Some criticism I’ve seen towards The Blade Itself is that it suffers from slow pacing. Luckily they are strong shoulders indeed. Abercrombie is not a world-builder, instead he lets his characters define the story and it’s on their strong shoulders that his reputation as a writer lies. The complexity that Abercrombie weaves into his characters is comendable and the fact that he’s able to create such resounding characters in a relatively short space ( The Blade Itself clocks in at only 400 or so pages) is a testament to his abilities as a writer. The rub? He’s now an experienced and brutal torturer himself, using the techniques that shattered his own body and spirit against those he used to call friend. Chief among these is Inquisitor Sand dan Glokta, a former hero of the Union, who is now a crippled victim of torture. The single most definable and praise-able facet of Abercrombie’s work are his characters, a motley collection of characters in the vein of Tim Powers: larger than life characters that, despite their flaws and despicableness, you can’t help but love and root for. The Blade Itself is an impressive debut novel that quickly and comfortably carves itself a niche in the fantasy genre.Ībercrombie has written a wickedly clever novel, with a biting sense of humour rarely found in the over-serious Fantasy genre, but does so with a subtle hand and a flair for the macabre that can’t be ignored. Joe Abercrombie’s debut novel really was as good as everyone had claimed, perhaps it would not have topped The Lies of Locke Lamora, but it would have come darn close. My first response was to say, “Hey those are pretty nifty covers!†and then my second was to knock myself atop the head for being so foolish to have missed this novel when it was first released. There’s no easy answer to that question, but to remedy it, I hastened to pick up both The Blade Itself and its sequel, Before They Are Hanged. How could it be that a novel, which many hail as the debut of the year (even over Lynch’s effort) could be released and I was completely unaware of it for almost an entire year?
So, it was with much surprise and trepidation that I entered into Joe Abercrombie’s The Blade Itself the first novel of a trilogy entitled The First Law.
I proudly named Scott Lynch’s The Lies of Locke Lamora as not only the Fantasy debut of the year, but also my Fantasy novel of the year. It’s a year that has come up a lot since the creation of A Dribble of Ink and the main reason for this is all the fantastic debut novels that found their way into the hands of readers that year.
Publisher: McArthur & Co / Orion Con Trad By Aidan Moher June 30th, 2007 The Blade Itself
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