“Red Country” by Joe Abercrombie

“Red Country” is one of the stand-alone sequels to the “First Law” trilogy, which, for those of you who have been keeping up with my blog, I just finished.  There are two main POV characters, with a few extra added here and there when needed.  This creates a tighter storyline that is a lot easier to follow.  Shy is the eldest child of three, and since her mother died, she has taken it upon herself to take care of her two younger siblings, Ro and Pit.  She does have a father-like figure in her life, but as she says multiple times, he is not her father.  He’s just some big Northerner man who helped raise her.  Temple is a lawyer for the Company of the Gracious Hand.  Or, I should say, currently he is a lawyer.  But he has some experience in other trades, like priest, or carpenter, or whatever was easiest at whatever time of his life.  He is a self-titled coward.  He always chooses the path of least resistance, even when his conscience is yelling at him.

The novel starts with Shy in town selling her crop with Lamb, her not-father father-figure.  When they return to their farm, they find it burned down.  Their friend, who was watching the kids, is hanging from a tree, and Pit and Ro are missing.  There is no trace of them anywhere, so they figure they were stolen.  Thus they embark on a journey to the Far Country to rescue them.  And along the way, Shy learns things about her nine fingered father that she never wanted to learn.  And he never wanted her to learn.  Lamb, appropriately named, as someone who knows him said, because he is a wolf in sheep’s clothing.  He’s not so submissive as he has led Shy to believe.

Meanwhile, Temple’s conscience gets the better of him, so he takes the path of resistance for once in his life, and flees the company.  He barely survives an attack in the wild, and gets rescued by Shy.  She ostensibly saved him for a fee, and it takes him the entire trip to the Far Country to pay her back.

This is a book of hope and betrayals.  People love and hate, sometimes the same people.  Sometimes at the same time.  Twists and turns abound.  We meet old friends from “The First Law” trilogy.  Sometimes by a different name, but still recognizable.  A great read.

But we see Logen Ninefingers again.  And there is no Ferro.  He has obviously given up on her.  We never get a Logen POV, so we never know if he still thinks about her.  But I do.  I miss her a lot. But Shy is great too!

“Last Argument of Kings” by Joe Abercrombie

And so I finish this ravishing series.  And might I say the end was a disappointment.  While I was not expecting ‘happily ever after’ for anyone, I was hoping for, well, hope.  It was a dismal end to a great story. And the questions I cared most about were left unanswered.  For example, Logen Ninefingers and West share a terrifying ability.  They both suffer headaches and then fly into a mindless rage.  It sounds like pseudo-PTSD, but there seems to be a mystical element to it.  And also a genetic component, West’s father seems to have suffered the same ability.  But it can’t be PTSD, because the first time it happened to Logen, he was still a happy Northerner child.  So what is it?  Alas, I do not know.

The book is filled with ups and downs, and surprising ups and worse downs. Both Jezal and Logen are named kings of their respective countries, but only Jezal seems to be able to do any good about it.  Jezal is probably the only character in the entire book with any significant amount of character growth.  He starts off as a stereotypical playboy miscreant, and turns into a benevolent king, beloved of the masses.  The same masses he spat upon at the beginning of the book, that is, when he actually deigned to notice them. Logen attempts character growth, but he falls back into his murderous ways as soon as he is among his Northerner brethren.  Ferro is still Ferro, but perhaps is not so murderous as she once was.  If she can Identify with a would-be victim, she might let them go.  Maybe that is significant character growth, for her.  Glokta is much the same as well.  He does save two lives by the end, but he does not show any signs of changing his torturous ways.

All in all, I give this book a big thumbs up, despite the depression.  Maybe I’m a little bit masochistic that way, but I love books that explore the greys in life.  And in life, there are no happy endings, so why should there be ones in books?  Maybe some people read to escape reality, but I read to explore reality.  I read somewhere, or heard somewhere, that people who read are more likely to be empathetic.  It has something to do with the fact that readers are constantly putting themselves in another person’s shoes.  They are constantly see the world from a different perspective, and this gives them the practice to do so in real life.  And for that to be effective, we can’t always get our happy endings in our books.  Suspension of disbelief only takes us so far

Some people might think that the portrayal of women in this series shows Abercrobie’s misogynistic self.  I disagree.  The women are certainly few and far between, and they are not treated fairly, but this is a misogynistic world that they are in.  All of the POV characters are fighters, or once were.  In this world, women are not in the military, so a fighting woman would be very rare to come by.  Yet we have Ferro, my favorite spitfire.

The other major women in the series, Ardee, Cathil, Vitari, and even Terez are beautifully complex women, even if their characters are not explored deeply.  Ardee is a lonely, selfish, drunk.  Full of self-loathing, but a good heart underneath it all.  Cathil has been hardened by life, and takes life and opportunities as they come.  Vitari has a great self-preservation instinct, is a loving mother, and a brutal enemy.  Terez has known since she was a child that she would be married off for the betterment of her country, but she never accepted her fate.  Not until her true lover was threatened did she show her true passion and selflessness.  She was willing to do literally anything to protect her love.  They are not perfect angels, and they are not evil spinsters.  They are something in between, just like the men in this series.

“Before They Are Hanged” by Joe Abercrombie

Say one thing for Logen Ninefingers, say he’s lost.  In this book, he embarks on a journey with an eclectic group of companions to find a mystical rock at the edge of the world.  With him are Ferro, a ferocious fiend from the south.  Full of hate and blood and death.  Jezal dan Luthar, a pompous and pampered rich kid, recent winner of the Contest (Adua’s version of an important fencing match), Bayaz, the First of the Magi, full of secrets and stories.  Malacus Quai, Bayaz’s apprentice.  A seemingly weak and weak-witted man, but I am not convinced.  He seems to survive a lot of life or death situations with pure chance.  Last last of Logen’s companions is their guide, their Navigator, Brother Longfoot, of the illustrious guild of the Navigators.

These six companions travel to the edge of the world and back, facing the harsh elements, attack from the locals, and the ancient and cursed city of Aulcus.  Ninefingers strikes up an unlikely tryst with Ferro.  They comfort each other, but her past pain and experience as a sex slave make it a relationship doomed from the start.  Meanwhile, Bayaz is constantly lecturing Jezal about what a good king should be like and do, which seems utterly pointless because Jezal is no where in line for the throne.  And Malacus Quai watches over all the events with increasingly suspicious eyes.  Bayaz reeks of deception, and Quai is finally catching on.  Each member of the party has been carefully selected for a specific purpose, and he is not keen on sharing the whys or the whats of it.

Meanwhile, up north, Colonel West is wandering the north at the mercy of Logen’s old crew.. They are searching for Bethod’s army and then the Union’s army to join up with them and help.it’s a hell of a journey in the snow and West is lucky to have made it out alive.  Not everyone does.  When they finally find the Union camp, they dig in for a battle. But Bethod has found allies with the unlikeliest of beings, Shanka.  Flatheads.  Inhuman beasts with no mercy and no brains.  They exist only to reek havoc and carnage.

In the south, Sand dan Glokta, Superior of the Inquisition is having no more luck.  He is sent down to hold Dagoska, the only Union held city on a continent ruled by Gurkhul.  It is a lost cause and he knows it.  He is told to find out what happened to the previous Superior of the Inquisition, root out the traitors, and increase the defenses of the city.  None of these tasks are easy because Dagoska is a city of bureaucracy run by merchants.  Meanwhile, the Gurkhish are coming.  No one thinks they can last a week under siege, but they manage over a month.  At the end, Glokta is convinced he will die, and digs in for his final moments.

This book is full of bad people with bad options and making bad choices.  Everyone’s hands are covered in blood, and its not a question of who’s good and who’s bad.  The quote at the start of Part II of “The Blade Itself” says it well.  “Life – the way it really is – is a battle not between good and bad, but between bad and worse,” Joseph Brodsky.  That is a highly depressing outlook on life, but perhaps accurate in this series.  All the good guys are of dubious moral character.  It’s really a matter of perspective.

I would love to see more women represented in this book, but the one’s that Abercrombie does give us are great combination of strong and flawed.  They are each highly distinct from each other, well thought out characterizations.  Unfortunately, Ardee practically is never mentioned, except in Jezal’s daydreams, and Cathil meets an unfortunate end as  soon as she really gets interesting.  But all three of them are living in a misogynistic world, and figuring out their own ways of dealing with it.

I’m almost done with the last book, and I desperately want to know what happens, so that’s all I can say for now!

“The Blade Itself” by Joe Abercrombie

“The Blade Itself” is the first book of Joe Abercrombie’s ‘First Law’ trilogy.  I chose this book/series as my next adventure because I read a great short story by Abercrombie in George R.R, Martin’s (GRRM) “Rogues” anthology. That story happened to take place in the same world, but as far as I can tell so far, it has no bearing on the trilogy. I am already halfway through the second book of the trilogy (“Before They are Hanged”), which should give you some indication of how much I am enjoying the series.

It starts off confusing, and Abercrombie did not feel like including a map to help guide the reader. I find this annoying, because even if it were a bad map, it would at least give me some bearings.  For example, Patrick Rothfuss included an undetailed (and possibly inaccurate) map with his ‘Kingkiller Chronicles’ series.  But at least it gives the reader an indication of what the major kingdoms and landmarks of that world are.  I managed to find a map on Deviantart that is supposed to be a fairly good map of the ‘First Law’ world, and the thing that most surprised me was the fact that the Agriont was an island.  That was probably indicated in the book, but I am a visual learner, and this map helped me understand the world on a much deeper level.

So after you get passed the initial confusion of no map, and you get to understand the different Point of View (POV) characters, “The Blade Itself” is an enthralling read.  One of the POV characters is a torturer.  Thing Guantanamo Bay style torture.  Or Abu Ghraib.  And you feel sympathetic for this man, Sand dan Glokt.  He was the victim of torture for 2 years, and after he was finally released, he returned home to friends and family who did not want anything to do with him.  He was a soldier unable to soldier.  But he learned how to torture most skillfully as a POW, and turned to that for a career.  We get so inside his mind, and his pain, that we forget that he is intentionally torturing false confessions out of mostly innocent people.

Logen led men into battles, killed more men than the plague, and burned several villages to the ground.  He is not a man to mess with.  In his mind, he says he put that life behind him, that he is reformed.  But we do not know the reason why he has changed his mind.  And we see him get into fight after fight.  He lost control, seemingly a mystical loss of control, but who knows?  And still, the sympathy is still there.  I am rooting for him, and I am rooting for Glokt; even thought I am firmly opposed to murder and torture.

Abercrobie has a gift for showing the humanity of seemingly evil characters.  The only writer that I have read who is better at this is GRRM.  GRRM is truly a master of the greyness between good and evil. And this is definitely a theme that is used more and more among contemporary fantasy writers.  Fantasy has long been a genre of absolute good versus absolute evil.  Frodo/innocence versus Sauron/evil.  Love versus hate.  God versus Satan.  It is refreshing that the genre is evolving past absolutes and making the fantastical real. I’ll be back soon when I finish “Before They are Hanged.”