Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #1786 in Books
• Published on: 2009-03-12
• Original language: English
• Binding: Paperback
• 704 pages

Customer Reviews

LOTR meets Guy Ritchie
If you buy this trilogy expecting pages of epic landscapes alive with giants, goblins, dragons and bestrode by shining heroes in silver armour sat on magnificent horses wielding magic swords dealing out death and destruction to an evil meglamaniac and his hordes of minions, you will be sadly dissappointed. Also if you like your books full of song lyrics, poems, family trees and elvish alphabets you will be equally dissappointed. Our author even declines to prefix the action with the usual obligatory badly drawn map!

No, Abercrombie's world is a world made of men. Their actions, emotions desires, words, triumphs, failings, smells and innards. The author takes you through the story from the various points of view of the main charactors, and what a collection of charactors they are, beautifully fleshed out, 3D and brought to life so that I almost expected to meet them whilst out walking the dog in the woods. The major benefit of this style is that you never tire of one charactor and you ride along behind their eyes so you know and understand their motives and grow to love and sympathise with them even though they are cabable of the dreadful.

Don't get me wrong, there is much here the hackneyed fantasy reader will recognise. A grizzled campaigner, a young handsome swordsman, an ancient arch magi, a torturer, a beautiful girl and a host of barbarian tribesman. However all given a refreshing twist. The swordsman is a cowardly, self obsessed snob. The grizzled campaigner is oft possessed by a 'beserker' alter ego who is as likey to kill his best friend as his worst enemy and the beautiful girl is a slightly tarty 'low-born' with an inclination to hit the bottle.

Potential buyers of a sensitive nature be warned the writing style is more Guy Ritchie than Tolkien. Expect profanities, sex, gore and plenty of black humour.

The joys of this book are the authors ability to create 'real' people, he has a gift for dialogue and moves the action along at a satisfying pace and puts you in the heart of it. The story avoids being cliched and predictable for the most part. The charactors are all shades of grey rather than being definatively evil or good and their actions stay true to their personalities as set out in volume one.

If I was hyper critical I may say that the plot though neatly pulled together at the end, for much of the trilogy can feel like a series of random events. Also the female charactors don't feel quite as authentic and fleshed out as the male ones. But I am splitting hairs here, this is a rollicking good adventure that has made me remember why I first picked up a copy of LOTR all those years ago.

I'm going to really miss the personalities in this book, Logan Ninefingers is truly one of the great fantasy charactors ever created as is the deliciously bitter and twisted Glotka. That said I hope 'Joe' does not do the predictable sequel or prequel but conjures us up another cast list of equally entertaining heroes & villains to ride with in his next book, and if your reading this Joe don't keep me waiting too long!

Unconventional genius
First and foremost this is just a great read. Entertaining, witty, suspenseful, exciting, thought-provoking, the list could go on. Abercrombie has definitely risen quickly above the other authors writting in this new sub-genre of fantasy - Erickson, Bakker, even Martin, who really pioneered it.
Abercrombie has managed to inject two vital ingredients that most of the other authors from the 'Dark, Gritty, Real' stable block miss. Humour and heart.
*Spoiler alert* Stop reading now if you don't want any giveaways.
For example, at first glance Glokta is a most unpleasant character, but very soon you find yourself sympathising with him, understanding his choices, caring about him. Also his dry, cynical wit is very endearing (inspired by a certain Edmund Blackadder, surely!).
All of the central characters are written equally as cleverly - Jezal dan Luthar, Logen Ninefingers, Collem West. This isn't just an exercise in cold, technically brilliant writting, it is a novel that appeals on a number of levels, with a sense of epic about it, although at the same time very character driven.
My only grumble is that the trend in trying to do the unexpected, killing off major characters, unexpected twists in the quest of achieving 'realism' and so on, is in itself becomming a little predictable. Although there was the definite potential for each of the main characters to have a 'happy ending' it was fairly obvious that none of them would have, Glokta being the possible exception.
I love fantasy and read it till it's comming out of my ears, but part of my motivation for reading it is that the real world is depressing enough. It is actually nice to immerse yourself in a world where justice has more of a chance of comming out on top. Although the epilogue with Logen had the feel of genius about it, there was still something quite depressing about the whole ending - Jezal didn't get the girl and seemed to retreat into the character that he began the book as (what point was there in his cleverly written character arc?), Collem dying of a hideous disease, Logen ( rightly) abandoned by his closest friends, and not getting the girl either. And it would have been nice to see Bayaz get something of a comeuppance.
Still, these are only minor quibbles when you sit back and look at the whole book. Overall it ticks most of the boxes and is without doubt a five star book, I don't think anyone could read this and not find themselves warming to the characters, enjoying the sense of epic, the cleverly written different cultural angles, the nail-bitting and stomach turning battle scenes, the sense of humour that makes it such an unpretentious read (unlike authors like Bakker and Erickson).
Quite simply: Brilliant!

Almost, but not quite...
In Last Argument of Kings, the story of Logen, Luthar and all the others continues apace and many of the sidebars are pulled together to form an even more connected story, than in the first books. The full trilogy is thus completed nicely. The story is well-paced and there are twists and turns that I did NOT see comming. I don't want to reveal too much, and spoil it for those of you who haven't read it, but I just have to point out that the twist at the end of Logen's story is master-full. Nice work Mr. A!

However all isn't well in the land of Joe A. While I really enjoyed the first two books in this trilogy, this concluding chapter doesn't quite have the same hint of greatness to it.
In the first two books I thoroughly enjoyed the interaction among the (very much not) merry band of adventurers, but in this book Abercrombie allows them to drift apart and continue their stories pretty much on their own. This allows for some of the tension to bleed out of the story and pushes the more unsavoury character-flaws of our heroes to the fore. In short, they become less charmingly nasty and more just plain unpleasant.
So while the story is still very good and very recomendable, I was left feeling just a tiny bit disapointed that the book didn't quite match up to the first two installments.