I had hopes for The Blade Itself. Not overly high
hopes, but solid, and I thought well-founded, hopes. In the space of two weeks, two entirely
different people had recommended the entire trilogy to me, one comparing it to Game
of Thrones and the other noting that it is possibly his favorite fantasy series,
ever. Then, for the holidays, a friend
gave me the entire trilogy as a gift. I
had been hungering for a dose of good fiction.
I didn’t need this to be magical or monumental, just good and
compelling.
The Blade Itself is neither good nor compelling. Had I picked the book up of my own volition,
I would have put it down before I hit page 50, but as it was a gift from a
friend, and moreover a gift he was excited to give, I felt the need to see it
all the way through, hoping that I would find hidden strengths in its length
and scope that overshadowed its weaknesses in writing and character. Sadly, I have finished the book, and whatever
strengths it possesses remain hidden from me. But while I didn’t find the reading enjoyable,
I found a way to make it educational. I
have been reading talented authors for so long that their art and skill had
become like the air that I was breathing.
Walking into the smoke-filled air of this literary wreck gave me the
opportunity to examine what I was choking on, what was clogging my passageways
and irritating my nasal passages.
The writing in The Blade Itself is terrible. It’s not that Abercrombie doesn’t know how to
put together a sentence, but that he doesn’t know how to say something
meaningful. He knows that he needs to fill
pages with words and scenes with actions, but he doesn’t know how to do that so
that the words give us more than description and the actions give us more than
happenings. We are forever skating along
the surface of events, people and places.
Abercrombie describes the physicality of these things in the emptiest terms,
giving us nothing of their importance, imbuing none of it with context and
meaning. In this way, description becomes merely description, and there’s no
guiding principle to help Abercrombie decide what should be described and what
should be left vague or hinted at. It
all becomes filler to pass the time. There is nothing you can point to and say,
“My god, that is a powerful sentence!”
Or well-written sentence. Or beautiful sentence. Or meaningful sentence.
The result is that you could effectively summarize each
chapter into a paragraph noting how the plot progresses and you would get every
bit of enjoyment out of reading the novel, losing nothing in the translation. Take for example the chapter titled “The
Theatrical Outfitters,” on pages 238-246 of my edition, just shy of the halfway
point. Logen, Bayaz, and Quai (consider
this your warning and spoilers are coming, and they’ll keep coming, so if you
are worried about spoilers, this is probably not the read for you) have come to
Adua and are about to enter into the Agriont.
To get through the gate, Bayaz has decided that they will need to change
clothes to look more like the Aduans expect them to look. So they go into a theatrical outfitters shop
and buy garish clothes that Aduans will read as Great Wizards, Studious Apprentice,
and Fierce Northerner. That’s it. That’s all you need to know about the chapter. Everything else, all 8 pages are just filler,
empty dialogue and meaningless exchanges.
We don’t learn anything about the world, about the characters, or about
the culture that isn’t already contained in the summary I have given you. There are no twists or surprises or unexpected
discoveries.
The characters of The Blade Itself are shells. You
get the measure of each character in the chapter of their respective
introductions and there is nothing left to surprise you later. Jezal is a shallow and pompous ass. Glotka is a bitter and observant ass. Logen is simple and skilled. Then in each succeeding scene, these
characterizations are driven home again and again without variation or
interest. Prose has the unique
opportunity to explore the complexity of the inner life of human beings, but
Abercrombie eschews such opportunities.
That’s fine. Authors sometimes
prefer to reveal characters through interaction with other characters, showing
how each side of a person is affected by whom they are in community with at
that moment. But Abercrombie cares not
for this approach either. Logen is Logen
whether he is talking to the Spirits, Bayaz, Ferro, or anyone else. Ferro treats Yulwei and Logen the same. Glotka talks the same to Severard and Jezal. And don’t look for subtlety in these
characterizations. We literally have
people tearing at their hair, frothing at the mouth, and it seems like everyone
at one point or another has their mouth hanging open, for that seems to be a favorite
of Abercrombie’s. Characters within the
novel are at best functional plot devices and at worst cartoon representations.
Unfortunately, when Abercrombie does try to add depth or
dimensionality to his characters it is still more painful. In the last fifth of the book, we get two
attempts to deepen characters, and I winced at both. In the first, we learn that West and Ardee had
an abusive father and that West has it in him to lose his tempter and hurt
those he loves, just like his father. Trauma
is a classic way to try to make characters sympathetic and complex, but this revelation
was there to do nothing more than that. Ardee’s
explanation to West is just pure exposition with no bite and no indication of
the real human feelings that are born from such a past. There is no conversation, no meaningful
fallout, and no follow up. Even worse is
when West goes to Glotka in a following chapter, “Old Friends” (in the last tenth
of the book, pages 444-449 in my edition).
Glotka, angry that West didn’t prove to be a good friend to him years
ago when he was first returned home after being tortured, yells at West and
sends him away. West explains that he
did try to see Glotka but that Glotka’s mother turned him away. Here’s what follows:
It took a while for the words to
sink in, and by the time they had, Glotka realized that his mouth was hanging open.
So simple. No conspiracy. No web of betrayal. He almost wanted to laugh
at the stupidity of it. My mother turned him away at the gate, and I never
thought to doubt that no one came. She always hated West. A most unsuitable
friend, far beneath her precious son. No doubt she blamed him for what happened
to me. I should have guessed, but I was too busy wallowing in pain and bitterness.
Too busy being tragic. He swallowed. ‘You came?’
West shrugged. “For what it’s
worth.”
Well. What can we do, except try
to do better? Glotka blinked, and
took a deep breath. “I’m, er . . . I’m sorry. Forget what I said, if you can.
Please. Sit down. You were saying something about your sister.”
“Yes. Yes. My sister.” West fumbled
his way back into his seat, looking down at the floor, his face taking on that
worried, guilty look again.
That’s it. There was tragedy and pain between us, but we
have a plot to get to, and I need you to go see my sister! What can we do, except try to do better? This monumental sense of injustice and guilt
sits between these two like the carcass of a dead animal, and they both just peer
around it to talk about the matter at hand. It’s a half-hearted attempt to make the
characters and world richer, and it only shows that Abercrombie has no ability
to handle such a scene.
The plotting of The Blade Itself is clumsy.
Abercrombie tries to pace his revelations, but they all fall flatly before the
reader. Abercrombie show’s no ability to
build tension, seed mystery, or connect to the richness of humanity in his
characters and his world. One reading
could be that he is afraid of showing his hand early, so he keeps everything tight-lipped
until he can drop some interesting information, but it feels more to me like he
has these parceled bits of information, knows they should only come occasionally,
and just kills time between delivering them.
In the penultimate chapter, we learn that Logen’s moniker The Bloody-Nine
is not just a nickname but a separate personality, and one that has a different
relationship with his body. I suspect
this is supposed to be quite the revelation, but there was nothing that built
up to it, so it registers simply as a fact, not as a bomb to the reader. We haven’t spent any quality time inside Logen’s
head to even be interested in what he might be hiding in there. When I picture the origins of this book, I
imagine Abercrombie creating an outline of each chapter, how it forwards the plot,
and what it reveals about characters and situations. Then the writing of the book is simply taking
that paragraph of summary material and stretching it out to fit the proper
length, the same material, dense in its initial form, diluted and thinned in
the telling. I was told many things I
didn’t know while reading the book, but I was never once surprised or
delighted.
The world of The Blade Itself is uninteresting. The setting is one of the least imaginative
settings I have encountered in a work of fiction, let alone in a work of fantasy. The patriarchal backbone that holds this
world up, and I mean it is present in every civilization discussed, is tired
and offputting. Men insult each other
and feel shame themselves by comparing them to women and girls. We don’t even get a named female character
until 60 pages into the book, when Ardee is introduced as the sister of one man
and the future love interest of another.
We then get two more named women who are dismissed as vacuous and
tedious before meeting Ferro, 200 pages into the book, who is little more than
a fighting, swearing, angry, vengeful, woman.
The woman engaged to the prince of Adua gets a name, and only one other female
character gets a name. That’s it. Six
total named women. Who writes a novel in
the 21st century that can’t pass the Bechdel test?
But patriarchy is only one of Abercrombie’s problems. You will not be surprised to learn (or at
least I wasn’t) that the center of this world is white people. Black people exist way to the south, and
Brown people hover at some of the edges, but there are about the same number of
named non-white characters as there are women characters. And then there is classic structure of
nobility and commoners, with a rising merchant class threatening nobility with
their newly-made money. The Aduans think
of everyone else as savages. There’s slavery
in the south. The northerners are tough
and without niceties of manner or goods.
It’s everything we have seen a hundred times before in fiction and
reality, and it is all present here without question or examination. Abercrombie has nothing to say about these structures,
just accepts them as the easy framework on which to hang his story.
In the most uncharitable light, one could easily accuse
Abercrombie of ripping off the general structure of George R. R. Martin’s world
in Game of Thrones, just draining it of everything that made it
interesting. There’s a center of civilization and nobility
in the hot climate of the middle regions.
Up north, there are rough northerners who have a new King of the Northmen,
where there are also a breed of giants. Down
South (as opposed to Martin’s East), there are deserts and Black people with
their desert and Black ways. All the world
is heading toward war, and unbeknownst to all but a few, a supernatural and deadly
creature is forming to the north of the North and coming down to wreak havoc on
the humans. Only Abercrombie has no gift
for understanding or discussing politics and intrigue. Instead, he yoked on a Tolkeinesque
fellowship led by a powerful wizard to somehow save the world.
On top of all these other complaints, I place this last
one. The Blade Itself doesn’t
even seek to be a satisfying standalone book.
It is merely an introduction to the characters and the world, a look at
how the machine got moving. Five hundred
pages of empty actions and flat character introductions to set you up for the second
and third books of the trilogy. This
entire book could have been an interesting 100 pages or a book that actually
went somewhere. Instead, we get a
bloated balloon that takes up space and gives little in return.
