Category Archive for ‘reading’

Red Country is finished!  Or at least my final changes are made.  Page proofs will no doubt appear some time over the coming weeks for a final read through, but basically it’s done.  One always feels one could perhaps do a little more, tweak something here, something there, but the last run through was mostly for tone and word choice and I didn’t make a great number of changes.  Too often found I was just slipping into reading without really concentrating on what could be changed, what could be improved.  Diminishing returns, and production want a manuscript, and so … adieu.

Thought this might be a good time to recommend a few westerns I’ve read and enjoyed, both while working on this book and before, and that have probably had some influence on one part or another of Red Country.  A lot of the influences, perhaps most, have been filmic ones, but I’ll stick to books for now:

Pete Dexter, Deadwood – I suspect the makers of the TV series owe a debt to this offbeat, dark and hilarious telling of the last days of Wild Bill Hickok.

A.B. Guthrie, The Big Sky and The Way West – Great novels of the early west.  Tough and authentic-seeming, it’s hard to believe they were written in the late 40s.

Richard Matheson, Journal of the Gun Years - If you only read one on this list, make it this one.  Very slim, very powerful story of the cost of violence, from the man who brought you I am Legend.  I’d never heard of it before plucking it at random from a bookstore shelf but I’m mighty glad I did.

Cormac McCarthy, Blood Meridian - The west as hell.  The crazy, unpunctuated biblical style and searing bleakness won’t be for everyone, but you can’t ignore the power.

Larry McMurtry, Lonesome Dove – Superb stuff.  Tough, moving, packed with memorable characters.  There’s a brilliant TV adaptation as well.

Charles Portis, True Grit - A classic, with brilliant voice and style.

Elmore Leonard, The Complete Western Stories of Elmore Leonard – He’s a master at characterisation, is Leonard, and can sketch a vivid character with a few words of description and a line of dialogue.  I read a couple of his full-length westerns as well (I say full length, they’re barely more than novellas, really) and I thought in the end his stuff worked a lot better short form.  Valdez is Coming is an extension and elaboration of one of the stories in this volume, and he actually takes a fascinating, surprising, and hard edged short story and spins a rather predictable novel out of it.  The shorts are fantastic, though.  Amazing how many memorable characters he produces in these thirty stories, and never seems to be treading the same ground.

Hampton Sides, Blood and Thunder – The only non-fiction I’m putting in here.  Rousing account of the conquest of the west centring on Kit Carson.

I read an awful lot of other stuff too, but these are the ones I’d unreservedly recommend…

And so we come to Best Served Cold, which is the last of these rereads I’ll be doing for the time being.  The Heroes was pretty recent and I feel it’s still pretty firmly in mind, and the nominal aim of this exercise was to familiarise myself with past characters and events while finishing work on Red Country rather than only to heap glory upon myself.  That said, Best Served Cold is fucking excellent, which is nice.

Huge Spoilers!  Those who haven’t read Best Served Cold look away NOW!  And indeed buy and read it NOW!  Or at any rate buy it.  Reading is optional.

Some background may be helpful.  This was my fourth book, but in many ways my difficult second project, as Before They are Hanged and Last Argument of Kings obviously continued with the same characters and plotlines as The Blade Itself.  Plus it was the first book I started work on with books out there in the marketplace and therefore with (at least a little bit) of expectation from readers and critics.  I’d written Last Argument of Kings in fourteen months, with relatively little blood, sweat and tears, and I expected this to be that little bit more straightforward again as I devoted more time to my writing, my craft improved and so forth.  How wrong I was.  Probably this was my most difficult book to write, I was crippled with doubts and worries about it pretty much from the start.  It’s hard to put myself in that mindset now, but I think I considered giving up on it a couple of times.  Certainly the challenge of coming up with new characters, new voices, new locations, a new style of storytelling approach, on a schedule and with people waiting, was vastly much more difficult and pressurised than I’d expected.  In the end it took about 20 months to write, I think, and for a great deal of that time I was deeply worried that it would turn out … let’s say a little bit shit, and indeed that I’d never write anything as good as The First Law again.  ’Well, not every book can be your best…’ said with a mournful shrug of the shoulders was a frequent refrain of that time, as I recall.

Partly I think that was entirely inevitable having, against any expectations, finished “that project I’d always dreamed of writing since a young lad”, and having used up a lot of the ideas I’d come up with during, well, my life (alright, stolen from other writers) in writing The First Law.  Partly it was difficulties with making the central character, Monza, work.  Even back then (I was starting to plan this book probably around the time Before They are Hanged came out) I was a little dissatisfied with what I’d done with the women in The First Law, and I wanted to try my hand at a woman in the lead role.  One would desire that the writing of a female character should be identical to a male one (not necessarily that the characters should feel identical whether male or female, but that the writing process should be the same with the same aim of producing the most vivid, interesting, authentic, multi-dimensional character possible), but I think there are actually a whole range of factors that make writing women more difficult than writing men if you’re a man.  There are elements of the female experience you’re always going to be slightly guessing at.  Just as one example, you’re probably going to have a lot of direct experience of how groups of men behave, you’ll hopefully have at least some experience of how men and women behave around each other, but by definition you probably won’t know much directly about how groups of women behave.  The likelihood is extremely high that you won’t personally have had to deal with sexism in the same way.  Stuff like that.  And then you’ve probably read, watched, absorbed a shit-load of male-centric media of one kind or another as well, and not a lot of female-centric.  You can research, you can ask questions, but watching How to Make an American Quilt just ain’t much substitute for, you know, being a woman.  Plus you’re probably aware that your women characters are going to be exposed to a kind of scrutiny your male ones probably won’t be.  If you’re writing tight point of view that slight distance, that slight doubt, perhaps a tendency to over-think and over-worry, can amount to some significant trouble in making a female character effortlessly pop in perhaps the way your male ones do.  I’m by no means saying that it’s not possible for men to write good women, but for me, at least, I think it adds a level of difficulty – it’s definitely been something I’ve had – and continue to have – to work at.  Anyway, Monza was difficult, and there were a lot of exacerbating factors: she was a central character in a way that I hadn’t had before, Glokta, Logen and Jezal had pretty much equal screen time in The First Law but here Monza’s PoV accounted for not much less than half the whole book, so the stakes were high.  She was entirely the driving force of the book as well – Glokta, Logen and Jezal had minimal agency, they tended to very much react to events being directed from elsewhere, whereas Monza’s quest for vengeance was the engine from which all the events in Best Served Cold had to flow.  And she was fundamentally not particularly likeable, especially to begin with, she’s cold, tough, calculating, ruthless, ultra single-minded.  It wasn’t until I got to the end of my first draft that I really felt she resolved in my own mind, and I got a handle on how to make her work, mostly through a lot of cutting and streamlining.  I think she does work, but doesn’t necessarily offer that immediately likeable, relatable, vivid central thread that Logen, and maybe even Glokta, give you in The First Law.

Best Served Cold certainly got good reviews at the time, not least from GRRM who described it as “a kind of splatterpunk sword n’ sorcery Count of Monte Cristo,” tee hee, still pleased with that one three years later, but looking at reader sites it’s probably my least liked book.  Or at any rate my most divisive one.  The most often disliked.  On Goodreads it scores 4.06 compared to an average for me of 4.14, on Librarything 3.98 compared to 4.15 overall, on Amazon UK 3.8 compared to 4.2 for The Blade Itself and, for instance, a whacking 4.5 for The Heroes.  Not massively significant, but noticeable, I’d say.  Out of 69 reviews on amazon UK, it has 10 three star, 10 two star, and 4 one star.  The Heroes has 56 reviews, with just 3 three star, 1 two star, and no one star.  Obviously how a book scores on amazon is far from the only method of assessing its success, but still interesting.  Some common criticisms, then, and whether they struck a chord with me having reread:

It’s not book four of the First Law.  Well duh.

Monza isn’t likeable.  As detailed above, there’s certainly some truth to this, but the degree of her unlikeability, as well as whether an unlikeable protagonist is necessarily a big problem, is going to depend on the reader.  I actually found her pretty likable this time, or certainly relatable.  She’s strong to a fault, savage even, but as the story unfolds we see she’s less evil than she seems, or even than she thinks, and not without her weaknesses, failings, guilt, occasional tendencies towards mercy for all they never do her any good.  I actually think the little flashbacks that precede each part work really well, not only in breaking up the story into episodes, but in drip-feeding the reader a different interpretation of the past, one she can never present to others, or perhaps even to herself, she’s so trapped behind her own image of ruthlessness.  It’s not necessarily that she improves so much as we come to see her differently as the story goes on.  She gets no better than ambiguous, I guess, but she does at least get that far.  More subtle than the way I usually tend to do these things, and asking more of the reader to rehabilitate an unlikeable character than to make them doubt a likeable one, but I still liked her and, much more importantly for me, since I’d much rather find a character interesting than likeable, found her deep and relatively convincing.  I guess you could say she’s very masculine, fitting unapologetically into the hole that an ultra-macho male lead could occupy in this kind of story.  She’s tough, self-reliant, hard-headed, ruthless, single-minded, decisive, arrogant, risk-taking, suspicious, manipulative, prone to verbal and physical violence, dominant in pretty much all her relationships.  A man with tits, I think I’ve seen her described as, but that’s always seemed a really strange criticism to me, as though there’s only a certain range of behaviour within which a female character can be convincing.  So Monza not likeable?  I’m not that arsed.

It’s too bleak and nasty.  Well, you can’t expect me to take this one too seriously, can you?  I mean, yeah, it’s dark.  The body count, certainly in the supporting characters, is way high, if not to say comprehensive.  It’s savage.  There’s a lot of intense violence and a fair bit of explicit sex and none of that is particularly … loving.  Nothing is sugar-coated, that’s for sure.  The scene with the eye may well be the most uncompromisingly nasty I’ve written, and Shivers’ plotline and descent into careless evil is, well, pretty horrible.  Certainly I think it’s fair to say that there’s not a lot of warm human emotion going on – everyone is treacherous, everyone’s after revenge, most relationships are ones of necessity between desperate people and end in disappointment.  But, you know, it’s about war, treachery and revenge.  What do you expect?  I actually think the ending is a good deal more positive than the First Law.  There’s every indication that Monza is going to be pretty damn successful as a ruler.  She ain’t touchy feely, but she’s pretty damn ruthlessly competent, that’s for sure.  Related is an occasional complaint that this book lacks the sense of humour of the trilogy, and I must say I don’t see that at all.  Cosca has some great lines but there’s also what I consider to be some funny stuff from Rogont, from Morveer, even from Shivers and Friendly, and Monza herself, though you wouldn’t call her jolly, can produce some acid laughs.  Overall I thought the timing had only improved.  So too bleak and nasty?  Nah, just bleak and nasty enough.

It’s too long.  I suspect this one somewhat depends.  If you’re loving it you might think it was too short.  The treatment had predicted a length of 150-175,000 words and the first two parts came in at around 25,000 words each, so had things stayed that way I would have hit the target with seven parts.  As I introduced other points of view, though, especially Cosca, and the murders became more convoluted and bound up in larger plots, the parts (perhaps predictably) started to expand.  In the end the book came in just a little shorter than Last Argument of Kings, somewhere around 228,000 words.  It might well have been better to go for six, or maybe five men to be killed and therefore five parts, perhaps trimming one or two of the points of view, but I’d have had to make that decision pretty early on.  Certainly I think, having gone with seven and worked out what the locations and content would be for each, I had to stick to the plan and let the book be the length it needed to be.  I certainly don’t feel it’s bloated myself, it feels tight in the writing.  I guess you could say that there’s always going to be a fundamental similarity between the parts – a man to kill, a plan to do it, the execution of it, onto the next, but it’s hard to see which part you’d cut – I made an effort to give each ‘episode’ a different tone, a different target, a different approach, a different backdrop, plus the broadening of the scale to finally bring in the whole politics of Styria works nicely, and the changing (or perhaps disintegrating) relationships within Monza’s dysfunctional fellowship move at the right pace.  So, yeah, maybe could have been that little bit shorter, but no huge regrets from me here, except of course that I could’ve been paid the same for less work, curse it…

Generally speaking, I thoroughly enjoyed it.  The writing felt nice and tight.  A slight tendency toward listiness in some of the descriptions but overall I thought the settings came across vividly – worldbuilding ain’t especially my thing but I think I did reasonably well at it here, the cities are distinct and there are some very memorable scenes.  I also noticed, or perhaps was reminded of, a few neat tricks of writing that I’d forgotten about – the seven men to be killed all have an animal with which they’re metaphorically associated – Mauthis a vulture, Gobba a pig, Faithful an old hound and so on – then the different parts all have a different style of imagery that keeps coming up – Visserine is full of painterly or sculptural metaphors, Westport of financial ones, and so on.  Perhaps the first half of the book is a little stronger and more focused than the second, but I noticed nowhere where things really started to flag.  The sequences in and around Cardotti’s House of Leisure I think are some of my best, really good use of alternating PoV, nice building of tension, nice description, nice shocks and surprises.  That scene in which Cosca and Shivers select entertainers for the party I really enjoyed – funny, nimble, quick, delivering loads of information about the principals and their relationship while providing laughs and advancing the plot.  Cracking multiple action sequence at the end as well, and I felt in general the action was varied and punchy enough to keep interest where it slightly flagged at times in Last Argument.  Good pacing in this book, the seven episode structure worked well, there was a constant feel of cutting to the chase, the plot unfolds neatly and delivers surprises, the complimentary arcs of Shivers’ decline and Monza’s rehabilitation worked well for me, and there are some able supporting performances from Cosca, Friendly, Shenkt, Morveer, Vitari and others.  The dialogue really sings at times.  Of the four books I’d say I enjoyed it and Before They are Hanged the most.  Probably this one I came closest to simply reading as, well, a reader would.  I even felt that slightly mournful feeling when I finished it this morning.  Ooooh, though, I wish he’d write another….

My readthrough of the First Law comes to a triumphant close, and the trilogy as a whole stands undiminished as a cracking read, a redefinition of fantasy, the culmination of seventy years of development of the form and yada yada yada.  I can remember thinking this was way my best book when it was published.  It was certainly the easiest to write (only took about 14 months, my quickest to write despite being my longest), and probably had the best reviews to that point.  But with distance I’d have to say it’s slightly patchy, slightly uneven.  Some really excellent stuff, but also some slightly lazy, uninspiring stuff suffering from a touch of fatigue, and a few plot threads left undeveloped in the rush to pay off the main threads big, a few characters left neglected in the carnage.  That unevenness is a bit of a drawback, no doubt, and leaves me feeling that Before They are Hanged is the most assured of the trilogy, actually.  Apologies for this long and rambling post, but there’s quite a lot to cover…

Spoilers!  Spoilers!  Massive spoilers!

The writing seemed a little less polished than it had in Before They are Hanged, not always, there were some really tight scenes, but often enough.  A little bit of slightly lazy repetitiveness creeping in, some loose lines here or there that really add nothing.  Bayaz is frosty, then he’s icy a few sentences later.  People nod and frown and use rather bland gestures rather than doing things that feel new and arresting and illustrative of their character.  I actually spotted a couple of real howlers, as well – “he closed his eyes and stared numbly down at the polished tabletop,” was one I particularly enjoyed.  Or rather didn’t.  It’s incredible, you go through this stuff over and over with a fine tooth comb and they still slip through.  Minor though these things are, I think their cumulative effect on the overall sense of immersion and trust, if you like, in the writing, can be quite damaging.  Jezal and Glokta’s chapters in the first part were generally the worst offenders – the more ‘cultured’ voices, if you will, while the stuff in the north generally felt tighter.

Glokta’s thoughts became a little less nimble again, as well.  A little less sharp and to the point.  You can see it just looking at the pages, sometimes.  Rather than a comment here, an aside there, there are big chunks, whole paragraphs of italics.  Perhaps that’s because he has more lifting to do from an expository standpoint – he tends to shoulder the biggest burden in explaining the Union’s politics to the reader – but it could have been more elegant.  There’s also some occasional rather – clumsy isn’t the word – artless, perhaps, summing up of things at key moments in a voice that strays a little close to authorial insertion.  Jezal and Logen reflect to themselves in a very tell not show sort of way.  Tell not show is generally bollocks, of course, there are rubbish ways of showing and brilliant ways of telling, and these are sometimes very pithy and quotable, but, again, perhaps distract from point of view discipline, sometimes labour the point a little.  Overall there’s a slight sense of bloat at times, of slightly smug discursion – not so much at the scene and sequence level, but in the detail, which surprises me as Last Argument of Kings is my longest book, a good deal longer than the other two in the trilogy, and I felt as if I made heroic efforts to bring it in as tight as possible.  I think Before They are Hanged is a good deal tighter.

Obviously what you do get is conclusion, surprises, and big ass action sequences, so I think there are good reasons why people might like this book most of the three.  There are some very good twists and shocks – some you see coming from far off like a chugging freight train, others come from nowhere with suitable punch.  Especially since The Blade Itself can be seen as slightly diffuse and plotless, you can see that the work done there does pay off here, on the whole.  In general I feel the various endings are suitably tough, uncompromising, and genre-subverting, and I very much like the way things carry on beyond the natural endpoint to show the costs, consequences, and outcomes both political and personal.  People have occasionally complained that the book goes on after its natural end but I think those people are a little bit silly, actually, as it’s in this extended end that I think much of the best stuff and the tightest writing is concentrated.  I really like the way that most of the characters in some way come full circle, their last chapters echoing their first.  It’s an ending powerful, spicy, and long, like the finish on a good whisky.  Nice metaphor, I should consider being a writer.  The ending, or perhaps the various endings, are pretty dark, no doubt, and that ain’t going float everyone’s boat but I don’t regret it in the least, I think it’s entirely fitting and sits well on the opposite side of the scales to some of the blandly predictable positive outcomes or bittersweet heroic sacrifices epic fantasy as a whole has spooned up over the years.

There’s perhaps a little too much action, though.  A slight feeling that, having turned it to ten in Before They are Hanged I needed to turn it to eleven twelve times in this book.  That exploding, splinter-flying, gut churning stuff is kind of my trademark and a lot of it works well, but I think there’s a combined slight fatigue in the writing – oh my god, how am I going to make this fifteenth scene of mayhem distinct – and just a cumulative loss of impact with some of the big, extended scenes.  The siege in the mountains comes in three big ass chunks, the final battle in Adua is massive and, I dunno, I can remember feeling slightly out of ideas at times when writing it and I think as a reader the eyes occasionally glaze over a little.  Like chilli sauce, it’s the sort of thing that’s perhaps better used sparingly.  It’s actually some of the smaller, more distinct action scenes which work better.  Logen’s duel with the Feared while the Dogman creeps into Carleon, the battle inside the House of the Maker, both the appearances of the Bloody-Nine.  Some of my best, so far as that goes, though I can’t help thinking they’d work even better if the overall pacing and tightness was quite as assured as it was in the previous book.  It’s actually the personal things that I think deliver most – the conversation between Logen and Bethod which puts the past, and therefore the reader’s whole understanding of Logen, in an entirely different light works very nicely.  Likewise Jezal’s fumbling progress to a better man, the slow revelation of Bayaz’ true character, the relationship between Glokta and Ardee, his development into the ruthless Arch Lector.

Plotting-wise, I think some things slide into place with the smoothness of a well-oiled machine while others … don’t do much at all.  There isn’t the same smooth interaction between the different plot threads in generating overall tension as there was in Before They are Hanged.  Things are more fragmented.  I think in classic fantasy author style I had a slight eyes bigger than belly syndrome, introducing more plot threads, characters and background than I ended up having quite the space and time to fully pay off.  I was absolutely determined to keep this to three books, and I’m very glad that I followed through on that, but I think the result is that some stuff was slightly wasted in the scramble to deliver.  So Jezal’s plot as the inversion of the boy with the special destiny, guided to a prophesied kingship by a mysterious mentor – score.  Logen’s as an inversion of the righteous man of violence – double score.  Glokta’s plotline breaks up, though, his involvement becomes more than a little bitty.  Some nice stuff in there, and his cheating in the vote for the new king in the first half of the book is all well and good, but in the second he’s investigating this and that, questioning spies, caught between Sult and Marovia and Valint and Balk at various tasks then seeking out treachery in his own ranks.  It’s not that it doesn’t make sense but it lacks central thrust, you might say.  It lacks focus.  Then there’s Ferro, who definitely gets the shortest authorial thrift.  There are some really nice scenes from her point of view, actually, I like the way she reads, but she just doesn’t have much to do until right at the end.  She’s not in the book that much and doesn’t get all that much of a payoff.  In general I think I’d initially conceived of the demon-related stuff: Tolomei, her backstory with Bayaz, Sult’s schemes at the University and Ferro’s involvement in them, as being more integral and developed.  I’d devoted a fair amount of time in the previous books to Quai’s replacement, Tolomei’s night-time appearances to Logen and Glokta, and so on, the groundwork was laid, but in the end didn’t do a lot with them.  The resolution of Sult’s scheme is quite perfunctory, almost played for bathos, and I could certainly have done a great deal more with that.

Women continue to be a problem.  Not enough, not interesting enough, occasionally very cliche.  Some further thoughts on this in the comments to the post on Before They are Hanged, which I think continue to apply here.  I actually think Ardee and Ferro are both good characters, and would work fine among a more diverse and vivid selection of women, but Ferro as the only female PoV is not very well served in this book, not present enough and, having shown some movement towards depth in the previous book reverts to being more one-noted again.  Vitari, again, much less present here.  Tolomei, very underdeveloped.  Eider, brief and rather fruitless appearance.  Terez and Shalere – ultra one-dimensional icy bitchy beautiful caricatures and also, looked at in hindsight, conforming to nasty lesbians put in their places stereotypes that I can hardly believe I didn’t notice at the time.  Overall there’s just a manly man’s world of men feel to the whole thing, and I think more than ever in this book.  A lack of incidental female presence.  Just a few questions that occur:  Are there no women apart from Caurib in the entire north?  Why are the female eaters all sultry and sexy?  Are women not involved in the peasant’s revolt?  Even assuming a chauvinist society, are there no powerful wives behind the incompetent noblemen of the Union?  No influential daughters?  No calculating mothers?  No virtuous paragons of womanliness to be held up to the people?  Why are characters always thinking about what their father said but rarely their mother?  Could the queen not have been a significant presence?  More women among the magi?  Why do so many of the female characters work largely through seduction?  Why do so many have some kind of sexual exploitation as a big motivating factor in their past?  Why is there virtually no interaction between women?  I think there are some reasonable answers to some of these questions, but overall it’s not a particularly gratifying picture.  Stuff to be aware of in future…

Thoughts on the series as a whole then – my feeling is the second book is the best, the smoothest, the tightest and most accomplished in terms of the pacing and writing, perhaps the best balance between craft and freshness, if you will.  You can tell The Blade Itself is a first book – there’s a roughness in the detail (although also a corresponding exuberance) and a slightly meandering sense to the plotting of someone finding their way from a planning standpoint.  Last Argument of Kings shows some faint signs of fatigue at times and although I think it largely works as a bold ending to the series not everything is developed as much or resolved as tightly as I’d ideally have liked.  But then the first book is always going to deliver the excitement of something new, and the last the satisfaction of shocks and resolutions that the second can’t, so I can well understand why people might prefer either of those to Before They are Hanged.  An entirely unscientific assessment of reader scores seems to broadly support the hypothesis that Before They are Hanged is the best liked of the three: On goodreads TBI averages 4.06/5, BTaH 4.21, and LAoK 4.20.  On Librarything they’re 4.13, 4.2, and 4.23.  Amazon UK averages 4.2, 4.5, and 4.4.  Amazon US is slightly harsher with 4.1, 4.4, and 3.9.  Though there’s perhaps an indication that LAoK is dragged down by a few very negative scores from people who hated the ending, and, you know, they’re dead to me.  DEAD.

Still, overall, I was very pleased with the reread of the series.  Proud of the achievement, if you must know, in fact I can hardly believe it was me that wrote all those pages, all those paragraphs, all those words, many of them in the dead of night, without a contract, purely for my own amusement.  Some of them even quite nicely turned, if you’ll pardon me for saying so.  Blade Itself was less sloppy than I’d expected (which is nice, since I guess many readers will always start with that one), Last Argument perhaps a little more.  But for this (admittedly somewhat sympathetic) critic I think it very much delivers what it set out to – a tough, gritty, visceral take on epic fantasy with some vivid characters, some memorable moments, some strong dialogue, and an uncompromising set of resolutions that provide some interesting twists on the staples of the genre.  If you agree with me, I suggest you buy a new set of the books to celebrate.  If you disagree, I suggest you buy every copy of the books you can find and ceremonially burn them.  That‘ll show me.

I believe the best way to make oneself look fair-minded, adult, and emotionally big after treating someone else’s hard work, sweat and tears to an unfavourable pasting is to review one’s own work and heap praise upon it.  So, without further ado, my thoughts on re-reading Before They are Hanged:

Now we’re talking.  Yeah, this is a big improvement over The Blade Itself in all sorts of ways, at least from where I’m sitting assessing it as a writer.  Possibly there’s a slight reverse middle-book syndrome going on for me here.  As a reader the middle volume perhaps has neither the excitement of introductions nor the satisfaction of conclusions, but looked at as a writer it neither has to carry the weight of setting things up, nor put in the work of dragging the threads together (or perhaps failing to), and hence writerly screw ups of one kind or another are less likely and the book is free to just spin the wheels.  Your mileage may of course vary, and indeed many mileages have, but for my mileage Before They are Hanged spins the wheels pretty damn nicely even if I do say so myself…

Beware ye of spoilers oh pitiful fools what have not read The First Law trilogy!

Writing generally is much improved, I feel, the voices have become more distinctive and assured, the descriptive stuff is a lot more arresting – partly I think that’s a result of the travelogue nature of the plotlines which means characters are frequently running across new and exciting things in a way they weren’t so much in the first book.  If you’re writing in tight Point of View there’s simply no need to describe a character’s own familiar bedroom, or the street they walk down every day, and I think that gave some of the descriptive stuff in the first book a slightly unconvincing, info-dumpy quality.  ”Jezal ran past building X where important institution Y was based and frowned up at monuments A and B commemorating important event in history Z which may be important later and neatly illustrates point C about Union culture and Jezal’s own character…” is just not honestly the experience of having a run in your own backyard.  This works a lot better, and there’s more variety in the settings as well, sweaty Dagoska alternating with the frozen North and the desolate Old Empire.  Some interesting stuff in there, and reading some of this I slightly miss the fantastic in the lower magic direction I’ve taken in the standalones.

The big score is the pacing, though.  There’s a definite sense I was piddling around somewhat in The Blade Itself while trying to manoeuvre the characters into position to get this book started, but having laid that groundwork things kick off here with a vengeance.  There are three entirely separate plotlines – Glokta’s machinations in defence of Dagoska, the Fellowship’s quest across the Old Empire, and West and the Dogman fighting oop north, and I’d say they all have a sense of well-contained forward motion.  Very little feels wasted.  Glokta in particular works much better here, freed from the direct oversight of his superiors and with Licence to Act Like a Shit from on high.  He’s at his best ruthlessly making idiots of the arrogant scum around him, and his thoughts have settled into a much more pointed and elegant acid cynicism.  Prince Ladisla, and to a lesser extent Poulder and Kroy, are much more caricature than character, but then the approach has always been for slightly larger than life supporting players (this is fantasy after all, there’s no point in being scrupulously realistic, I don’t think) and most of the stuff in the North still works well, Threetrees and the rest of the band are always good value, and the developing relationships between Logen, Jezal and Ferro are satisfying, even if some of the necessary Expounding Upon Stuff That Happened Ye Manie Centuries Ago Around The Campfire (TM) is a bit clunksome.  Above all, I felt there was a really nice rhythm to the way the three plotlines compliment each other, especially in the first half, where chapters from the quest plotline alternate with blocks of Dagoska and the North, the chapters getting shorter as things build to a crisis in each, cutting from building tension to building tension to building tension.  Slick, that.

Problems?  Well, the Bloody-Nine’s appearance is less memorable this time around, Bayaz’ magic has lost its impact somewhat, and indeed Bayaz generally is diminished as he is forced back into Ye Olde Mysteriouse Wizarde With Unexplained Planse role, but then we all know we’re going somewhere with that, so I think it’s forgivable.  Women are starting to emerge as a bit of an issue – the lack of them, the superficiality and sexification (is that a word? My spellcheck says no but I say YES) of most of those that are there, of which more later.  The action generally still strikes me as really memorable, though – the two battles in the North, the siege of Dagoska, the fight among the stones, the chase through collapsing Aulcus, all good stuff, and there are some really good speeches dotted about here and there as well, some great exchanges between Jezal and Logen, amongst the Northmen, now with added Shivers, between Glokta and pretty much everyone, especially Cosca.

Probably I shouldn’t say this, but Before They are Hanged strikes me as fucking ace, probably to the degree that your intense love for it validates you (and certainly me) as a human being.  Hmm.  Is it frowned on if cover quotes come from the author of the book itself, because I need to let the world know that they really ought to be reading this shit…

Over the last few days I’ve been reading Joe Abercrombie’s seminal work of modern fantasy, The Blade Itself.  Alright, I confess, I have read it before.  About 90 times.  In fact there’s probably no significant body of text that I’ve read more times.  In a week this book will have been published six years ago.  Which means I was making the first (probably now unrecognisable) efforts at writing the first scenes maybe nine or ten years ago.  Although I had made the very first (utterly unrecognisable apart from some of the names) abortive efforts at writing those scenes about seventeen years ago.  Which means I very much wouldn’t do things quite the same way now in all kinds of ways.  Which means it almost feels at times as if it was written by someone else.  Sometimes that’s a bad thing, sometimes a good – there were a couple of nice lines and gags I’d actually entirely forgotten.  At other times I knew the text so well I’d expect to read a line that had been taken out late in the editing and be shocked that it wasn’t there.  The notional purpose of rereading was to check whether there was anything I’d forgotten about that should find its way into the current book, particularly from the point of view of any returning characters (obviously I can’t say who but the sharp among you have probably already got your theories).  I’ve leafed through it now and again to check some detail or other but I haven’t actually sat down and read the entire thing for a good two or three years, I don’t think.  It was an interesting experience.  Occasionally a little wincy and frustrating but by and large a good deal better than I’d feared.  Some thoughts…

The writing’s a little lumpy, sometimes trying a bit too hard – why use one adjective when five are available?  Then you can repeat a couple of them later in the paragraph!  Hmmm.  A tendency towards providing pairs of nouns or adjectives when one, or perhaps none, would do.  A bit of dead-horse beating, you could say.  Sometimes it’s a bit foursquare, dwelling on who did what when, some unnecessary repetition and too much focus on technical aspects of positioning in a scene that really don’t matter at all.  He turned, then he turned back, then he turned again.  He could probably have turned less.  Or indeed simply looked forwards and delivered his dialogue.  But actually the writing was generally less embarrassing than I’d feared it might be.  Some of the descriptive bits are a little, I don’t know, lacking in sparkle, prone to become a bit listy and unimaginative, and sometimes there’s a slightly trying, breathless, ‘Ooh, I can’t wait to tell you how ace this is,’ sense to things, but the dialogue is largely there, there are some really nice exchanges I’d forgotten about.  If there’s one relative strength that I’d identify it is the dialogue.  The different ‘voices’ for the different points of view generally work but haven’t totally settled down at this stage.  I actually found the prose-style with Ferro’s chapters worked really well although I was trying a bit hard for an emotional payoff there, and the Dogman just always worked right off, but Glokta’s internal voice I actually found rather surprisingly disappointing – works in some of the more reflective sequences where he’s just thinking, but comes across as trying too hard when it’s working as a commentary on action and conversation – sometimes a bit obvious and lacking in subtlety, I’d say.  It improved as things went on, though and undoubtedly had its moments.  Perhaps overused?

I’d say probably the biggest problem is with content and pacing.  The different threads don’t necessarily interact all that smoothly.  There are some really nice sequences at the Contest, in the House of the Maker, when the Bloody-Nine appears, but they tend not to coincide, coming as blips out of a flatline of occasionally rather dull hanging around rather than building together to a crescendo.  In general the first part works fine – although I think a slightly meandering sense remains from when the early chapters were first written more as test samples than as part of a larger, planned out whole – but in the second part you’re waiting for an increase in intensity and if anything there’s a relaxation, a bit of a dispersement and dilution as Ferro and the Dogman appear in their unrelated stories, there’s a little too much fencing with Jezal, though some of that works well, Logen is treading water and Glokta’s investigations into Bayaz, though necessary to fill out the back story, aren’t always thrilling.  There are interesting and exciting moments in there, and the characters and world are definitely laid out and built up in a largely entertaining and involving way, things do intensify as we come towards the end, but there’s no denouement to this book, if you like.  If you look at the trilogy as a single story that’s not necessarily a major problem, but I think it would have helped to have a rather more decisive structure to this volume – certainly it’s a criticism I often see and probably one that I’d largely agree with.  At one time I’d have said something like, ‘well, Fellowship of the Ring sets things up and then trails away at the end without at all standing alone,’ but Fellowship of the Ring is basically one thread, so that sequences like the flight from the Nazgul and Moria have huge impact.  I don’t know that the Blade Itself has anything on that sort of scale, and big events for one character tend to be slightly traded off against flatter stuff for others.  The second part in particular could definitely have been condensed considerably without costing much, I feel.

That said, despite the issues, I still like it.  A lot, at times.  Probably that’s unsurprising, since I like it in the way that you like that sandwich you make for yourself, on just the kind of bread you like, with just the right amount of sauce and the lettuce cut just bloody so.  I like the way it kicks off hard, I like the tone and the sense of humour, and I think the characters are pretty arresting, vivid and original right off and do pull you (or at least me) through the flatter sections.  Although nothing much pays off there is some reasonably cunning set up of various plot points, partly thanks I’m sure to the luxury of publishing the first book when I was already well underway in the writing of the third.  There are some really nice scenes, often when the characters suddenly encounter one another for the first time and the way others see them is contrasted with the way they see themselves.  And although the pacing overall is uneven a lot of the sequences have a nice internal rhythm.  There’s a good sense of timing, you might say.  Some rough edges, then, some things I wouldn’t do the same way now at all, but I nonetheless award myself high marks.  Unsurprisingly, some might say.  But it is handy, since the chances are large that your first book will remain in many ways your most important.

In conclusion, The Blade Itself is incontestably the finest fantasy debut that will ever be made … by me.

Oh, and the comment thread is getting a little spoilery, so if you haven’t read the First Law, firstly, I pity you, secondly, don’t read the comments, and thirdly, what are you waiting for…?