Abercrombie, Joe: The Blade Itself
The First Law: Book One: The Blade Itself
Writer: Joe Abercrombie
Genre: Fantasy
Pages: 539 (ARC)
Disclaimer: received ARC from Pyr Books
It's not fair, but I had pretty much decided I wouldn't like this book before I ever cracked it open. Why? If I recall (I don't have the ARC on me) the first four words to the blurb on the back are "Logen Ninefingers, infamous barbarian" or something very close. And those four words did nothing whatsoever to perk my interest. In fact, the mild interest I'd had in the book (hey, new and promising fantasy writer from the UK! cool cover!) pretty much deflated at those words.
But, since this was an ARC, I decided to give it a go. That's only fair, right? I'm always looking to be pleasantly surprised when I read a book (and by that, I mean I'm always looking to have my socks knocked off), so who knows? Maybe I'd like it.
Last year, I made a rule. The rule was that if, when finishing the book, I had the urge to rant about it, that I would not post the review until I'd slept on it.
So I slept on it.
I don't feel near the need to rant now as I did last night. And even last night's urge wasn't so much a rant as it was a burning need to nit-pick. I still want to nit-pick to a certain extent, but I don't feel quite so devious in doing so. I spent some time mulling over the text, checking out the author's website, reading a snippet of his blog. He seems like a good chap, so I'm not going to be too mean. ;)
I will say this: if I had picked this book up in the store and read the first couple of pages, I would have never bought it. My problems with the text started on the first page, where Logen is fleeing from a creature called a Shanka. That's all well and good, but once the fight scene starts, suddenly, I'm introduced to a "Flathead." My first instinct is that something else is on the scene with the Shanka and Logen, but the more I read (and re-read), I realized that Flathead is just another NAME for the Shanka.
My poor brain.
No, it's not too much to ask the reader to make the connection, but let's face it, at the start of the book, in an action scene, no less, where there's little to no room for explanations, this is just a mean thing to do. Granted, I figured it out, I moved on, but I was bitter.
And then I stumbled upon the first of what appears to be a writing tick of Abercrombie: the use of second-person in a third person narrative. We're going along in our character's third person POV, which feels rather limited, and suddenly, the character (or author) is speaking to ME directly with these generalized statements about life and the world. I'm making this sound really bad, and I don't mean to. It's just that little phrases directed to YOU THE READER are consistent through-out the text, and every time, I was jerked out of the story. I know the phrases related to the world at large and the culture of the POV character, but the use of "you." Gah, it kills me. This mix can be done, and it can be done well, but I'm of the opinion it should be used with much caution and very rarely. One "you" address in the third-person POV novel is enough for me, thanks.
But hey, this is my peeve, right? It may not bother everyone. But, like I said earlier, had I picked this book off the shelf and read the first couple of pages, I would've promptly put it back.
And that would've been before I stumbled on the SECOND writing tick, and this one made my teeth hurt. I'll make up the figure, but I swear it felt like a fourth of the dialogue consisted of lines such as these:
"Erm."
"Ugh."
"Aaargh!"
"Ssss."
And so on an so forth. I might be wrong about my figure, but I'm not kidding when I say that Jezal could barely speak a coherent sentence to save his life, that his dialogue was littered with such "Er..."s, and let's not talk about the need to articulate grunts, groans, and screams during fighting and torture scenes.
Maybe this is another peeve of mine. But do you know how absurdly comical it is to read the articulation of such sounds when a simple phrase "He grunted" or sensory description "The scream ripped from his throat" would do?
Worse, sometimes, we got this: "Urgh," the man grunted.
I'm making up the specific example, but you get the point. The book was LITTERED with this stuff, and if I followed the 100-page rule that so many of my friends follow when reading books, I would've never finished it because of this.
Now, I know I'm being picky. I see these as bad writerly habits whereas other readers wouldn't bat an eyelash and wonder what my problem is. To each his or her own. I think it's obvious, on a whole, that this is the writer's debut, so I expect his style will evolve and improve with time. But as it stands now, Abercrombie's style does not agree with my tastes.
But, I'll give him credit (this is not good credit) for my new favorite adverb to mock: manfully. Every time I see that word (I counted it twice in the narrative), I wanted to burst out laughing. I know writers are told to avoid adverbs as much as possible, but manfully? Oh, such a word BELONGS in satire...
Okay, I'll stop nitpicking his writing. After all, I made it through the book, right? And it didn't take me THAT long, so obviously, his style wasn't SO intrusive that it hurt my eyes to read it.
So let's talk about the book:
I'm torn.
On one hand, I understand that fantasies tend to run in trilogies/series, and that, like television shows, some volumes will stand alone while working on the overall arc, and some volumes are nothing but the overall arc. I also understand that it's difficult to judge a series/trilogy that's nothing but overall arc when one has only read the first book.
You could make a comparison to LOTR: Tolkien wrote it as one tome, but at publication, it was divided into three books, and those three books weren't published all at once either. You had to wait for the next installment.
I don't know if Abercrombie had all three books written before the first book was published. But I know that in the UK, books one and two are available with the third on its way. In the US, we're just now getting the first book.
I don't know how readers originally felt about The Fellowship of the Ring as its own entity. I imagine some might've felt frustration because, if my memory serves me correctly (which remembers the film with far greater clarity than the book), nothing really happens at the end.
Such is true with this volume. We get pages and pages and pages of world-building, of getting to know our key players, but to me, while there's plenty of conflict in this novel, there's no tension. There's no real direction to anything at all, and by time you get some direction, the book is over. It's all set-up to the next books in the trilogy.
It's not entirely fair to compare this reading experience with mine of FOTR. After all, the film version is SEARED into my brain (in fact, I'm one of those who saw the film before ever reading the book), and I didn't have the experience of reading the book without TTT and ROTK at hand. So all I can do is focus on the texts themselves, and what worked for me and what didn't and wonder why.
I didn't stop feeling the urge to nit-pick until after I got past the first 100 pages. I suspect the urge left me when Logen finally met up with another human being, the apprentice, and I could see him interact with a person. I started liking Logen then, I liked the apprentice, and I loved Bayaz. He's actually the only character I really got into.
Glokta (great name) started out strong. His first chapter and the description of simply getting from one place to another (he's a cripple) was fantastic, and it really got my attention. His character, in hindsight, is probably one of the most complex and interesting in the whole book, even though there are times when the magic isn't quite working, and I can't pin-point why. I don't mind rooting for the villain (if that's what he really is, it matters not), but I guess I never found myself invested in his storyline. His past and his character, yes. But present action, not so much. And I don't mind torture either. It's just that the plot surrounding it did nothing for me.
Don't get me started on Jezal. He's a self-absorbed, gutless little prick, and I thought I was going to like him once he made the decision to actually work for the Contest, but all of that flew out of the window once the Contest started. His character barely changed, and while I definitely see the seeds of change planted in this book (his love for Ardee, the sense that what he's always wanted isn't what it's cracked up to be), I would've liked to see a little more nobility from him, particularly in his final fight. He thinks he did it on his own, and frankly, I think ANYONE should've realized that something wasn't right with the performance. Even if Jezal couldn't have pin-pointed why he felt uneasy, I wanted him to feel uneasy, not feel like he won the thing fair and square.
Logen would've been fine for me, if not for the very end. Apparently, "Bloody-Nine" is not just how he used to act, it's a personality of DID (Dissociative Identity Disorder, formerly known as MPD, or Multiple Personality Disorder) sorts, and I'm not kidding: all the signs are there, and I have to say, I was beyond disappointed in that development. It could've been cool, but it fell flat for me, it took away the choice of Logen's actions. He didn't CHOOSE to tap into that blood-lust that kept him alive back in his old days, and Bloody-Nine didn't choose to stop killing. Both fell to their knees, not wanting to give up control, and having to as the situation called for. Maybe this is will be further developed later on in the other books, but we didn't get a hint that this was how things worked early on in this volume (and how cool would it have been if we did, if Logen had to make a conscious effort to keep that personality at bay when any time he got into a fight?), and so the revelation was an ugly slap.
It's obvious a lot of work has gone into building this world, and yet the most interesting thing to me--the magic, the Eaters--we saw precious little of, and got little explanation. Granted, this book is all set-up, but I still found myself wanting as I flipped through the pages. I didn't read to find out what happens, but rather, to simply finish the book. The ingredients simply didn't mix right for me, simply because that's all they were: ingredients. I can certainly see the potential in this book, this upcoming trilogy, but there's not enough pulling me back to see how it all plays out. There's stuff I liked, but not enough, you know?
But we'll see what happens when the second book is released. If it finds its way to me, I'll read it, as I would like to give Abercrombie another shot, but I'm not going to go out of my way to do so, especially since there's other fantasy--George R.R. Martin, Jacqueline Carey, Sean Williams--who've snagged me in the first book, and usually, within the first few pages.
That's not to say that Abercrombie doesn't have potential. He's getting some mighty praise, especially from those privy to the second volume in this trilogy, so who knows? He might be the next big thing, but I think I need at least one more book before making that judgment for myself.
And speaking of this series, I must say I'm curious: the first three books are the First Law trilogy. Does this mean there will be a Second Law trilogy as well? After all, the Second Law is mentioned in this book. And with that thought, how many laws are there? There's definitely potential for a sprawling series, should Abercrombie go that route.
As for recommendations, I can imagine people enjoying this. It's epic in its own right, medieval in a way, with a splash of sword and sorcery. I didn't get a lot out of it, though I appreciated what Abercrombie is doing, but I think readers with different tastes than I will enjoy this a lot more. There's a slightly wicked part of me that wants to label this "man-adventure" or "man-fantasy" but that would imply women couldn't enjoy it, and I don't want to imply that at all. But if you know my tastes, I think the labels I want to use but "aren't" will speak for themselves.
That said, reading this book really makes me want to read some of the other latest-and-greatest fantasies on my bookshelf, particularly Lynch's Lies of Locke Lamora, Durham's Acacia, and Rothfuss's The Name of the Wind. But not yet. I don't want to burn myself out on epic fantasies. One tome at a time...
Next up: The Hollower by Mary SanGiovanni