K-SCORE: 48
Author: Joe Abercrombie
Spoiler Level: Moderate
Advertised as a brutal high fantasy novel that introduced a grim and exciting world with fascinating characters, wit, cynicism, and a complex and compelling plot, Joe Abercrombie convinced me with the first entry to his First Law trilogy that his greatest strength as an author is selling falsehoods of his story. You could plot my frustration with The Blade Itself on a graph and the growth would closely follow a standard exponential curve. I used to have more patience for reading largely ineffective or amateurish writing, but apparently no longer. Perhaps one day I’ll regain my strength for reading bad books. I certainly hope so. Because I’m not going to want to figure out what happens in the next two entries until I do.
The Blade Itself introduces an entire fantasy world filled with mages, warriors, kings, emperors, inquisitions, institutions, tournaments, wars, epic cities with long histories, and follows multiple characters whose paths cross repeatedly, but who all appear to be on their own distinct journey. No single conflict exists, but every person has his or her own troubles as they clash and fight and team up to battle forces of evil that go largely misunderstood. Much like A Song of Ice and Fire. The problem: nothing is nearly as good as A Song of Ice and Fire. Comparing every piece of epic fantasy to that masterful series would be colossally unfair, however. Accepting that I was reading a lesser product was something I did from the start. This novel still gave me nothing to grab onto. At every turn of every page, I was presented with the book’s ultimate question: who cares?
“They’re all killers of a sort, all self-obsessed... completely confused as to the goings on of their world”
I suppose it’s fair to say that there are six essential characters to the story. Sans dan Glokta is a crippled torturer who was once a great fencer and warrior but lost his ethics along with his physical functionality in an enemy prison and now spends his days forcing confessions out of the guilty and innocent alike and doing investigations at the behest of his daft city-leading superiors. Jezal dan Luthar is a fencing prospect and unfocused young man from a good family who mills about the city drinking, womanizing, literally staring at himself in the mirror, and stumbling unfairly into tremendous success despite few qualifications. Logen Ninefingers is a northman with ninefingers who is a talented hardened warrior who quite specifically professes to having no desire to make his own decisions. Bayaz, the First Magi, is an impossibly old mage of boundless talent who presumably knows something of actual threats that face his world, but who won’t tell anyone, and who only uses his hazy-ruled magics when it will create the largest cinematic impression and not when it would be most effective. The Dogman is another northman who kills his enemies with a bow, follows around a leader, brings about no plot revelations and does not develop. Ferro is a black woman who kills her enemies with a bow, follows around a leader, brings about no plot revelations and does not develop. Not a one, nor their more ancillary versions holds anything particularly interesting. They’re all killers of a sort, all self-obsessed, all but one straight men of an approximate maturity level, all but one completely confused as to the goings on of their world. The plot of Logen travelling to Bayaz at the beginning could have been cut out. Glokta’s torturing and destroying the merchant guild in the beginning is largely irrelevant. Jezal’s fencing is largely irrelevant and more time is spent on it than on anything else; then he’s thrust into other stories awkwardly. If Ferro and Dogman have any purpose to greater plots, they don’t surface in this novel. And what Bayaz literally does in this story is unclear: travels with Logen, takes baths, breaks a chair, blows a few people up, takes a box from an old and magical tower that everyone in the city have come to accept. That’s the best I got for a summary of his movements.
“Abercrombie’s idea of a plot that moves is to frequently throw fight scenes into the mix”
Character work is really all it is, too, so if I didn’t attach to any of those characters for what I hope are valid reasons, I wasn’t going to attach to any of the plot. The fencing tournament Jezal participates in marks the only completed plotline, and it’s scenes have very little tension because the stakes are so low. Jezal’s an ass. Win, lose, who cares? With regard to the war against the new northern king, with regard to the Ghurkish invasion in some faraway land, with regard to the greater evil from “The Other Side” (cliche), the outcome is still TBD. Abercrombie’s idea of a plot that moves is to frequently throw fight scenes into the mix of scenes where characters argue about who is in the greatest position of authority and scenes where characters delve into inner-monologues about their own internal strifes. The subplots of Jezal’s love affair with Ardee West, of West’s struggles amassing an army and managing his sister’s stay in the city, of the mage’s apprentice struggling with his studies, of Glokta’s new house for inquisitions, of political turmoil in the royal family and the Closed Council are all laughably ineffective. I was moved by nothing. Things technically happened, but always I fell back on that great questions.
I think the reason I hold this novel in such contempt is for the unfair reason that it is very much an archetype of what I’ve been taught you can’t sell to people. Violence without a purpose. Great length without a direction. Needless tangents. Shallow descriptions. Almost no internal sense of ethics or thematic work of any kind. Humorless. Cliffhanger? The whole thing arbitrarily ends at exactly page 500. Character similarity. Incomplete world building. Trite, cliche, bland fantasy tropes. Twistless. I thought all of these things were signs that an author’s work should remain forever in manuscript form, never being picked up and published. I just don’t get it. I’m willing to read something hyper violent, something that just ends a third of the way through it’s story, something that is amoral to its core, something that has warriors and northmen and mages even though I’ve read all that before, something that strives for excitement and epic conclusions instead of shocking revelations, something that has more power in its moving plot than its beautiful prose or themes, but all of that at once? And if the true selling point was the gritty violence, I laugh. All the characters Abercrombie follows survive the ordeals of this story, and the ones that are tortured and killed didn’t do so in ways I find remarkable. You need a more morbid mind Abercrombie. Let me show you how to torture your creations. 500 pages is a great length for a story, 1500 pages even better, but one can pack far more into 500 pages than Abercrombie did with this.
The Blade Itself is telling the lie that it’s at all worth your time, and for that reason I really hated it. I admit that, if someone was willing to buy my epic series, I’d probably have eased up on it a bit, but even if that was the case, it still wouldn’t be a good novel. It’s amateurish work, the kind of stuff I was writing ten years ago, written by a manchild with the douchiest book jacket photo I’ve ever seen.