All Prologue
Aug. 22nd, 2010 03:36 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
mtvesselNov 2009
The Blade Itself - Joe Abercrombie - Gollancz, 2007
* * *
A common complaint levelled against epic fantasy by critics (when they deign to comment at all) is that it concentrates on world-building and simplistic manichean plotting at the expense of the character complexity and development that is the stuff of "real" literature. This might have been the case fifty years ago - no-one would, I think, read the Conan books for psychological insights into their protagonist - but since then there has been a progressive tendency for characterisation to be foregrounded over world-building. On the whole this is a good thing, but some writers are beginning to take it too far. Case in point: The Blade Itself.
Personally, I blame role-playing games. Writers of my age and below have a high chance of having played Dungeons and Dragons in their youth, and Abercrombie's world has a distinct sense of an adapted role-playing setting. Even some of the names follow the old Dungeon Master trick of taking a real-world example and substituting, adding or removing a single letter - Angland, a country that is under attack from Northmen; Adua, the capital city; the Gurkish empire; a port to the south called Shaffa; the city states of Styria; distant Suljuk. In fact I think Abercrombie is a bit embarrassed by his world and its origins. It's the only reason I can think of to explain why there is no map, which will immediately alienate the large percentage of his readers with visual imaginations. This absence drains the locations of any in-built context, making them meaningless and unmemorable. Which would not be a problem if the plot were confined to a single location, but it's not. The set-up is essentially a corrupt empire that is under military threat from both the north and the south. The distance between places and their relative orientation is clearly going to be important in the overall storyline, so it is deeply frustrating to be given so little sense of them.
The vagueness also extends to magic and religion. Despite the fact that one of the major characters is Bayaz, the "Last of the Magi", we never get a strong sense of the rules by which magic works, other than a mention of the First Law that you do not consort with devils. Again, it is clear that magic and the Maker, the mysterious being who created a locked tower full of powerful artifacts and then disappeared, are going to be important. But by the end we still know next to nothing about them.
Role-playing games may also be responsible for the unlikeability of the main characters. Warhammer and the various World of Darkness games, amongst others, have made a point of eschewing simple good-vs-evil social set-ups and instead present a relativistic moral universe where who is right largely depends on where you are standing. In a game, this is good for allowing players to choose sides without imposing one on them, but it also means that all characters have in effect to be anti-heroes, with serious flaws to balance out their good points. In a novelistic context, this makes them unlikeable. It's hard to root for a man like Glotka, one of the three main viewpoint characters, when his day job consists of torturing people in graphically unpleasant ways (and even harder when Gene Wolfe created a similar character with considerably more elegance and brevity in The Shadow of the Torturer). The other two are slightly more sympathetic but not by much. Jezal dan Luthar is a shallow, stupid and fundamentally useless sword fighter who is only in training for a competition because of family pressure. And Logen Ninefingers is an updated Conan with a long history of bloody violence.
The heroism of these three is undermined still further by the fact that they are essentially servants of more powerful characters or institutions and never attempt to break free from them. Glotka works for the empire's secret police, Jezal is in thrall to his social position and his love interest Ardee, and Logen spends most of the book as an unnecessary bodyguard for Bayaz. Their passivity, totally justified though it may be in terms of personal survival, is one of the reasons why so little actually happens, as they are fundamentally observers of the forces that are taking their places on the stage. The result is a book which despite being five hundred pages long is all prologue. The characters come to Adua and are sent to the brewing war-zones and on a mysterious quest of Bayaz's. And that's it. It's a bad case of what I call fantasy author's bloat, where story development is held up by characterisation or world description. To be fair, it's very good characterisation - Abercrombie has a real talent for readable and witty dialogue, and Jezal's initial encounter with Ardee made me laugh out loud - but this doesn't excuse the fact that there is no satisfying dramatic climax.
Abercrombie's talents also do not extend to female characters, of whom there are only two of any note. Ardee starts promisingly but is sidelined for the rest of the book, and the other - Ferro - is a stereotypical Amazon warrior killing machine. As a result, the world feels depressingly blokish.
Despite the negativity of this review, there are some promising signs. I liked the Dog Man and the other members of Logen's band and could have spent more time with them. Reports also suggest that now the set-up is out of the way, the other two books are more satisfying. But with the lack of sympathy for the main characters, and the infuriating vagueness of the world, I won't be in a hurry to read them.
The Blade Itself - Joe Abercrombie - Gollancz, 2007
* * *
A common complaint levelled against epic fantasy by critics (when they deign to comment at all) is that it concentrates on world-building and simplistic manichean plotting at the expense of the character complexity and development that is the stuff of "real" literature. This might have been the case fifty years ago - no-one would, I think, read the Conan books for psychological insights into their protagonist - but since then there has been a progressive tendency for characterisation to be foregrounded over world-building. On the whole this is a good thing, but some writers are beginning to take it too far. Case in point: The Blade Itself.
Personally, I blame role-playing games. Writers of my age and below have a high chance of having played Dungeons and Dragons in their youth, and Abercrombie's world has a distinct sense of an adapted role-playing setting. Even some of the names follow the old Dungeon Master trick of taking a real-world example and substituting, adding or removing a single letter - Angland, a country that is under attack from Northmen; Adua, the capital city; the Gurkish empire; a port to the south called Shaffa; the city states of Styria; distant Suljuk. In fact I think Abercrombie is a bit embarrassed by his world and its origins. It's the only reason I can think of to explain why there is no map, which will immediately alienate the large percentage of his readers with visual imaginations. This absence drains the locations of any in-built context, making them meaningless and unmemorable. Which would not be a problem if the plot were confined to a single location, but it's not. The set-up is essentially a corrupt empire that is under military threat from both the north and the south. The distance between places and their relative orientation is clearly going to be important in the overall storyline, so it is deeply frustrating to be given so little sense of them.
The vagueness also extends to magic and religion. Despite the fact that one of the major characters is Bayaz, the "Last of the Magi", we never get a strong sense of the rules by which magic works, other than a mention of the First Law that you do not consort with devils. Again, it is clear that magic and the Maker, the mysterious being who created a locked tower full of powerful artifacts and then disappeared, are going to be important. But by the end we still know next to nothing about them.
Role-playing games may also be responsible for the unlikeability of the main characters. Warhammer and the various World of Darkness games, amongst others, have made a point of eschewing simple good-vs-evil social set-ups and instead present a relativistic moral universe where who is right largely depends on where you are standing. In a game, this is good for allowing players to choose sides without imposing one on them, but it also means that all characters have in effect to be anti-heroes, with serious flaws to balance out their good points. In a novelistic context, this makes them unlikeable. It's hard to root for a man like Glotka, one of the three main viewpoint characters, when his day job consists of torturing people in graphically unpleasant ways (and even harder when Gene Wolfe created a similar character with considerably more elegance and brevity in The Shadow of the Torturer). The other two are slightly more sympathetic but not by much. Jezal dan Luthar is a shallow, stupid and fundamentally useless sword fighter who is only in training for a competition because of family pressure. And Logen Ninefingers is an updated Conan with a long history of bloody violence.
The heroism of these three is undermined still further by the fact that they are essentially servants of more powerful characters or institutions and never attempt to break free from them. Glotka works for the empire's secret police, Jezal is in thrall to his social position and his love interest Ardee, and Logen spends most of the book as an unnecessary bodyguard for Bayaz. Their passivity, totally justified though it may be in terms of personal survival, is one of the reasons why so little actually happens, as they are fundamentally observers of the forces that are taking their places on the stage. The result is a book which despite being five hundred pages long is all prologue. The characters come to Adua and are sent to the brewing war-zones and on a mysterious quest of Bayaz's. And that's it. It's a bad case of what I call fantasy author's bloat, where story development is held up by characterisation or world description. To be fair, it's very good characterisation - Abercrombie has a real talent for readable and witty dialogue, and Jezal's initial encounter with Ardee made me laugh out loud - but this doesn't excuse the fact that there is no satisfying dramatic climax.
Abercrombie's talents also do not extend to female characters, of whom there are only two of any note. Ardee starts promisingly but is sidelined for the rest of the book, and the other - Ferro - is a stereotypical Amazon warrior killing machine. As a result, the world feels depressingly blokish.
Despite the negativity of this review, there are some promising signs. I liked the Dog Man and the other members of Logen's band and could have spent more time with them. Reports also suggest that now the set-up is out of the way, the other two books are more satisfying. But with the lack of sympathy for the main characters, and the infuriating vagueness of the world, I won't be in a hurry to read them.