I bought Assassin's Apprentice on the strength of a good review, but was almost put off when I read the back. It said: "A glorious classic fantasy combining the magic of Ursula Le Guin's The Wizard of Earthsea with the epic mastery of Tolkien's The Lord of the Rings."

If there's one thing that's sure to kill off my interest in a book before I've read it, it's a blurb like this. Assassin's Apprentice is not The Lord of the Rings — thankfully. Otherwise, what would be the point in reading it? And, while a case could be put forward for it resembling The Wizard of Earthsea, it is not in its "magic" (by which I suppose they mean its feel), but in the fact that both books follow the story of a boy's life and training as he grows to manhood. If anything, Assassin's Apprentice's intentions are on the realistic, not the magical, side of the genre. This sort of blurb-writing is reminiscent of the scenes in Robert Altman's The Player where people are pitching an idea for a film. Every pitch has to start by describing it as a cross between two successful films ("It's Jurassic Park meets Annie," for example.)

But if I were to rewrite this blurb, and compare Assassin's Apprentice to The Wizard of Earthsea and one other book, what would that other be?

Assassin's Apprentice is the story of a royal bastard who is trained to be a political tool of the non-diplomatic variety. As he is never publicly acknowledged, nor allowed to tell anyone that he is being trained as an assassin, he is generally thought to be a bit useless.

His early life is told alongside the political story of the Five Duchies, an unstable kingdom which suffers from sea-raiders that leave their victims not dead, but in a psychologically damaged state more like animals than men — they are left totally devoid of human feelings and act entirely on selfish, immediate-survival impulses — seemingly as the result of some dire magic. Other political troubles, internal and external, come to the surface.

The book is narrated by Fitz, the bastard, whose attempt to write a history of the Five Duchies ends up as a telling of his own story. It is interspersed with retellings of "official history", and with his own iconoclastic, down-to-earth tales of the truth behind them.

So, what is the other book I would compare it with? In tone and subject matter it is similar to Robert Graves' I, Claudius, the tale of a "stammering fool" in the family of Imperial Rome who is actually an intelligent historian, and who narrates his own life and the more eventful (and violent) ones of his family.

Assassin's Apprentice's theme is identity. In a world where the royals take their names from qualities, such as Verity, Noble and Shrewd, for a long time the narrator has no definite name — he is just "boy" or "fitz", which, meaning bastard, is as much an assertion of what he isn't as what he is. The secrecy of his training as an assassin means only a few people can know his true identity, and so he is forced to live a double life.

The fantasy elements support the theme. The first appearance of magic is tied up with the question of Fitz's identity:

The supernatural is handled in a subtle, understated way, as at first the boy is unaware it isn't normal.

The two types of magic that humans can practise are both reducers of individuality, and hence of identity. The first is the Skill, the above mental force being an example, but which is mostly used as a telepathic joining of minds, and can result in the individual losing himself in the greater unity of his fellow practitioners. The other type of magic is the base Wit, which allows a human to communicate and share the senses of an animal. If too heavily relied upon, this can result in the practitioner losing his humanity and becoming an animal, in mind at least. In addition, the "Forging" of the sea-raiders is the ultimate assault on identity.

Fitz's double life and lack of well-defined identity give him a freedom which the other characters do not have, but which can be psychologically damaging. At the start of his narration, he refers to his "spite", and his attempts to do away with it in order to tell his tale. As a narrator, though, he seems to be level-headed and as fair as possible to his enemies as well as his few friends. The most interesting character comes out as being the mysterious Fool. The glimpse into his life, when Fitz enters his room, is one of the best moments in the book for sheer suggestiveness.

Usually in genre fantasy, every event exists to serve the best ends of the story. Here, not every incident is milked for its full dramatic potential, and although the result has a more realistic feel, there were the occasional loose or slack ends.

This is the first book of a trilogy. As the cover declares: "A new legend begins..." and it is, basically, an introduction to Fitz and his world. Apart from the mysteries of Forging and the character of the Fool, neither of which takes centre-stage for long, there is little in the way of unresolved situations and unanswered questions sufficiently intriguing to carry me, at least, on to the next book. In addition, the story doesn't really have strong enough dynamics — tension or suspense, for example — apart from the slightly rushed ending, to make it the great read it could have been. But it isn't too much less than that, both because of its character, and the fact that it is, though within the limits of "genre" fantasy, different enough to make it a worthwhile read.