The Blade Itself (review)

“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. It follows me now, always, like my shadow, and like my shadow I can never be free of it. I should never be free of it. I’ve earned it. I’ve deserved it. I’ve sought it out. Such is my punishment.”

• Title: The Blade Itself
• Author: Joe Abercrombie
• Genre: High Fantasy
• Year: 2006

The words above are spoken by Logen Ninefingers, an aging berserker champion rapidly losing his taste for violence, just one of the many smartly-drawn characters in the cast of The Blade Itself. Joe Abercrombie’s first book, and the start of a fantasy trilogy entitled The First Law, The Blade Itself is sometimes playfully referred to as ‘Low Fantasy’ for its subversion of the tropes of the traditional fat fantasy with its wizards, barbarians, quests, and warring kingdoms. The Blade Itself has all that, but it’s seen through a more hard-edged filter to create a High Fantasy tale that puts pace and character above the evocation of a landscape or the intricacies of a fictional history lesson. A darker, bloodier fantasy then, though not a Dark Fantasy such as Tim Lebbon’s Dusk, but rather a book that delivers a slew of familiar elements in a punchier package.

And it’s that pacing and balance that really impressed me, especially when one considers this is Abercrombie’s first novel. The Blade Itself doesn’t read like a first novel, but rather something conceived and polished by a pro, perhaps someone who’s been writing thrillers for years that decided to try their hand at fantasy. For anyone daunted by the average bloated fantasy novel of today, who maybe doesn’t feel like learning a whole new lexicon and geography every time they pick up a book, The Blade Itself delivers all of the essentials of the epic with none of the usual tedium. Abercrombie handles his alternating points of view over a large cast of distinctive characters superbly, parceling information out carefully and without repetition, keeping his prose lean and his focus tight. An example that struck me in particular of this balance was the description of the city of Adua, a central location in the story. We know quite a bit about it by following the exploits of Jezal dan Luthar, an aristocratic officer in the King’s Army, but it isn’t until Logen arrives in the city that we really see it through his outsider’s eyes. While many authors could probably not resist painting a word picture of their great city much earlier in the book, Abercrombie both preserves the narrative drive of his story and reinforces the effectiveness of Logen’s scenes as he discovers such an unfamiliar urban environment by saving his thunder for when he most needs it. That’s good judgment, and smart storytelling, and an example of why this book fits together so well.

Characters are really the heart of the story of The Blade Itself, and Abercrombie has done a fine job combining the needs of believability, reader empathy, and dramatic potential with his varied cast. The aforementioned Logen and Jezal share the most time with a third key character, the crippled Inquistor Glokta, a man at once sinister and sympathetic. Most of the meat of the story is conveyed in their three viewpoints, as Logen escapes the chaos of the northlands and links up with the powerful wizard Bayaz, Jezal trains for an important fencing contest but also cannot help but be aware of the politically important events in Adua, and Glokta, also in Adua, ferrets out criminals and conspiracies and himself in drawn into a larger conflict. As expected, the many story threads are gradually tightened together and the over-arching plot revealed piece by piece. War is coming, Logen’s old patron has become King of the North and launched an invasion southward, the emissaries of a mysterious prophet pursue our heroes, and machinations at the highest level of government may in fact be more than just power politics at its worst . . . The Blade Itself has enough intrigue, mystery, and violent conflict to keep you turning the page.

And violence is at the heart of The Blade Itself, but it is violence with consequences. The fight scenes are superb and grounded, and the injuries sustained by the characters don’t just disappear after a few pages. Many of the characters are marked by violence, such as Glokta, the victim of permanently disfiguring torture that has destroyed his former life and poisoned his soul, or Logen himself — called Ninefingers because of a missing digit, but also ‘The Bloody-Nine’ for his murderous propensities — a man who has been an instrument of violence all his life who is just now learning to regret what it has made him. The violence can be sensational and stirring, as it should be in an action fantasy story, but it is never sentimental and doesn’t shy from certain brutal truths, and that is perhaps the real difference between this story and many of the more mainstream fantasy epics.

The Blade Itself has a lot in common with Sword & Sorcery, and at heart it’s a High Fantasy with a hardboiled, Sword & Sorcery attitude. The pace, the command of voice and dialog, and the strong characterization all make this a series to watch. Like most first books in a trilogy (of which I have been reviewing a great many, lately) by the end of The Blade Itself our heroes have come together and the stage is set for the movement into the larger, overarching conflict. But long before that, about halfway through The Blade Itself, I put the book down, fired up the computer, and ordered its sequel Before They Are Hanged, because it was clear that this was a story going places, and an author to watch. If the rest of The First Law trilogy lives up to the promise of The Blade Itself, then fantasy fans who give Abercrombie a shot are in for some bloody good fun.

• The Blade Itself at Amazon
• My review of Before They Are Hanged
• My Review of Last Argument of Kings
  
• Joe Abercrombie’s website