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igenlodeThe First Law is that it is forbidden to speak with devils. The Second Law is that it is forbidden to eat the flesh of men. There are definitely people in Joe Abercrombie's universe who do the latter (and seem to gain uncanny powers thereby), so we can assume that there are probably people who break the First Law as well, and that devils exist to be spoken with...
The review extract on the front of the book calls it "delightfully twisted and evil"; Goodreads calls it "grimdark". I'm not sure what either of these are based upon, unless it is by comparison with the Young Adult diversity-positive fantasy faeverse. What you've got here is a world that feels real rather than just generic (and adult male protagonists rather than the obligatory Strong Female Characters Coming of Age; modern fantasy, like fan-fiction, tends to be pitched at teenage girls).
The main aspect that felt a bit lazy was the Shanka/'Flatheads', who come across as just your standard-issue evil humanoid menace. We really don't see very much of them beyond the opening combat in the very first pages, a point at which we have very little idea what is going on, but they feature as an offscreen existential threat (which apparently originated as shock troops created by an overthrown Evil Overlord -- they are, basically, Orcs) which the bickering kingdoms are supposed to be worried about and aren't, because they are too busy making war upon each other.
And I suppose that objectively speaking the setting is, in fact, along your standard quasi-mediaeval Western European stock fantasy lines, with hairy barbarians to the cold north, dark-skinned desert kingdoms (with Arabic-style naming practices) to the south, and a decaying Old Empire to the Byzantine east. All I can say is that it doesn't feel like a stock setting -- I've glanced at a lot of fantasy novels that all have a distinctly similar feel, however dogged their author's 'worldbuilding' and however self-consciously trangressive their societies, and this isn't one of them. This one genuinely came across as a glimpse into a different existence.
Apart from that, we have a lot of politics, rival civilisations, ancient legends, magic that is apparently real but very rarely seen, social rituals that are all-important to those taking part (even if bewilderingly irrelevant to those in the city's underbelly), and, above all, characters. And I think what the review comments are getting at is that the characters the author has chosen as protagonists for his story are *not* the standard-issue heroic farmboy/longlost heir/D&D adventurer classes; as in Barbara Hambly's Dark Hand of Magic, the viewpoint characters are those whom in a standard off-the-shelf fantasy might well be the antagonists.
The most daring, of course, is the decision to write extensively from the viewpoint of Inquisitor Glokta, whose job involves investigating, torturing and framing those suspects who attract the attention of his politically-ambitious superiors, along with his two ugly and violent sidekicks. It's not clear quite how innocent the victims are -- there's a suggestion that there really has been gross peculation going on among the Mercers, for example -- but it's clear that he is expected to produce confessions to order whatever the actual facts of the case. Although there is a precedent in that Gene Wolfe created the character of Severian the apprentice torturer as the protagonist for The Book of the New Sun, Wolfe doesn't spend that book showing his character engaging in the work of his profession and gruesomely extracting false confessions from people (although Glokta's activities are not, in fact, all that explicitly described -- it's much more implication).
But the impressive thing is that Glokta is not, in fact, an unsympathetic character; he is an erstwhile dashing war hero who was captured and himself tortured by the other side, and then had the ill grace to be repatriated as a broken man and a cripple rather then being conveniently dead. He is a cynic who has had to watch his former world reject him and is under no illusions about either the Inquisition or the officials he is ordered to arrest and torture -- he has very little fear of offending his superiors, because mere day to day existence for him is a constant litany of pain and physical humiliations as it is. "The only emotion that he felt at the idea [of death] was a flutter of mild relief. No more stairs."
He is not a sadist but a highly intelligent man who has taken refuge in the one profession where his hideously changed appearance arouses a terrified respect rather than pity, and where the process of investigation offers an intellectual challenge in place of the physical ones in which it was once taken for granted that he would excel. I win again. Does my leg hurt any less? Do I have my teeth back? Has it helped me to destroy this man, who I once called a friend? Then why do I do this? But he goes on grimly, regarding the world around him with engrained suspicion and distrust: "the only honest man left in the country".
Captain Jezal dan Luthar, high-born owner of a purchased commission in the King's Own, on the other hand, is a handsome, dissipated, arrogant young nobleman whose most pressing concern in life is the fact that he is expected to train to win the annual fencing contest in order to gratify his father, which involves him in actual physical hard work and interferes with his drinking and gambling. If Glokta in the average fantasy would be the scheming deformed villain, Jezal would probably be the worthless rival for the heroine's affections, who ends up getting killed off by the hero after attempting to seduce and then dump her. He was interested in meeting poor, common girls he could take advantage of, and rich, noble ones he might think about marrying. Anything in between was of no importance.
But in fact he is not written as an unsympathetic character either; he can be a clueless or unthinkingly callous idiot at times, but he has moments of shame and self-awareness and is clearly not irredeemable, just generally immature. (As a member of the King's Own he also has to mount guard duty at various otherwise-exclusive assemblies, which comes in handy for narrative purposes when Dramatic Events transpire!) His physical discomforts may be minor compared to what Glokta has to endure on a perpetual basis, but the training schedule is genuinely tough enough, and his social obligations may be trivial compared to the various external threats to the kingdom of which he is unaware, but they are real enough to him -- it never stopped Jane Austen writing about domestic embarrassments during the Napoleonic Wars, after all. And his concern for most of this book is that he has managed to get himself involved with a woman who does not, as it happens, fit into either of his neat categories of financial transaction, and for whom he finds himself undergoing emotions that are completely outside his sphere of experience...
Meanwhile the character with whom the story opens -- in a pretty much literal cliffhanger -- is much more akin to Barbara Hambly's 'Sun Wolf'; he is a scarred and battered northern barbarian, not of the chivalric Conan the Cimmerian type, but a grim survivor who has committed atrocities in his own country for years and fought on behalf of an ambitious, ruthless king. "There are few men with more blood on their hands than me. None, that I know of. The Bloody-Nine they call me, my enemies, and there's a lot of 'em. Always more enemies, and fewer friends. Blood gets you nothing but more blood." His friends call him Ninefingers for obvious reasons, but his name is Logen.
We believe along with Logen at the beginning of the book that all his companions are dead, lost in the same Shanka attack on their camp which leaves him dangling over the edge of a cliff with an enemy's teeth fastened into his leg. He finds new allies after a hapless young apprentice wizard (it's hard to see what his master sees in him, since he seems entirely incompetent in his chosen studies throughout the book) turns up looking for him, but it's a token to the vividness of the character and the quality of the writing that when we discover, many chapters later, that the Dogman and the rest of Logen's tattered band have survived and are mourning their leader's presumed death, that it comes as a wash of gladness and relief. And when one of them is treacherously killed later on, that hits hard -- harder than you would expect for a band of hardened killers in a world full of casual corpses.
It is not until the end of the book that we find the true reason why people call Logen the Bloody-Nine, and it's not just because under normal circumstances he is a relentlessly competent survivor (his mantra in a fight: I'm still alive. Still alive). It seems he has a berserker alter-ego that kills everything in sight, however injured its host-body...
Ardee, the tough as nails, quick-witted woman with whom Jezal falls inconveniently (for him) in love, has a drinking problem to go with her lack of social qualifications. Even her brother Major West, a career soldier promoted on merit and the nearest thing to an unambiguously 'good' character in the book, turns out to have a dark secret of his own where she is concerned.
So... I'm guessing this is why people are calling it 'grimdark'†. It's not all wronged and oppressed innocents campaigning for the sake of the righteous cause; it's people dealing with the realities of their everyday lives in a world that's not particularly heroic, or even magical for the most part (to the degree that a lot of people, e.g. Glokta, don't believe in the existence of magic, although "Bayaz, First of the Magi" is undoubtedly the real deal... and, apparently, really the same balding, sixty-ish individual who disappeared from the kingdom a thousand years ago promising to some day return!) But it's also full of humour, and feeling, and unexpected twists of empathy, and it's a gripping story.
† Apparently Abercrombie posts on Twitter under the handle "LordGrimdark", so it may well be the result of deliberate self-advertising...
By the looks of it is also the set-up for an apocalyptic clash of civilizations -- and possibly evil forces that transcend all their merely human enmities -- yet to come, which does leave me somewhat nervous. There is an awful lot to live up to, and every trilogy I've read in the last few years that had a great start has ended up with a less satisfactory finale, from "Romanitas" through "Divergent" to "The Bone Ships" (and I haven't even finished that one yet). Also, while I happen to have the sequel to this novel, "Before They are Hanged", I hadn't realised that it was, in fact, a trilogy when I pulled them out of the discard box [edit: but an online search shows that, very unusually for 'old' (2009!) fantasy, the local library service does in fact have the final volume in stock, "Last Argument of Kings"]
The review extract on the front of the book calls it "delightfully twisted and evil"; Goodreads calls it "grimdark". I'm not sure what either of these are based upon, unless it is by comparison with the Young Adult diversity-positive fantasy faeverse. What you've got here is a world that feels real rather than just generic (and adult male protagonists rather than the obligatory Strong Female Characters Coming of Age; modern fantasy, like fan-fiction, tends to be pitched at teenage girls).
The main aspect that felt a bit lazy was the Shanka/'Flatheads', who come across as just your standard-issue evil humanoid menace. We really don't see very much of them beyond the opening combat in the very first pages, a point at which we have very little idea what is going on, but they feature as an offscreen existential threat (which apparently originated as shock troops created by an overthrown Evil Overlord -- they are, basically, Orcs) which the bickering kingdoms are supposed to be worried about and aren't, because they are too busy making war upon each other.
And I suppose that objectively speaking the setting is, in fact, along your standard quasi-mediaeval Western European stock fantasy lines, with hairy barbarians to the cold north, dark-skinned desert kingdoms (with Arabic-style naming practices) to the south, and a decaying Old Empire to the Byzantine east. All I can say is that it doesn't feel like a stock setting -- I've glanced at a lot of fantasy novels that all have a distinctly similar feel, however dogged their author's 'worldbuilding' and however self-consciously trangressive their societies, and this isn't one of them. This one genuinely came across as a glimpse into a different existence.
Apart from that, we have a lot of politics, rival civilisations, ancient legends, magic that is apparently real but very rarely seen, social rituals that are all-important to those taking part (even if bewilderingly irrelevant to those in the city's underbelly), and, above all, characters. And I think what the review comments are getting at is that the characters the author has chosen as protagonists for his story are *not* the standard-issue heroic farmboy/longlost heir/D&D adventurer classes; as in Barbara Hambly's Dark Hand of Magic, the viewpoint characters are those whom in a standard off-the-shelf fantasy might well be the antagonists.
The most daring, of course, is the decision to write extensively from the viewpoint of Inquisitor Glokta, whose job involves investigating, torturing and framing those suspects who attract the attention of his politically-ambitious superiors, along with his two ugly and violent sidekicks. It's not clear quite how innocent the victims are -- there's a suggestion that there really has been gross peculation going on among the Mercers, for example -- but it's clear that he is expected to produce confessions to order whatever the actual facts of the case. Although there is a precedent in that Gene Wolfe created the character of Severian the apprentice torturer as the protagonist for The Book of the New Sun, Wolfe doesn't spend that book showing his character engaging in the work of his profession and gruesomely extracting false confessions from people (although Glokta's activities are not, in fact, all that explicitly described -- it's much more implication).
But the impressive thing is that Glokta is not, in fact, an unsympathetic character; he is an erstwhile dashing war hero who was captured and himself tortured by the other side, and then had the ill grace to be repatriated as a broken man and a cripple rather then being conveniently dead. He is a cynic who has had to watch his former world reject him and is under no illusions about either the Inquisition or the officials he is ordered to arrest and torture -- he has very little fear of offending his superiors, because mere day to day existence for him is a constant litany of pain and physical humiliations as it is. "The only emotion that he felt at the idea [of death] was a flutter of mild relief. No more stairs."
He is not a sadist but a highly intelligent man who has taken refuge in the one profession where his hideously changed appearance arouses a terrified respect rather than pity, and where the process of investigation offers an intellectual challenge in place of the physical ones in which it was once taken for granted that he would excel. I win again. Does my leg hurt any less? Do I have my teeth back? Has it helped me to destroy this man, who I once called a friend? Then why do I do this? But he goes on grimly, regarding the world around him with engrained suspicion and distrust: "the only honest man left in the country".
Captain Jezal dan Luthar, high-born owner of a purchased commission in the King's Own, on the other hand, is a handsome, dissipated, arrogant young nobleman whose most pressing concern in life is the fact that he is expected to train to win the annual fencing contest in order to gratify his father, which involves him in actual physical hard work and interferes with his drinking and gambling. If Glokta in the average fantasy would be the scheming deformed villain, Jezal would probably be the worthless rival for the heroine's affections, who ends up getting killed off by the hero after attempting to seduce and then dump her. He was interested in meeting poor, common girls he could take advantage of, and rich, noble ones he might think about marrying. Anything in between was of no importance.
But in fact he is not written as an unsympathetic character either; he can be a clueless or unthinkingly callous idiot at times, but he has moments of shame and self-awareness and is clearly not irredeemable, just generally immature. (As a member of the King's Own he also has to mount guard duty at various otherwise-exclusive assemblies, which comes in handy for narrative purposes when Dramatic Events transpire!) His physical discomforts may be minor compared to what Glokta has to endure on a perpetual basis, but the training schedule is genuinely tough enough, and his social obligations may be trivial compared to the various external threats to the kingdom of which he is unaware, but they are real enough to him -- it never stopped Jane Austen writing about domestic embarrassments during the Napoleonic Wars, after all. And his concern for most of this book is that he has managed to get himself involved with a woman who does not, as it happens, fit into either of his neat categories of financial transaction, and for whom he finds himself undergoing emotions that are completely outside his sphere of experience...
Meanwhile the character with whom the story opens -- in a pretty much literal cliffhanger -- is much more akin to Barbara Hambly's 'Sun Wolf'; he is a scarred and battered northern barbarian, not of the chivalric Conan the Cimmerian type, but a grim survivor who has committed atrocities in his own country for years and fought on behalf of an ambitious, ruthless king. "There are few men with more blood on their hands than me. None, that I know of. The Bloody-Nine they call me, my enemies, and there's a lot of 'em. Always more enemies, and fewer friends. Blood gets you nothing but more blood." His friends call him Ninefingers for obvious reasons, but his name is Logen.
We believe along with Logen at the beginning of the book that all his companions are dead, lost in the same Shanka attack on their camp which leaves him dangling over the edge of a cliff with an enemy's teeth fastened into his leg. He finds new allies after a hapless young apprentice wizard (it's hard to see what his master sees in him, since he seems entirely incompetent in his chosen studies throughout the book) turns up looking for him, but it's a token to the vividness of the character and the quality of the writing that when we discover, many chapters later, that the Dogman and the rest of Logen's tattered band have survived and are mourning their leader's presumed death, that it comes as a wash of gladness and relief. And when one of them is treacherously killed later on, that hits hard -- harder than you would expect for a band of hardened killers in a world full of casual corpses.
It is not until the end of the book that we find the true reason why people call Logen the Bloody-Nine, and it's not just because under normal circumstances he is a relentlessly competent survivor (his mantra in a fight: I'm still alive. Still alive). It seems he has a berserker alter-ego that kills everything in sight, however injured its host-body...
Ardee, the tough as nails, quick-witted woman with whom Jezal falls inconveniently (for him) in love, has a drinking problem to go with her lack of social qualifications. Even her brother Major West, a career soldier promoted on merit and the nearest thing to an unambiguously 'good' character in the book, turns out to have a dark secret of his own where she is concerned.
So... I'm guessing this is why people are calling it 'grimdark'†. It's not all wronged and oppressed innocents campaigning for the sake of the righteous cause; it's people dealing with the realities of their everyday lives in a world that's not particularly heroic, or even magical for the most part (to the degree that a lot of people, e.g. Glokta, don't believe in the existence of magic, although "Bayaz, First of the Magi" is undoubtedly the real deal... and, apparently, really the same balding, sixty-ish individual who disappeared from the kingdom a thousand years ago promising to some day return!) But it's also full of humour, and feeling, and unexpected twists of empathy, and it's a gripping story.
† Apparently Abercrombie posts on Twitter under the handle "LordGrimdark", so it may well be the result of deliberate self-advertising...
By the looks of it is also the set-up for an apocalyptic clash of civilizations -- and possibly evil forces that transcend all their merely human enmities -- yet to come, which does leave me somewhat nervous. There is an awful lot to live up to, and every trilogy I've read in the last few years that had a great start has ended up with a less satisfactory finale, from "Romanitas" through "Divergent" to "The Bone Ships" (and I haven't even finished that one yet). Also, while I happen to have the sequel to this novel, "Before They are Hanged", I hadn't realised that it was, in fact, a trilogy when I pulled them out of the discard box [edit: but an online search shows that, very unusually for 'old' (2009!) fantasy, the local library service does in fact have the final volume in stock, "Last Argument of Kings"]
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Date: 2023-08-23 08:33 am (UTC)(no subject)
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