The Collected Works of Joe Abercrombie
She seems nice, don’t you think?
The idea of “post-George R.R. Martin” fantasy is a little weird to contemplate; after all, that’s straight-up contemporary! A Song of Ice & Fire is still in progress; Game of Thrones is on TV and winning Emmys; people are still working on the monolith that is A Dance With Dragons. But when you step back and look at it, there are people who were teenagers when the first book came out that are now, sixteen years later, employed adults with kids. And some of those people, who devoured page after page of Starks & Lannisters and Targaryens in high school, are now authors in their own right, on the shelves some distance or another from the still-working Mr. Martin.
One of the post-George writers, and for my money the best, is England’s Joe Abercrombie. Mr. Abercrombie started his career in 2007 with The Blade Itself, the lean, nasty, and bloody hilarious (as in, funny and also full of people bleeding) opener of the First Law trilogy. The trilogy was followed by two stand-alones in the same world, and now, an eagerly anticipated third book is set to hit US shelves on November 13th. And if I’m going to talk about that, I should talk about the others first, so let’s do that today.
The First Law is, in large part, a vicious homage to/loving mockery of the whole concept of Epic Fantasy. There’s a wise old wizard, and a bold young nobleman, and a noble savage from the frozen North; there’s an epic quest for an artifact of power, and a series of political shenanigans behind the scenes. But all of it is delivered at a tilted angle, suffused with the foibles and failures of shitty little humans going about their shitty little lives; a pithy, if not entirely accurate, summation might be “Lord of the Rings if everyone was a dick.”
A bare bones poke at the plot is that there is a kingdom called the Union, which is a sort of Holy Roman Empire/pre-Renaissance Venice crossbreed; the Union is about to go to war with the North, a Gaelic-Norse wilderness united under a king for the first time in its history. The Union is also engaged in a sort of meandering cold war with the Ottoman Empire-inspired nation of Gurkhul. Against this backdrop of impending doom, a handful of exemplary* individuals are gathered by Bayaz, the First of the Magi, to seek out an artifact that may bring peace and stability. Or, at least, victory. Of course, everyone has their own agenda and very little is what it seems, except when nobody wants it to be.
(*Good examples of something, anyway.)
The Blade Itself is a raw but immediately arresting work, moving along with the punchy clip of a good action movie and relying on Mr. Abercrombie’s great gift for switching character voices between his handful of points of view; standouts include the world-weary northman Logen Ninefingers, the damaged, merciless Gurkish ex-slave Ferro Maljinn, and above all the rest, the Union inquisitor and crippled shell of a man Sand dan Glokta. If there was one thing that elevated Blade above other fantasy debuts I’ve read, it was the presence of Glokta, a sardonic, self-loathing, and utterly ruthless character whose self-aware villainy and black humor are a delight to read even when he’s cutting a man’s fingers off joint by joint. Maybe even especially then.
The second book, Before They Are Hanged, does something interesting; it embraces its status as the middle of a trilogy, wallows in Book Two Syndrome, and makes it part of the charm. The pace is relatively leisurely in parts, with plot almost taking a backseat to world-building, but the C-plot of a war in the North (featuring a rag-tag band of Northern turncoats who are easily the best take on the “adventuring party” I’ve ever seen in fantasy) comes in with all the sturm and drang one requires until the adventures of Bayaz’s band and Inquisitor Glokta come to their respective crashing ends. And then Last Argument of Kings wraps the trilogy up in fine fashion, restoring a few characters to their native habitats just in time for everything to get relentlessly fucked up for them. Against the backdrop of big, world-shattering battles, major events are decided by small, sad moments and mean little murders. Bonds are forged and then betrayed, courage and cowardice both have their day, and a few poor stupid bastards even try to do the right thing.
The trilogy is a great read, but it’s with the two follow-ups that Mr. Abercrombie really hit his stride. It’s a fascinating thing, reading along with an author whose writing skill is developing so rapidly that the reader can see it, and in terms of pure wordcraft Best Served Cold and The Heroes are both huge leaps forward from where The Blade Itself started. Both of them, taking place in the same world and featuring a number of the same characters, are exercises in genre, respective tributes to the Bloody Revenge Thriller and the Big War Story; playing on these tropes in the same way he toyed with readers of epic fantasy in The First Law, Mr. Abercrombie crafts a pair of sharp-edged narratives with similar dark humor but a thematic depth exceeding the trilogy.
Of the two, The Heroes is slightly the better, and indeed one of the best fantasy books of recent years; it benefits in large part from taking place entirely over a three-day period, in which forces from the Union and the North clash over some disputed ground. The quick development means that not a moment is wasted, not a page spent doing anything but double duty in advancing the plot and exploring the sheer useless toadfuckery in evidence when two huge armies of people are sent to kill each other.
By comparison, Best Served Cold’s strongest point is its protagonist, a single-minded mercenary from Styria (a chain of heavily populated islands obviously influenced by Italian city-states) named Monza Murcatto who is happy to take her revenge (on a previous employer who attempts to have her murdered to open the book) however she can get it. Monza is a fascinating anti-hero, a woman who never really set out to be a bad person but, having become one, is as dedicated to being good at it as she would be at anything else. And it shouldn’t be lost that she is a woman, the female protagonist being something of a difficult concept for many fantasy writers to wrap their brains around; Mr. Abercrombie’s stated in interviews that he just wanted to write a good character who happened to be a woman, which is really the way to do it. It turned out well, with Monza’s moral journey (or, occasionally, lack thereof) paralleling the book’s plot throughout.
Taken as a pair, Cold and Heroes have some interesting parallels; they’re both stories concerning futility, and the difficulty of redemption, and the sheer number of things that can go awfully, hilariously wrong with any situation where people are trying to kill other people. They’re also – and this is true of the First Law trilogy as well – exceptionally bleak, a hallmark of Mr. Abercrombie’s writing. People try to do the right thing and fail; they try to outrun their pasts and said pasts catch up; they try to be better people and have to admit that they just weren’t that good to begin with. And as becomes clear, the overarching meta-plot of the series concerns an age-old struggle between entities who view most of the protagonists as particularly useful game pieces, and are perfectly willing to fuck up the development of human civilization possibly beyond repair just to score some points. It’s well-written, and thematically consistent, and incredibly convincing, but damn if it isn’t brutal to read.
But both Best Served Cold and The Heroes manage to sneak in hope spots at the end, with Heroes probably doing a slightly better job. And I should emphasize that darkness or not, both books are a joy (albeit a sick and twisted one) to read, primarily due to the strength of their respective casts. In Cold, Monza’s vengeance is supported by a misfit collection of killers; in Heroes, the battle is largely narrated by six participants, three on each side of the lines. Again, there’s a neat meta-textual twist as the prose style changes between characters, which stops short of being over-affected.
There’s standouts: Cold features an OCD-wracked thug named “Friendly” who just wants to get this business over with so he can get someone to put him in jail again, where the world makes sense, and his erstwhile companion, the charming, wily, 110% untrustworthy mercenary general Nicomo Cosca. Heroes gets more than its supply of charm and wiliness from the dispossessed prince Calder, who’d like nothing more than to eliminate the adjective from that noun; he meets his slippery-minded match in the Union noblewoman Finree dan Brock, an officer’s wife whose ambition is mostly hindered by a genetic inability to put up with idiots (and as Mr. Abercrombie happily reminds us, war is just chock-full of idiocy.)
These books are probably best read in order, but if you’re not looking to commit to a trilogy right off the bat, I know at least one friend who started with Best Served Cold and was able to double back to The First Law without trouble. I wouldn’t recommend starting with The Heroes, both because it contains a veritable smorgasbord of spoilers for earlier works and because its pacing is so wildly unlike the rest of Mr. Abercrombie’s books thus far.
Overall, Joe Abercrombie’s greatest gifts as an author are much like the traits that seem to ensure survival in his books – ruthlessness, adaptability, and sheer bloody-minded tenacity. He eliminates characters with off-handed ease at times, and more cruelly, leaves many of them alive to look at the results of their actions; he switches voice effortlessly between wildly disparate narrators and delivers prose and dialogue alike with engaging inflection; and he keeps his books moving, avoiding the “look at my big shiny setting!” pitfalls secondary-world fantasy can be prone to. Also, he’s writing ‘em pretty damned fast.
Red Country will be available on US shelves on November 13, so you have three weeks to catch up. I’d recommend starting soon, because for my money, you will not find a better fantasist writing today.
