Praise For ‘Red Country’ & The ‘First Law’ World

There’s no contemporary author more honest with their characters than Joe Abercrombie. That was my first thought after finishing Red Country, the standalone sequel book that sees Logen Ninefingers, the lead character in Joe Abercrombie’s First Law trilogy, relegated to a supporting role where he’s made to seem like a terrifying monstrosity; a demon lurking in the shadows, bearing a sinister laugh and an unquenchable thirst for blood.

Logen has always been a bad man who’s done bad things, yet always seems inches away from becoming the traditional fantasy hero, if only he could escape his need for ruthless violence and follow through with his desire to be better, to be more just. It’s easy to see the goodness in him, Abercrombie loves to tease it, but Logen Ninefingers is doomed to come up short, always inches away from making the right choice or saying the right words. The simple struggle for Logen is that the situations he faces are never as simple as his desire to divide good and evil, and he loses control in that chaos.

Nine out of ten authors would fall in love with the good side of Logen, maybe even give him something of a redemption arc. Not Joe Abercrombie. Abercrombie commits to the reality of his characters. In Red Country, the cycle of blood leads Logen to fall so short that he spends much of the Third Act as an unwavering terror killing everyone in his path, before riding off into oblivion to reckon with what he’s done.

I’ve begun describing The First Law as naturalistic fantasy. There’s a plot, but it’s not as consequential as “Let’s bring the One Ring to the volcano.” The real focus is the characters. Chapters are filled with conversations, extensive sequences of dialogue where characters like Nicomo Cosca, Monza Murcatto, or even Crown Prince Ladisla reveal everything you need to know about them without a single word of expository emotion. Joe Abercrombie has built a world so authentic and characters so candid that reading their words is like listening to a conversation between actual people, a quality one wouldn’t find in The Lord of the Rings, The Wheel of Time, or any Brandon Sanderson book.

I’m bothered by the fiction analysis trend that conflates complexity with moral ambiguity, as if a human being could be simplified to the characteristics of yin and yang. Many fantasy authors write characters who are capable of great good and great evil, but Joe Abercrombie is the only one I’ve read to write personalities that are simply human, admitting that actions don’t simply fall under the categories of good and evil, but that a character can be pushed and pulled by any feeling at any time: from lust to hate, from envy to love, from pride to anxiety, etc.