The Blade Itself

I came to The Blade Itself late, after every friend with a fantasy shelf told me I had to. The standard pitch is that Abercrombie reinvented the genre in a darker, more morally complicated direction, and that is true, but the standard pitch undersells the book's real magic, which is the dialogue. Almost every chapter contains at least one exchange so sharp you read it twice.

The cast is the engine. Logen Ninefingers is the barbarian who has run out of people to kill and would very much like to stop. Glokta is a torturer with a ruined body and a worse conscience, and somehow he is the most magnetic character in modern fantasy. Jezal dan Luthar is a vain little aristocrat being slowly forced to become a person. None of them are who they pretend to be, including to themselves.

The plot, in classic first-book-of-a-trilogy fashion, is mostly setup. Things happen, the world widens, magic shows up in glimpses, and then it ends without much resolved. That bothered me less than I expected. The pleasure of the book is being in these heads, not racing to a finish.

If you want fantasy that takes its violence seriously and its banter even more seriously, this is the one. Five stars, with the warning that you will absolutely have to read the next two.