out, but most of the time they’re couched in anecdotes and blend into other messages or ideas. It’s a bit like going to a lecture where the speaker goes off on tangents, but due to the alien nature of the topic, you’re not really sure when and if he’s getting to some important point or if he’s just gone rogue. You can try to learn but the guy does not make it easy. Some ideas are very clearly explained (like the Monte Carlo engine – always wanted to know what that was), yet at other times, everything gets muddied. The author often sort of mentions something only to change the topic without having fully explained it. If this helps at all, Fooled by Randomness is the sort of book where (a) chapters don’t necessarily delineate topics (for example, the “it ain’t over” idea is sort of explored in dribs and drabs here and there); and (b) the author may occasionally veer into rants about a particular journalist he hates.

I can’t shake the idea that this book could have been much, much shorter. The author makes the same point again and again but in slightly different ways, as if unable to decide which way he likes best. Unfortunately, this just makes everything harder to understand. In the end, I was also left with the impression that nothing had been explored in very much depth, despite the fact I read an entire book. As interesting as Mr Taleb’s ideas – and personality – are, the end result is not very accessible to the average idiot reader. To someone with a background in finance or philosophy though, this book will undoubtedly hold more value.

If you’re looking to learn, you’d be better served reading a bunch of Wikipedia articles on logic and reasoning. If, however, you’re after an evening of interesting conversation with a clever, bookish, finance-y guy, then Fooled by Randomness is probably just the thing for you. 

Alex’s Rating: 3/5