Merelan and Petiron are two giant talents at the Harperhall. Merelan is a gifted singer, while Petiron writes sublime music, often for Merelan’s voice. Their child Robinton, though, shows talent enough to surpass them both in talent and intelligence…
This is the biography of Robinton, Masterharper of Pern. His death was the conclusion of All The Weyrs Of Pern, but that didn’t stop Anne McCaffrey from revisiting him in The Dolphins Of Pern and this book, which presents his life and all the key moments of it.
This is not a good entry point for new readers: it is the most obviously fantastical of all the books, featuring a setting that is under very little threat from anything except the depredations of Fax, who we saw come to an end in Dragonflight. It’s a book that doesn’t require any kind of knowledge from the reader but it really only makes sense if you have read a book with Robinton in it before.
It’s a great read, though. Told in such an easy-to-read manner that you want to dismiss it as fluff, it sets out to fill gaps in the life of the beloved character, who was in turn based upon a real acquaintance of McCaffrey.
Let’s start with Petiron and Merelan. They are the Harperhall’s power couple, but it’s easy to see why everyone prefers Merelan while they put up with Petiron and his genius. Petiron is one of those characters who has a towering intellect and very little regard for the sensibilities of others. His saving grace is that he can recognise talent in others and will go to extraordinary lengths to cultivate that talent – there’s a wonderful scene where he and Merelan are on their honeymoon and are travelling with her family. Petiron listens to one of her cousins playing music around the campfire and at gathers and laments that his obvious talent is being allowed to stagnate by not being taught to expand. Merelan reminds him that some people are happy to know what they know and don’t seek fulfillment in everything that he does.
But after Robinton is born and quickly displays signs of musical genius, it’s up to Merelan and the other harpers to keep Petiron distracted lest he completely consume Robinton with lessons or become jealous that his own son has more talent than himself.
As Robinton grows he becomes more involved in the mastery of his craft and becomes journeyman at a very young age – the same age as Menolly when she achieved the same rank. He is then given assignments across different parts of the world and succeeds brilliantly in all of them. He’s a little too good to be true in this book, frankly, but the story just flows and reads more like soap opera than planetary romance. His travels parse well with a young man seeking out experience to build his fortune but the way they dovetail nicely into him being groomed as Masterharper work out well, too.
However, not all goes well for Robinton: he meets a young woman named Kasia, with whom he falls madly in love and marries but she succumbs to an infection and dies after just months of wedded bliss. Robinton goes into a deep decline but he is brought out of it with the help of his friends, notably F’lon, a dragonrider friend who is the father of later heroes in the series, F’lar and F’nor.
But he continues his work for the Harperhall, only slowing down for a brief dalliance with Silvina, headwoman of the Hall, and with whom he conceives his only child, Camo – and that came as a massive shock to me as well, I can tell you.
Look, there’s a lot going on in this book and I need to discuss what happens because the sophisticated, tolerant world of the first half of this book is quite far removed from what we see at the beginning of Dragonflight, which is where we take our leave of Robinton, because – for once – we don’t get much overlap between the established story and what McCaffrey is presenting here.
Anyway, during one of his early assignments, Robinton has a run-in with a minor lordling named Fax. Fax already has a reputation for being a bit of a bastard, so Robinton takes heed of warnings to stay out of his way. From there on in we only get occasional references to fax until we discover that he has managed to begin carving out an empire for himself through marriage, fraud, murder and invasion. The other Lord Holders are naturally aghast at this but they believe that Fax will soon settle down and leave them alone.
He doesn’t, and the steps that the rest of the lords take to protect themselves manage to create a more conservative and hostile society than what was there previously. This slow decline from a cosmopolitan, egalitarian culture into one that becomes sexist and conservative is fast but, sadly, all-too-believable. And when F’lon is murdered by one of Fax’s minions in a knife fight – beginning a tradition of such fights that will be carried on by his sons – the Weyr (because this is a story set at a time when there was only one of them) becomes more isolationist as well.
This leads into the fact that Robinton has a few dragons talk to him. It is presented as an astonishing fact to the young Robinton, but one he becomes quite used to. He can’t hear all dragons – like Lessa or Torene in the other books – but they are willing to talk to him. But this doesn’t contradict the awe and surprise that Robinton’s felt when he got an occasional thought from a dragon in the earlier books – or when they began their mass chorus in his mind when he had a heart attack in The White Dragon – because after the death of F’lon, the new Weyrleader – R’gul – instituted a policy of isolationism for Benden Weyr, so Robinton wouldn’t have had much to do with dragons or their riders beyond formal occasions.
I keep saying it but the Pern novels are a mix of epic and domestic. The original trilogy (Dragonflight, Dragonquest and The White Dragon) are epics. The Harperhall novels are domestic. This one is a mix of the two. It starts out domestic with the retelling of Robinton’s life and becomes epic when McCaffrey begins slightly bending what we know about Pern’s history to ensure that Robinton plays a larger part in it to become even more awesome than he already is. Which really – in my not-terribly-humble opinion – only serves to make the series a little cosier and smaller in my eyes because it seems that just a handful of people are running Pern and contributing to its history. But it’s Pern, which I would rather visit than just about any other place in fiction, and, thankfully, it’s always readable for which I can forgive a multitude of sins.
Coming Up Next: Another pre-Ninth Pass story: “Runner Of Pern.”
