There’s lots to like about Joe Abercrombie’s The Blade Itself. Pithy, witty prose for one. The characters are superbly drawn – smart new takes on the traditional high fantasy archetypes. I loved Logen’s contemplative barbarian, world-weary and rather depressed by the fact he keeps winning all these down-and-dirty battles. Inquisitor Glokta is a joy, with his constant and bitter internal monologue that manages to generate sympathy even while he’s pulling out the teeth of an unfortunate prisoner.
Even so, I don’t think I’ll be picking up the sequel.
Honest, Joe, it’s not you. It’s me. I’ve just never been a fan of high fantasy. Maybe I still think of it as “sword and sorcery” – a term that still sends shivers up my spine. For all its qualities, The Blade Itself is at heart a tale of barbarians and battles in a faux-medieval setting. Instead of orcs we have Flatheads and the wizards are called Magi, but it’s all the familiar post-Tolkien ingredients mashed together, albeit with charm and wit and pace.
I picked this book up in the hope of being converted. Sadly, despite Joe Abercrombie’s skill as a chef, I have to confess this is a diet that just doesn’t suit me. Much of the problem, I think, boils down to my need to know one critical thing: where the hell is this fantasy world anyway? Tolkien dealt with this question by creating a mythology that could so easily be our own. Middle-Earth is a world that has passed away, symbolised by the elves passing into the West. To paraphrase John Crowley: “The world was not always as it is now.”
For me, too much high fantasy relies on the creation of arbitrary worlds. And I believe that’s a cop-out. It’s one thing to build yourself a wildly imaginative adventure playground for your characters to romp around in, quite another to make that world connect with – and be relevant to – the world we live in ourselves. It’s a hard job. The hardest of all, I think.
Graham Edwards 