Nicola Griffith - Slow River (1995)

"She has read many fairy tales and understands instinctively that those who are dragged places unwillingly must find their own way back."

'Slow River' by Nicola Griffith shares many of the concerns of cyberpunk. Set fifteen minutes in the future, it explores the intersection between technology and identity, as well as being deeply concerned with corporate ethics, or lack thereof. Reading it, I found myself thinking of the famous William Gibson quote, "The street finds its own use for things." Yet, whilst most of the original cyberpunk texts are noir-infused SF thrillers, 'Slow River' is a much more thoughtful, reflective book. It achieves its impact through character development and Griffith's eloquent, lyrical writing. The end result is a powerful, haunting novel, and its anger is all the more effective for being carefully revealed. It is also a deeply feminist novel, both in its themes of female characters searching for and ultimately achieving their own agency, and in the way its almost entirely female cast effortlessly spans a wide range of motivations, viewpoints and morality.
   'Slow River' is very much about the quest for identity, so it's appropriate that the novel opens with the main character having hers stolen. Lore van der Oest is the daughter of a powerful family at the head of a global corporation, who is kidnapped just before her eighteenth birthday. She escapes, and finds herself naked on the streets of a city, injured and with her Personal Identity, DNA and Account insert removed. She is rescued by Spanner, a thief and con artist. The fact that her family didn't pay her ransom, coupled with the recent suicide of her sister after years of abuse at the hands of her mother, leads Lore to turn her back on her origins and try to make a new life with Spanner. The narrative is split into three threads told concurrently, reflecting Lore's fractured identity. One thread, told in the third person present tense, follows Lore throughout her early life, from five years old up until the kidnapping. The second thread, told in third person past tense,  details Lore's life with Spanner. The final thread is told in first person past, and tells of Lore's attempt to start afresh with an honest job after splitting up with Spanner. The different voices in which these threads are written tells you something about how well structured the book is; the present tense of the early life sections give them an immediate yet child-like quality, while the switch to the first person for the chronologically last thread highlights Lore's attempt to take control over her own life. Yet the fact that the narrative threads run concurrently until the end of the book show that Lore has not yet achieved full control over her own identity until she confronts her past.
   Another effect of telling all three parts of the story at the same time is that we get to see the corruption of Lore's spirit at the same time as we see how innocent she was and how hard she is working to redeem herself. As a member of the powerful van der Oest family, Lore's childhood is shaped by both the spectre of abuse and her parents' ambitions for her. During her relationship with Spanner, she is finally able to leave the influence of her family behind, but she winds up being subject to Spanner's much stronger personality. Spanner may be effortlessly charming, but she is ultimately a damaging influence on herself and anyone who comes into her range. She ekes out a living on the margins of a digital society, involved in various types of internet scams of varying unsavouriness. At first, Lore doesn't question who is being hurt by her and Spanner's actions, and is just glad after her abuse at the hands of her kidnappers to be on the other side of the equation:

"She knew that sometimes Spanner made money from other people's suffering, but she did not have to see that, and she had suffered, too. Everyone suffered. It was just a question of making sure she was using them, and not the other way around."

But ultimately she gets to the stage where she cannot live with what she and Spanner are doing, and realises that Spanner's outlook on life is flawed, and that she can only truly gain agency and heal from the wounds of her past by living a life that allows empathy for her fellow humans.
   The book draws parallels between Spanner's prostitution and the van der Oest's business practices. The van der Oest's wealth comes from their jealously-guarded monopoly over the bioremediation biotechnology necessary for cleaning the drinking water and environment. Whilst this technology is a good thing that improves people's lives, gives them safe drinking water and fixes the mistakes of the industry-driven past, it is corrupted by the van der Oest's greed. The van der Oest get their way by wining and dining politicians, and when that doesn't work they have a black ops group happy to resort to kidnap and blackmail. Both Spanner and van der Oest operate happily in their own social strata, unaware and unconcerned by those that they harm. In the third narrative thread, Lore is forced to come face to face with the victims of one of her and Spanner's pornography scams and a man born without limbs as a result of an error in one of the van der Oest's bioremediation projects, both people who have had their lives scarred by Lore's complicity. The book's anger at complicity is a theme that recurs at the end when Lore confronts her father for failing to notice that his wife was abusing his children.
   However, for all its anger, 'Slow River' ends on a hopeful note. The three narrative threads meet, Lore is able to reclaim her own identity but on her own terms, and begins a much more healthy relationship with Magyar, a colleague at the wastewater treatment plant where she has been working. After all her trauma, she is ultimately able to heal and move on with her life. It is a powerful and moving ending, all the moreso for being hard earned.

Rachel Bach - Paradox Book One: Fortune's Pawn (2013)

"Whole truths usually just made things worse anyway. I avoided them whenever I could."

'Fortune's Pawn' by Rachel Bach is something of a missed opportunity. On the one hand, you have a well drawn female protagonist who not only kicks ass but is realistically flawed successfully inhabiting a genre archetype usually reserved for males, a bunch of interesting aliens and a brisk, page-turner-y plot. On the other hand, you have a plot so riddled with cliches that the book as a whole struggles to carve out its own identity outside of its well-worn source materials. This is a pity as there are the seeds of a very good book in 'Fortune's Pawn' struggling to make itself heard over tired space-opera trappings.
    'Fortune's Pawn' tells the story of Devi Morris, a shoot-first, ask-questions-later mercenary kitted out with power armour, laser swords and guns. Hoping to fast-track her career, she follows a tip and takes up a tour of duty as a guard on board the Glorious Fool, a ship with luck so bad as to be legendary. Is the crew a rag-tag bunch of misfits? Do the captain and the ship have a dark secret that they're determined to make sure Devi doesn't find out? Is there a handsome and mysterious love interest with a plot-based reason why he and Devi can't be together? If you answered yes to all three questions, pat yourself on the back and help yourself to a biscuit. All of this stuff is good fun, and these are elements that have become cliches in space operas for a reason, and they're certainly not done badly here, but everything feels second hand at best. The influence of TV space operas Firefly and Farscape figure strongly here, as well as, say, Heinlein's 'Starship Troopers' or Haldeman's 'The Forever War', though with significantly less philosophical heft than either. And while Rachel Bach clearly has good taste and a firm understanding of what makes these sources of inspiration so beloved, she brings precious little new to the table. This isn't the worst sin in the world to be guilty of, but it says something about how deeply indebted to the past your work is when you can comfortably reduce any given scene to, "Oh, I really enjoyed the bit where Aeryn Sun fought the Dunwich Horror until River Tam came in and rescued her."
   This is a shame, because there are things that 'Fortune's Pawn' does particularly well. Devi Morris is a very successful gender-flip of the standard male meathead mercenary you usually get in these stories. Not just a female character who is strong, Devi is believably flawed - she's impulsive, reckless and bigoted. Likewise her romance with Rupert, Mr. Handsome and Mysterious, is very well handled, for all the predictability of its arc. The two have a natural chemistry and rapport and clearly enjoy each other's company. What's more, Devi refuses to be patronised or rescued by him, or have him  make big decisions about their relationship without her input.
   In some ways, 'Fortune's Pawn' suffers being read after 'Ancillary Justice'. Devi's world of Paradox is a technologically advanced feudal society. This is an amusing conceit and a nice comment on the imperialism prevalent in much space opera, and there's clearly a lot of potential for witty subversion here, however I felt this was not used to the extent it could have been. Additionally, Rachel Bach has some really interesting aliens that I would far rather have spent more time with than sitting through another shoot out. The xith'cal are basically space dinosaurs (think halfway between Scarrans and the Jem'Hadar) who can choose their biological sex, with the males being the hunters but also butchers and cooks, and the females being engineers and scientists, or, in the case of Hyrek, the ship's doctor on the Glorious Fool, they can just choose not to differentiate. Hyrek was by far my favourite character and I would easily have read a whole novel about gender queer book snob space dinosaurs. But I digress, one must review the book at hand and not the book you wanted it to be. The point is that there is some actual original invention here, that could have been used to explore themes of gender and identity, which were sadly overlooked to provide a simpler, action-heavy but idea-lacking plot.
   In many ways I think this is the crux of my problem with the book; even after I finished it it still didn't feel like it had been about anything. There's nothing wrong with a bit of action-packed fun, but there's no reason that action-packed fun can't make us think a little as well once all the smoke's cleared. While I found some of the ideas in the book very promising, and I thought that Bach's execution of a female version of a traditionally male archetype was very well done, overall the book left me cold. I am willing to admit that I may be doing Rachel Bach a huge disservice, seeing as 'Fortune's Pawn' is very much conceived as part one of a trilogy. Perhaps books two and three explore the subtle themes of book one in more depth. (Perhaps it makes more sense of the abrupt and frankly bizarre mindwipe decision at the end of the book). However my experience reading 'Fortune's Pawn' has not inclined me to rush out to the shops to buy the sequels, so I may never know what I'm missing.

Poul Anderson - The Broken Sword (1954)

"'Can you not feel it? The monstrous slumbering power locked in that iron, held by those runes so ancient even I cannot  read them - the power ravenous and resistless and - evil! there is a curse on that weapon, Skafloc. It will bring the bane of all within its might.' Her eyes were wide and frightened. She shivered with a cold not that of the dungeon. 'I think - Skafloc, I think it were best for you if you walled up that sword again.'"

Poul Anderson's 'The Broken Sword' was first published in the same year as Tolkien's 'The Fellowship Of The Ring'. Both books are landmarks in Fantasy in very different ways. Ably informed by their authors' passion for and study of Norse mythology and Icelandic sagas, the books set both the subject matter and the tone of the Fantasy genre from then until the present day. Yet the books could not be more different. Compared to the bulk and meandering of Tolkien's masterwork, 'The Broken Sword' clocks in at a remarkably swift 274 pages, and in place of Tolkien's gentility is a savagery and brutality that harks back to the original sagas and myths that both books draw on. While the tropes and modes that Tolkien set in stone would influence the bulk of mass market Fantasy produced for decades, Anderson's novel, though less well known, anticipates the grimdark nature of modern masters like George R. R. Martin and Joe Abercrombie, whilst providing an alternative template to Fantasy for those put off by Tolkien's twee-ness that would be taken up by the likes of Michael Moorcock and M. John Harrison. 'The Broken Sword' is frequently regarded as a Fantasy classic, yet after reading Anderson's disappointing 'Tau Zero' I had been avoiding more of his work. Yet where 'Tau Zero' is clumsily written with poorly realised characters, 'The Broken Sword' sings off the page, and while it would be a stretch to paint it as overtly feminist, in this regard it is easily more progressive than 'Tau Zero' and 'Lord Of The Rings', having multiple strong female characters with agency. 

So good it's been a Fantasy Masterwork twice

'The Broken Sword' is about doom. Characters have to face the frequently bad consequences of their and their ancestors' actions, frequently hindered by supernatural forces much stronger than them. It opens with Orm, a viking who kills an Englander and all of his family in order to steal his land, save for an old witch who escapes. The witch, desiring revenge, directs a passing elf to steal Orm's newly-born son and replace him with a changeling, setting off a series of events that can only end in their mutual destruction. Skafloc, Orm's son, is brought up among the elves, learning their skills with fighting, hunting and magic. Valgard, his photo-negative changeling, his brought up as Orm's son, where his aggressive and surly nature isolate him from his family. Whilst Skafloc is beloved by the elves and goes with them to fight in their wars with the trolls, Valgard is manipulated by the witch into killing Orm and his sons and selling his daughters to the trolls in order to become one of their generals. The elves and the trolls are natural enemies and always at war, yet they can't let their fighting get too serious otherwise the gods and the giants will join in, leading to the end of the world. Yet the gods are already involved; on the day Skafloc was brought to Alfheim, a messenger of the gods presented him with a broken black blade, saying that one day he will have need of it. This is Tyrfing, forged by the giant Bolverk, a powerful weapon destined to play a role in Ragnarok.
   The book unfolds beautifully, events following on from one another in inevitable certainty towards Skafloc and Valgard's twinned fate. The book is driven by Anderson's beautiful prose, (something I genuinely never thought I'd write); using almost entirely words with Old English sources, full of inversions, and evocatively poetic, Anderson accurately summons the feel and texture of the Norse myths he draws from as much as the subject matter. Characters even frequently burst into verse, like the skalds, which of course Anderson knows the rules for and follows. Which is not to say he shies away from violence. 'The Broken Sword' features enough bloody battles and brutal violence to satisfy the most hardened of Abercrombie fans. It also rattles along at an incredibly sprightly pace, largely due to the fact that Anderson is incredibly focused on the main thread of the narrative. Lesser writers would have used the diversion of Skafloc and Mananaan's flight from the ice giants to pad the book out, whereas Anderson hints at wider adventures tangential to the main narrative, allowing our imagination to play within the gaps left by the main story and freeing him up from getting bogged down in trivialities while he's building to the climax. The book also manages to tie together multiple strands of mythology. Anderson lifts from Norse, Irish, Celtic and Christian mythology when he chooses, yet has the talent to tie it together into one coherent world.
   Of course none of this would work if the book didn't have strong characters to inhabit this coherent world. Skafloc and Valgard are perfect foils for each other, each cursed by being in the other's natural place, each manipulated by forces outside their control, ultimately their hatred for each other winds up being the last thing they have. The forbidden love between Skafloc and his sister Freda is all the more affecting because Freda is a well developed character in her own right. Freda is smart, resourceful and can handle herself in a fight, winding up with a fairly impressive troll body-count. In the end, she is the one with control over their relationship, and her tragic decision to return to Skafloc at the worst possible time is hers alone. Simirlarly, Leea, Skafloc's elf foster mother, though she is defined in the book largely through her relationship to Skafloc, but is cunning and wily. Leea and the rest of the female elves even get their turn to save the day, as they kill the trolls in their sleep and steal the keys to let Skafloc and the elf army into the castle. Leea and Freda even have conversations that aren't about Skafloc, allowing the book to technically pass the Bechdel test. Again it's not perfect but it's considerably better than 'The Lord Of The Rings' in this regard and many of the Fantasies that follow it. Then there is Tyrfing, the black blade, the broken sword itself, a weapon of evil that howls like a demon, must drink blood once it's been drawn, and ultimately turns on its user. The influence on Michael Moorcock would be clear even if his endorsement wasn't on the cover of the latest printing.

The 1971 Sphere reprint has a beautiful cover, but includes the Bowdlerised text in which Anderson himself made his own book less awesome. Both Fantasy Masterworks editions happily restore the original 1954 text.

In the end, the gods manipulate elves, trolls and humans alike for their own means. Odin has been driving everything from the start, to fix Tyrfing and to breed Skafloc and Freda's son, whom he claims from Freda as a price for saving Skafloc, so that he can be a hero who will wield the dangerous sword for the gods. This ties into the book's main theme of fate. All the characters are up against hugely powerful forces, there is nothing for them to do but to choose how they will face them. Having left 'The Broken Sword' open for a sequel, Anderson never wrote it. But it's enough that he wrote this great book, one that we can be thankful for both its own merits and its influence on generations of Fantasy writers to come.

Big Sky Fanzine Issues 3 and 4 - SF Masterworks special - available now!

A special announcement. The e-fanzine Big Sky, edited by Pete Young, has just released a two-part special edition covering the complete Gollancz SF Masterworks series, a series that regular visitors to my blog will know that is very close to my heart, and featuring contributions from yours truly! The fanzine includes my reviews for Samuel R. Delany's 'Nova', Ursula K. Le Guin's 'The Left Hand Of Darkness', (both issue 3) T. J. Bass' 'Half Past Human', as well as reprinting my reviews of Robert Heinlein's 'Double Star' and John Crowley's 'The Deep', which originally appeared here on this blog. In addition it features reviews and commentary on the complete series by many other talented bloggers, writers and professional authors (Ian McDonald, Jo Walton, Scott Lynch, G. K. Chesterton and TIM POWERS!). Please do visit Big Sky's index page here and give them a read, there is a wealth of fantastic writing here. I would like to thank the editor Pete Young for giving me the opportunity to be a part of this project, and for his tireless work and enthusiasm in putting the whole enormous project together. I am pleased as punch, and incredibly honoured to have my work published in this fanzine, which really is a great read - check out issues 1 and 2, which I did not contribute to but which feature a wide range of interesting and informative articles from early Japanese SF to a detailed discussion of pulp. Thanks again Pete.

M. John Harrison - 'Viriconium' (1971-1985)

"Time is erosion: an icy wind blew constant abrasive streams of dust over the bare rock of the ridge: it had been blowing for a thousand years."

"'Viriconium', remarks Ansel Verdigris in his last ironic essay Allies, 'is a world trying to remember itself. The dumb stones perform an unending act of recall.'"

"Where the city is at its emptiest we find ourselves full."

"Viriconium is all the cities that have ever been."

Recently I was walking down Charing Cross Road with my father. I had studied in London for a year in 2011, but my father had grown up there in the 60s and 70s. As we walked down the road from bookshop to bookshop, he told me about the places he used to visit as a child and young man, and how much the city had changed. I realised in that moment how different my London and my father's London was. Cities, especially those with a rich history, are hyper-real, a conglomeration of history, legend, and different people's experiences and interpretations of them, all superimposed over the physical buildings and streets. M. John Harrison understands this, and this is what he explores vividly and evocatively in his Viriconium stories. Viriconium, as Audsley King  notes in 'In Viriconium', "is all the cities that have ever been", glorious, crumbling and decadent, situated in the vast decaying wastelands in the last days of the Earth. M. John Harrison wrote three novels about Viriconium, 'The Pastel City' (1971), 'A Storm Of Wings' (1980) and 'In Viriconium' (1982), plus a series of short stories collected in 'Viriconium Nights' (1985). Each of these is lyrical and powerful, though quite different. Taken together they make up a singular, haunting piece of work. Viriconium is so vividly realised it is almost a character itself. Like a real city, it is mutable, living and breathing. In defiance of Fantasy tradition, Harrison intentionally disrupts the continuity between stories. The very name of the city changes, characters and events in one story are reimagined as myths or legends in another. Viriconium is a palimpsest, constantly rewritten by the different perspectives, hopes, dreams and fears of its citizens. The differing interpretations and versions of the city serve to make it more lifelike, and make it all the harder to leave behind. I think it has become my new favourite book.
   I was originally intending to talk about each of the installments of the series individually, but seeing as so much of the power and effect is generated by the cross-talk of characters and themes between stories, I don't think that's an appropriate approach to talking about Viriconium. The edition I read is the 2000 Gollancz Fantasy Masterworks version - this is important as the sequence and even contents of the various Viriconium omnibuses has changed between versions. The Fantasy Masterworks edition is thoughtfully sequenced, with the three novels presented in sequence with the 'Viriconium Nights' stories interspersed throughout. It opens with 'Viriconium Knights', which previews the events of 'The Pastel City' as a legend and the hope of a better Viriconium for the people who live there. With its outlandish, almost grotesque characters with bizarre names and its vivid crumbling edifices, the Viriconium stories from the start bring to mind Mervin Peake's Gormenghast books, and its last days of Earth setting owes much to Jack Vance's Dying Earth series. It anticipates Gene Wolfe's 'The Book Of The New Sun' and Simon Ings' 'City Of The Iron Fish' both in its setting and the way it subverts traditional Fantasy tropes. And in its setting of a shifting, magical city beset by calamity it superficially resembles Samuel R. Delany's 'Dhalgren', another great favourite of mine. But really these comparisons do little more than hint at Viriconium's unique flavour; it simply isn't much like anything else, which is always of great value.
   'The Pastel City' and 'A Storm Of Wings' are both more plot-driven than the other Viriconium stories, and both feature the city under threat of invasion. In 'The Pastel City' the threat is an ancient weapon, merciless golems that steal people's brains, and in 'A Storm Of Wings' it is giant alien psychic wasps. In these stories it is most easy to see the influence of the more imaginative sword and sorcery stories that influenced it. However from the out they go against Fantasy convention. 'The Pastel City' is violent enough to stand next to anything Joe Abercrombie wrote. Its protagonist, tegeus-Cromis, likes to think of himself as a poet rather than a warrior, yet it is clear that the reason he is chosen for these tasks is because he is a supremely efficient killer. Over the course of the book he becomes more and more disillusioned with his role as a tool for violence, and in fact winds up missing out on the big climax. tegeus-Cromis' character arc finishes before the siege of the city and the confrontation with the rival Queen, so we don't get to see it, an incredibly bold narrative move that it's still difficult to imagine coming across in a Fantasy novel to this day. The world-weariness of the protagonist reflects the bruised and battered Earth, now a toxic wasteland largely uninhabitable thanks to the destructiveness and greed of humanity.

 The relationship of 'A Storm Of Wings' to 'The Pastel City' is interesting. It is more of a direct sequel than the other Viriconium stories, yet in some ways it is a retelling, recapitulating the themes and events of the original. Tomb the dwarf and Cellur the Lord of the Birds return from the previous book, but in an unusual move tegeus-Cromis has died in the intervening years, so he is replaced by Galen Hornwrack. Hornwrack is an assassin, dispossessed by the War of Two Queens from the previous book, and his selfishness and pissiness contrast directly with tegeus-Cromis' honour and dignity, yet he is required by Queen Methvet Nian and by the narrative to fulfill the role of tegeus-Cromis in the story. This he does but ultimately on his own terms. The alien invasion is used to explore the central theme of all the Viriconium stories, that the places we inhabit are a combination of the different perspectives of the people who live there. The perspective of the alien insects and of the humans is so radically different their two realities prove to be incompatible, with disastrous results for both. Outside of the city of Viriconium, travelling in the wasteland, stripped of the consensus reality provided by the perspective of their fellow humans, the characters start to forget who they are and to become archetypes. In this way the book explores the use of archetypes in Fantasy, something the genre strongly relies on but outside of, say, Michael Moorcock, generally doesn't comment on. The fate of airman Benedict Paucemanly anticipates that of several characters in Harrison's 'Empty Space'.

  In between 'The Pastel City' and 'A Storm Of Wings' the Fantasy Masterworks edition gives us the 'Viriconium Nights' short stories 'Lords Of Misrule' and 'Strange Great Sins'. The former cynically recontextualises tegeus-Cromis' role as a hero and Viriconium's role as an empire. The latter is the first appearance of the horse's skull, an image that would become a recurring motif throughout the Viriconium stories and again crop up in the shape of the Shrander in 'Light'. These recurring images provide a  thread that connects Viriconium to M. John Harrison's SF work. As in the Kefahuchi Tract trilogy, the Viriconium stories are built around strong and incisive character work, as well as our relationship with our past. If the characters in the Kefahuchi Tract trilogy are haunted by their past, the whole setting of Viriconium is haunted by the mistakes humanity made before it.
   Most of the rest of the 'Viriconium Nights' stories are placed between 'A Storm Of Wings' and 'In Viriconium'. 'The Dancer From The Dance' expands the story of the ballerina from 'Strange Great Sins' and reimagines 'A Storm Of Wings' as a local legend, or perhaps a suppressed psychic memory. Insects become another recurring Viriconium motif. 'The Luck In The Head', in which a woman wearing an insect mask convinces the protagonist to launch an assassination attempt on Mammy Vooley using what may be tegeus-Cromis' laser sword, works as a metaphor for the events of 'A Storm Of Wings' or converts the events of that story into a metaphor for it. Mammy Vooley, a fragile old woman whose delicate physical appearance is in direct opposition to her despotic power, appears as the Queen in the 'Viriconium Nights' stories, a fictionalisation of Margaret Thatcher and a direct opposite to the beautiful Methvet Nian, the Queen in 'The Pastel City' and 'A Storm Of Wings'. 'The Lamia & Lord Cromis' again reimagines tegeus-Cromis as distinctly less than heroic whilst providing him with a mythic foe. The overall effect of these shifting and contradictory interpretations of events and characters subverts SF and Fantasy's traditional overwhelming hunger for background details, world building and context whilst demonstrating how unnecessary they truly are. Viriconium gains vividness and power from all these shifting perspectives rather than losing them.

   'In Viriconium' is the last of the Viriconium novels, and more abstract than its predecessors. Based around the images of an imaginary tarot, the novel looks at the lives of the painters, artists and down-and-outs of the city as Viriconium is struck by an existential plague, brought about by the incarnation of its gods. In a brutal subversion of the Christ myth, the Barley brothers incarnate experience humanity by being humans at their absolute worst, a pair of drunken hooligans vomiting on the street and beating helpless victims. As the city collapses around him, the painter Ashlyme tries to save Audsley King from dying of the plague. He comes up against the Kafka-esque bureaucracy of the plague police, and has to deal with The Grand Cairo, the Barley brothers' dwarf. The Grand Cairo, who, like the dwarf in 'The Dancer From The Dance' was forced to become a dwarf by his parents keeping him in a restrictive box in order that he might have a lucrative circus career, mirrors the repression and resentment of Audsley King, who has become famous for the sublimated sexuality and violence of her paintings. The events of 'A Storm Of Wings' turn up again, this time as one of The Grand Cairo's ludicrous paranoid fantasies, and the aristocratic thugs of 'Viriconium Knights' reappear as struggling artists. The themes and images from the previous stories appear, perhaps at their most powerful here where the focus is more on the characters and setting rather than the plot, allowing the work as a whole more room to breathe. Like tegeus-Cromis back in 'The Pastel City', Ashlyme very much sees himself as an artist, but his major contribution to the plot is one of violence, a necessary act that frees Viriconium of its invaders whilst his attempt at rescue ends in farce, perhaps achieved with Galen Hornwrack's blade from 'A Storm Of Wings'.
   The collection ends with 'A Young Man's Journey To Viriconium'. Harrison has said that the series can be read in any order as long as the reader finishes with this one, and I can't imagine a more effective ending for the Viriconium stories. It is set in our world, and the protagonist discovers that two people from our world have travelled to Viriconium by entering a mirror in the bathroom of the Merrie England Cafe on New Street in Huddersfield. Though of course this gateway won't work for him. This final story explores why we need Fantasy, why we need Viriconium, whilst warning against exactly that. Viriconium, with all its manifest squalour, decadence and horrors, with its dream-like, shifting realities, the crumbling ancient beauty of the High City and the ramshackle slums of the Low City, is almost more vivid than the real world. Yet for its citizens caught within it and those in our reality haunted by glimpses of it, we are both forced to confront the reality that faces us. It is an appropriately haunting note to end on, and makes it all the harder for us to leave.
 

Joe Abercrombie: The First Law (2006-2008)

Here are all my reviews for Lord Grimdark's The First Law, one of the key trilogies of modern Fantasy, in one place:

Book One: 'The Blade Itself'

Book Two: 'Before They Are Hanged'

Book Three: 'Last Argument Of Kings' 

Joe Abercrombie: The First Law Book Three: Last Argument Of Kings (2008)

"Do you know what's worse than a villain? A villain who thinks he's a hero. A man like that, there's nothing he won't do, and he'll always find himself an excuse."

In 'Last Argument Of Kings', Joe Abercrombie brings The First Law Trilogy to a fittingly dramatic, action-packed and bloody end. As tends to be the case with modern Fantasy, 'The Blade Itself' and 'Before They Are Hanged' launched an intimidating number of plot juggling balls into the air, leaving the final book with a lot to successfully catch before the narrative winds up. Colonel West and the Union forces, allied with the rebel Northmen, have to face King Bethod, Logen Ninefingers must return to the North to take his vengeance against Bethod, Ferro continues her quest for vengeance against the Gurkish, Glokta is still trying to untangle the truth whilst serving both Arch Lector Sult and the sinister bank Valint and Balk, Jezal dan Luther is returning to Adua determined to try to be a better man, and Bayaz has to find a way to stop Khalul and his Eaters. All this is going on in the midst of increasing chaos, as all the members of the Closed Council scheme to find an heir to the king sympathetic to their best interests before he dies, while unbeknownst to all the Gurkish embark on their invasion of the Union. Whilst 'Last Argument Of Kings' is no slim volume, it's to Abercrombie's credit that he manages to tie all this up satisfyingly in the space of a single book. And he does so with drama, flair and style to spare. The final book features bloody battles galore, multiple sieges, the sacking of Adua by the invading Gurkish, and an incredible showdown between Logen Ninefingers and Fenris the Feared.
   However there's more to a satisfying ending than pyrotechnics and ensuring all the pieces wind up in the correct place. The true success of  'Last Argument Of Kings' is in the way that it brings into focus and drives home what the trilogy is really about. From the outset The First Law Trilogy has been all about the characters. Glokta, Jezal and Logen Ninefingers have been compelling protagonists from the start, but unusual due to just how vile Abercrombie is willing to make their actions. The question running through the whole series is whether any of these characters can actually be redeemed. Because we are invested in the characters, because they are deeply developed enough that we understand and sympathise with where they're coming from even as we disapprove of their choices, because their struggles with their consciences and their developing sense of morality is so human and believable, we very much want them to achieve redemption. However, wanting to be a better person and actually being a better person are two distinct things. Abercrombie's biggest trick is in making you root for these characters, and dangling redemption in front of them just enough so that you believe it could be possible, before revealing just how beyond redemption any of these characters actually are.
   One of the reasons this works so well is Abercrombie's use of the multiple third person viewpoint. This mode is generally the standard for Fantasy, with different viewpoint characters used to provide different perspectives on the imaginary world, but what sets Abercrombie aside is just how good he is at using it to tell us about the character whose eyes we are seeing out of. Each of the viewpoint characters in The Third Law trilogy has massive blindspots in how they perceive themselves versus how others perceive them, which they are forced to confront in 'Last Argument Of Kings'. At the end of the day, despite their world-weary cynicism, both Glokta and Logen Ninefingers would like to believe that they are nicer people than they actually are. So Glokta can be genuinely surprised when both of his loyal practicals betray him, Severard to Valint and Balk and Frost to Sult, despite the fact that on some level he does realise that he is, as Ardee describes him with typical frankness, a self-pitying villain. Similarly Logen can be horrified that the infamously barking Crummock-i-Phail uses him to get rid of Bethod but wants nothing further to do with him afterwards, or that the Dogman runs out of patience with him after he kills Tul Duru, Crummock-i-Phail's son and nearly the Dogman himself in his battle rage. Likewise Jezal's attempt to stand up against Bayaz fails miserably because Bayaz knows that, despite all his character development, Jezal is still a coward at heart.
   The interesting thing is that facing their failings doesn't make any of them better people. One of the main themes of the trilogy is the unfairness of life, especially in the feudalistic hierarchy that is the default setting for most Fantasy. Logen and Glokta have experienced much of life's unfairness first hand, and in the figures of Bethod and Sult respectively have a shadow archetype, a version of themselves at the head of the repressive and violent system that they claim to despise. Both Logen and Glokta are able to overthrow their shadow doubles, but both of them wind up taking their place, rather than using the opportunity to dismantle an oppressive system. For all Logen's disgust at Bethod for the very concept of being the King of the North, Logen becomes the King of the Northmen himself once he has killed Bethod. And after arresting Sult, Glokta becomes Arch Lector himself, upholding the institution of the Inquisition and treating his new subordinates just as brutally as Sult treated him. All their rhetoric for change and a better, less violent way of life is revealed to be hypocrisy, as once they are in the seat of power neither man behaves any differently from his despised predecessor. Jezal returns to Adua with a genuine hope to be a better person, and it looks like he might finally get the chance to do so when he is elected the new king, thanks to the manipulations of Bayaz. But King Jezal I is a puppet king with very little power of his own, put in place by Bayaz to continue the mage's centuries-long control over the Union, and his cowardice ensures that he will not act against Bayaz's will to make any positive changes for the people of the Union.
   The reveal that Bayaz is a manipulative jerk is not really surprising, but the sheer extent of how awful he is kind of is. The leader of Valint and Balk, Bayaz has been the puppet master running the Union ever since it was founded, and is happy to keep all its oppressive social machinery in place in order to ensure that he stays in power. He has lived so long that any possible empathy he might feel for people has been worn away, our mayfly-like existence meaning nothing to him. The eponymous First Law, as Bayaz sees it, is not about not touching the other side, but power. His argument with Khalul is less that he has broken the Second Law by eating human flesh to gain powers, but more that Khalul wants to bring Bayaz to justice for murdering Juvens. The mass civilian death caused by his unleashing the power of the Seed, and his utter indifference to it, shows exactly how little human life is worth to him.
   Interestingly enough, our three major characters kind of get what looks like your standard Fantasy happy ending, very much in the spirit that life is unfair, as none of them deserve it. Inquisitor Glokta winds up married to Ardee, who is devoted to helping him, and Logen and Jezal wind up as kings. However all three characters have faced too clearly the hollowness of their own existence; they all realise that redemption is beyond them, and that they are puppets of Bayaz, however much they personally may profit from it. Near the end of the book, Glokta and Jezal share a walk in the Agriont gardens, and agree to try and do as much good as they can in their positions of power without inciting Bayaz's wrath, right after Gokta has blackmailed Jezal's wife the Queen into sleeping with him by kidnapping her lesbian lover. The sheer sickening hypocrisy shows exactly how far these characters are from doing good. In this book we finally get the answers to Logen's and Glokta's mantras. Logen's father always followed his motto, 'You have to be realistic,' with the observation that Logen is anything but. And the reason that Glokta tortures is, ultimately, that he gets a kick out of it.
  The quote at the top of the page, said by Black Dow to Logen Ninefingers at the end of the book, is an apt summary of the entire trilogy. To some extent, it describes pretty much every character in the book. From Bayaz with his grandiose talk of saving the world to Ferro with her tragic back story she uses to justify her blood lust, to Glokta, Logen and Jezal and the lies they tell themselves so they can live with the things they do, everyone in the First Law Trilogy has some excuse or reason for all the horrific things they do. 'Last Argument Of Kings' strips away the excuses to reveal their corrupt moral centres. An argument frequently trotted out as to why genre fiction is not as mature as literary fiction is that genre fiction does not acknowledge the banality of evil; the SS officer who commits atrocities then goes home to have dinner with his wife and children. And indeed the evil we encounter in the real world does not manifest as a flaming eye atop a dark tower. Evil is committed by people, some of whom may be charming or likable, some of whom may see themselves as family men, most of whom either have reasons or excuses for the horrific things they do, lies they tell themselves so that they can sleep at night when they go home to their families. This is exactly what The First Law Trilogy is about.