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Joe Abercrombie, Violently Funny

saad j hossian
Joe Abercrombie hasn't invented any new worlds. His First Law series, consisting of six novels and some short stories, are set in a world suspiciously like our own. He hasn't coined any nifty genre spanning terms. He hasn't created any alien races or systems of magic. He hasn't even tried his hand at a dialect of Elvish. Clearly he's a lightweight.
The thing is, Abercrombie is hysterically funny and marvelously violent. He straddles the fine line between complete satire and completely serious fantasy. This combination is somehow irresistible, and I found myself wolfing down his entire output in one go. Now I’m always trawling the bookshelves for something new from him. I've even contemplated buying hardcover!
I might have given the impression
that Abercrombie is a bit of a hack, but the truth is, he's actually at the forefront of a new breed of fantasy writers, where the kings, mages, princes are all replaced by dirty thieving murderers who stumble around doing crappy things and sometimes affecting the course of destiny by accident. The sweeping epic balladic stories of 'good vs evil' are slowly being subverted to 'slightly bad vs really evil'. Pretty soon it will just be'them vs us'.
This upending of cliches and a focus on realism is giving us a new depth to fantasy, and attracting perhaps more talented authors to the genre, who would otherwise disdain the formulaic writing. With any kind of genre fiction there is a danger of falling into assembly line writing, and for authors who have made a name there must be a temptation to
just churn out books. I'm all in favour of populist writing, and originality might be low down the list for a reader who simply wants something comforting and familiar. Abercrombie's financial success, however, shows that there is room for something sophisticated.
Abercrombie starts off with something familiar, but his brutal humour and insane characters actually land us very far off the reservation. By the end of the first three books, I was actually cheering for a crippled torturer and a nine fingered mass murderer. The really refreshing thing here is that there aren't actually any heroes. None. There isn't a single person with a halo on his head. Everyone is a bastard, and without any moral imperative, we are left to simply enjoy the hysterically funny prose of despicable people cutting
each other up. He gives us villains against villains, and forces us to root for them. As an aficionado of villains, I'm impressed.
Abercrombie's crowning glory is Logen Ninefingers, easily one of the best characters in fantasy today. He's a Norse berserker with a heart of gold, except when the battle madness comes, he stops differentiating between friend and foe, and typically ends up killing everyone. It's Ninefingers' fault that the entire North is constantly at war, because everyone has a vendetta against him. No situation is too dire that Ninefingers cannot make it worse. His last name is Ninefingers. What's not to love?
Saad Z. Hossain is an entrepreneur and author of "Baghdad Immortals". He is currently working on his second novel.