Just Finished Reading Royal Assassin by Robin Hobb

I'm currently plowing through another fantasy book series after taking an extended vacation from the genre.  This one is Farseer Trilogy by Robin Hobb and I just finished reading the second book, titled Royal Assassin and published in 1996.  Typical for fantasy settings, it is a different world where the population lives in a preindustrial, pre-firearms technology where despotic nobility still holds the political power and magic manifests in different ways.  The story is told in the first person by the narrator, FitzChivalry, the illegitimate son of a prince and now a trained assassin for the king.  There is a power struggle going on between the princes for succession, and invaders from the sea are wreaking havoc on the society and economy...as well as turning people they conquer into something resembling soulless zombies.  Telepathy exists here, either in the form of Skilling, which a very tiny portion of the population can do, or Witting, a proscribed, taboo talent for getting inside the minds of animals.  Fitz can do both, but his ability as a Wit far exceeds his Skilling.  Our narrator has a love interest in Molly, but sadly being a commoner, she brings little in political advantage to a marriage and the king wants him to wed the daughter of a noble from another duchy to seal an alliance.  Not wanting to give away the story, I'm afraid I might have already stated too much...especially if you've yet to pick up the first book.  Let me just say that a lot of what frustrated me about this genre of literature is coming back...especially concerning not only the overwhelming oppression everywhere in this world where death, torture, or imprisonment are but an arbitrary royal pronouncement away but also the notion of it being a virtue to submit oneself completely and unquestioningly to the whims of the king, who in essence is an absolute dictator.  Since the protagonist is telling the story in retrospect, I can assume that he will make it through the rest of the trilogy...maybe.  Each book is getting longer...that's another typically annoying feature of fantasy literature.  As fiction of this sort goes, I think it's well written and at least the author as taken care not to inject too many characters and subplots into the narrative. That's more than I can say for some other series I've suffered through.  Well, I'm determined to finish Farseer Trilogy, but first I'm taking a detour and returning to Robert Pirsig's great book Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, which I first read back in 1990...