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The Blade Itself (The First Law, #1)

Joe Abercrombie

Start date: September 1, 2012

Finish date: September 30, 2012

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What Members Thought

Dec 04, 2016 Jim rated it really liked it · review of another edition

Shelves: 1audio, fantasy, 2fiction, 3series

Oops! Apparently I forgot to write a review for this & went straight on to the next book. I just finished it. Both were excellent. It's a fairly standard fantasy world with magical magic, although there are some real limits & hints of better rules. What makes this so good are the characters & the politics.

The politics are basically straight forward at first blush. The nobles are spoiled jerks & everyone is out for themselves. There are some hints, but they don't really evolve until the second bo ...more

24 likes · Like · see review

Apr 06, 2013 Alex rated it it was amazing

Shelves: fantasy

The best books often confuse you, demand that you step back and reassess your thinking on how literature should be written. I'm not ashamed to say that I put Abercrombies "The Blade Itself" down for a couple of months because the narrative style was frustrating me and the book wasn't giving me the pop culture relief that I was particularly craving. Sometimes the best boooks make you do this - I recall being so angry with Gene Wolfe at times that I'd swear off his fucking dense, annoying, often d The best books often confuse you, demand that you step back and reassess your thinking on how literature should be written. I'm not ashamed to say that I put Abercrombies "The Blade Itself" down for a couple of months because the narrative style was frustrating me and the book wasn't giving me the pop culture relief that I was particularly craving. Sometimes the best boooks make you do this - I recall being so angry with Gene Wolfe at times that I'd swear off his fucking dense, annoying, often deliberately boring narratives only to later pick them up and swear they were masterpieces and if you don't read them you haven't read fantasy. Abercrombie's book is a bit like that, potentially. As an author he doesn't much care if, at times, you're confused, bored or not enjopying The Blade Itself; as far as he's concerned you can keep up with him if you like and he'll just damn well keep being opaque because that's how he rolls, ok? he's not remotely a dense, difficult or tricksy writer like Wolfe, but his opaque and he keeps his cards firmly to his chest.

In fact, Abercrombie keeps his cards so tightly clutched to his chest in The Blade Itself that it's difficult to see what the point of the book is, where it started and where it's going. As a first novel in a trilogy it's pure set-up, only it's not really clear what's being setup, or, as a modern interpretative fantasy, what genre conventions he's really knocking down. What is apparent from this blistering debut novel is that Abercrombie has a voice and a style that is pure Abercrombie that voice is applied so well to the three main characters that I ended up being more than satisfied with being along for the ride, and appreciating that sometimes you can't quite tell where a novelist is going with a novel until you've turned the final page (as with, of course, Gene Wolfe) Any writer that can keep you along in that vein for 500 pages is doing well, but to then make you anticipate another 500 pages - that's really good going.

Abercrombie writes great fantasy prose. He's not an aesthete when it comes to writing, he just does a terrific job of cutting out the crap and getting inside his characters heads. He's not a scene-setter, he's a character man, a humour man (much of the book is grimly comic) and an action man there's a whole lot of blood and gore. This pleases me). It doesn't sound like those three go together to make a great book, but somehow they do. When discussing fantasy literature people tend to get obsessed these days with morality plays, shades of grey, anti-heroism and so on. What I loved about Abercrombies characters and the situations they go through is the neat way those issues are sidestepped. We don't ask many questions about morality or politics, neither do we get shocked by amoral actions or applaud moral ones. Abercrombies characters are simply interesting people living in a somewhat brutal world and acting as people within that world. And the meat of the novel, the narrative structure if there is one, merely involves the three main characters Jezal, Logan and Glokta (none of whom are particularly likeable or dislikable) coming together into the same space, almost bashing heads, not really getting along and then moving onwards to the plot of the next book (which may involve a little bit of fighting and more head-bashing). The perspective shifts allow us to see characters from slightly differing points of view and Abercrombie constantly frustrates our natural inclinations to pass judgement on characters that we don't like and cheer for those that we do. For instance, young, determined Jezal enters a fencing tournament, and naturally we want him to win despite his proclivity for drink and ladies... yet things don't turn out quite so straightforwardly and although we feel ambiguous towards him after the tournament, we can see how and why things happened the way they did from multiple angles and how people feel about it. And some angles are still, as yet, unclear to us.

I'm hesitant to say or think too much about this book because it reads and feels like one-third of a large book, rather than PART ONE OF AN EPIC FANTASY. Maybe at this point that's all I need to say - that Abercrombie's voice is fresh, intriguing, funny and fun and I'm particularly looking forward to the second book in the series. ...more

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