10 maj 2008 - bookreview (english essay)
Title: Shaman's Crossing
Author: Robin Hobb
Genre: Fantasy novel
Year of publishing: 2005
The choice between reading a book by an English author in its original language or in the Swedish translation is almost always a difficult one. Both alternatives involve the same disadvantage, you risk losing the essence of the story. Most often it is recommended to examine what kind of book it is. If the author is known for exploring the language, playing with it and making use of every aspect of it by weighing every word before it is written on the paper it is rather likely that you will miss the entire spirit of the story by reading the Swedish translation. Books based on the tone of the sentences are as untranslatable as poems.
This is, though, not the case with Robin Hobb. Of course she is an excellent writer but, for her, the language is mostly a useful tool (which she handles with expertise) in the process of telling a story in which her characters constitute the most important part. Hence I would suggest that one reads her novels in ones own language, in that way one will run an obviously smaller risk missing any of the events and most tiny but delicate characteristics of her protagonists.
Shaman's Crossing is the first Robin Hobb-novel which I have read in English. The reason is not that I was eager to explore her original way of writing but simply that I was too impatient for reading her new book to wait for the Swedish translation of it.
This first novel in Hobb's latest series is about the schooling of Nevare Burvelle, born as a second son of a second son and therefore destined to make living as a cavalry soldier, a fate he looks forward to with a youth's eagerness. During his pre-education at home one of his tutors, an enemy of his father, gives him a dangerous mission which almost kills Nevare and which links him to an ancient spirit called the Tree Woman.
At the age of eighteen Nevare enters the King's Cavalla Academy where he is to become a trained cavalry soldier and, hopefully, an officer. Here the Tree Woman, who Nevare, hitherto, has believed to be a hallucination, begins to affect his dreams and, as time passes, his life.
Compared to other fantasy novels the world of Gernia seems to be farther gone in the development than most fantasy worlds. Instead of an imitation of the Middle Ages it seems to be one of the nineteenth or perhaps eighteenth century. Both the gunpowder and the printing press seem to be both invented and established.
This is a novel which brings up several important issues in the world of today. Most obvious is the difference in treatment of sons of new and of old nobles, something that quite straight can be referred to any discussion about the injustice in that one's possibilities in life is decided by who is one's parents and what possibilities they have had.
A bit more concealed - mostly because of that Nevare never questions it - is the reference to racism. The world of Gernia includes two speeches which threats the reign of man, the specks and the plainsmen. They are hated and despised and though they are skilful warriors, Gernia has managed to defeat them during the recent wars.
In the background creeps the, according to me, most interesting topic of Shaman's Crossing, the battle between human and nature. In the resolution Nevare is forced to make the choice between mankind and the forest. Either he allows the Tree Woman to murder a large number of humans or he stops her and allows the humans to keep on devastating the forest. Being possessed by the Tree Woman, he develops a strong love for the trees but yet the choice never seems very difficult to make, he saves the humans.
But though these issues are of great current interest I do not find Robin Hobb's portraits of them very captivating. Portraits are what they are; they simply describe reality without giving any new visual angle of it. Yet this does not make the novel a bad one. Hobb is a storyteller; she gives you the opportunity of following her into her worlds, of loving her characters and of forgetting every thought that might keep you awake at night. She is greatly needed in a decade where the not very simple art of telling a tale is despised if the tale does not have a moral or advocates an innovating approach of life.
I advice, no, I order every single person who has not yet discovered Robin Hobb to take the first bus to the library and borrow Assassin's Apprentice (the first book of her first trilogy) and to lean back in a coach and let oneself be swept away by one of the most enchanting stories of our time.
