The First Law trilogy by Joe Abercrombie – review

I’m taking a page from Jay’s book and re-running some old reviews from my now-defunct personal review blog. For the most part they are unchanged in content, except for removing things that no longer apply and actual editorial scouring…no, not even my prose is immune.

I find it a grave oversight that our site doesn’t actually have reviews of these books, so it’s with special pleasure that I offer up my (reprinted and somewhat reduxed) impressions of the Joe Abercrombie’s first fantasy work.  Since The First Law trilogy is one story and was written as a trilogy (vs. starting with a standalone novel and adding sequels), I don’t think it’s unreasonable to consider the set as one entity.  The individual books that comprise it are, in order, The Blade Itself, Before They Are Hanged, and Last Argument of Kings. 

I want to start these reflections by saying, up front, that I really liked these books. I found them to be a fresh take on a genre I gave up on after eighth grade, in a style after my own heart.  Abercrombie’s characters are funny, his world is engaging, and his stories predictably unpredictable (that is, you never know what to expect and you kind of get that from the beginning).

A bit of background about the books before I start dropping opinions and analysis like death spells. These books would fit under my umbrella of “gonzo fantasy”:  they are crass, they are violent, they are drunken and dirty and deranged.  (Note:  There are minor spoilers ahead, in the sense that I tell you what type of story is told in books two and three, but I don’t think I have ruined anything for those of you still unversed in this tale.)  The first book introduces the various protagonists–I hesitate to use the term “heroes”–and sets this disparate group of people on convergent paths. It seems to be meandering rather aimlessly for the first third or so as we are introduced chapter by chapter to Logen Ninefingers, barbarian non grata on the run; Jezal dan Luthar, a decorative nobleman drinking and swindling his way through his youth and his father’s fortune; Ferro, an escaped slave bent on revenge; Inquisitor Glokta, the crippled war hero cum Spanish Inquisition-style interrogator/confessor/torturer; and the unprepossessing wizard Bayaz, relict species of ages long dead. After about two runs through the cycle of characters, the storylines begin to spiral in toward the central point; the book ends when the characters are finally all brought together and some semblance of the trilogy’s overarching plot is revealed. The second book takes them out into the wider world on a quest to recover a dangerous artifact/weapon, and the third brings them home again for the conflagration of all the various tensions tearing apart their kingdom and their lives—wars on two fronts to be ended or lost, religious zealots from the “dark side” to be conquered with an even darker magic, a royal succession to be manipulated, old enemies to be crushed beneath the heel of vengeance, etc.

As should be obvious from that description, there are some elements common to most epic fantasy. (1) Widely different group of people bound together (2) on the road by (3) a quest to save the world, and (4) the final showdown that determines the fate of the world. Only slightly less ubiquitously used elements include (5) the last wizard standing; (6) a world living in the shadow of its past—or perhaps more properly said, living as a shadow of its past; (7) a magical item that requires a scion of a pre-designated bloodline to wield it. And all this is as it should be. Abercrombie has described his intention with the trilogy as being to epic fantasy what Unforgiven is to movie westerns—definitely an example of the form, but one with a slant-wise take on the genre.

I think that is an honest way to describe it. For every genre staple/cliché that is included, another is pissed upon. There is a near-constant undermining of expectation, both by the standards of fantasy epics and those of literature in general.  Another way to summarize the trilogy—mine, in fact—would be: Reservoir Dogs + “Dr Heidegger’s Experiment” + The Empire Strikes Back, dropped into post-apocalyptic Middle Earth.

This book speaks in the cant of a 21st-century 20-something, hence the inclusion of a Tarantino movie. It is well written, witty, and full of violently poetic descriptions and snarky one-liners, if also littered with more comma splices than bodies (Abercrombie has assured me this is part of his “style,” and since he does apply it consistently I suppose that might even be true). The prose is furthermore blood-soaked in its graphic depictions of battles, deaths, and interrogative torture–and Abercrombie spits out (or should I say, spits on?) some of the most uncomfortably realistic sex scenes I’ve ever read.

As far as the characters go, do yourself a favor and don’t get emotionally attached to any of them. One reviewer said the events of the last book seem to be orchestrated by the puppet master—the behaviors of the characters do not seem to fit with the arc of their development. I can’t decide if that is right, or if it was just that the characters were not developing the way we thought based on how they normally will change over the course of a book. But this is what makes me include the short story “Dr. Heidegger’s Experiment”—they are like the Coquette, the Glutton, and the Gambler, falling back into their old patterns of behavior without qualm or second thought once the mitigating circumstances are removed. This is, to me, a very Aristotelian view of humanity; he suggested that man’s character is the sum of his actions, so that a habit, once formed, essentially becomes the man. Certainly the play of events in The First Law supports that idea.

Finally, unlike most epic fantasy, which ends either with happy success or a noble self-sacrifice that saves the world and is thus a bittersweet happy ending, the story of The First Law ends more in bleakness than in triumph. The characters who make it to the end alive have accomplished more than they could have hoped, simply by managing that feat, regardless of the outcome of the struggle for world supremacy. By the time the end has come, there seems to be little difference between the “good guys” winning and the “bad guys” winning—the point is that the status quo will remain the same, and that the villainy or virtue of either side is subjective. This view of the world is cynical, not quite to the point of being chilling but close, and put me in mind of the havoc wreaked upon hope and reason and the very tenants of beliefs about the world by the end of The Empire Strikes Back. Only no Return of the Jedi follows to put the misery back into its designated corner and restore the world’s tinsel-sparkle.

I appreciate what Abercrombie was trying to do, which was to turn everything onto its head and then yank the rug out from under you while you were still trying to squeeze your eyeballs back in. Certainly the direction he chose to take the story gave it the impact of a heavyweight’s right hook. But despite the fact that I liked this aspect, I can’t help but feel a little bamboozled by the difference in expectations raised by the style of the first book and the exit strategy of the last book. It’s akin to how I felt after seeing the “black comedy” film Happiness for the first time:  it was funny in the beginning, but by the end the humor was overwhelmed by the tragedy. If I were to go back and re-read the whole trilogy it might be funny the whole way through—or not funny even at the beginning—now that I know what’s coming. But after just one read of the whole sequence, I feel like I started in one genre and finished in another. Again, I realize his point was to knock down expectations, and I did enjoy the whole ride. As an artistic choice I respect the end…but for me the humor in the first book belies the starkness of the end.  Perhaps my sense of humor is just not Germanic enough?–if I had found Michael Haneke’s movie Funny Games, well, funny, I could see myself thinking the ending here was humorous. 

Despite my sense that the ending was one standard deviation too far from the beginning on the lightness scale, I really loved the books.  They reignited my enthusiasm for reading epic fantasy, and I will continue to be a fan of Abercrombie even if he essentially writes the same book over and over again.