Review: The Heroes by Joe Abercrombie
By Angela Roberts
September 5, 2011
If you haven’t been reading Joe Abercrombie’s work, you’re either not into fantasy or you’ve been living under a rock for the past few years. (Or you’re someone with a lot of stuff to read, I suppose, but still, this author ought to be on your list.) Abercrombie has quickly been establishing himself as a leading voice in British fantasy with his gritty bloody secondary-world fantasy novels. He’s gone in five novels from a writer I discovered in the bargain bin to receiving acclaim from sources as diverse as The Times, Publishers Weekly, and Interzone. And he’s done it, in many ways, by bending every rule he could think of. He started with a trilogy, his fantastic First Law trilogy; then went into standalones, with first the awesome Best Served Cold and most recently, The Heroes. His books are connected, they all take place within a shared world, but he seems to make a point of changing protagonists with each story. He uses multiple viewpoints and writes in deep third person limited. His books are incredibly hard to define in terms of genre. His work is epic fantasy told through the eyes of the regular guy, it’s sword and sorcery but with hardly any magic, it’s historical fantasy set in a secondary-world setting, it’s a lot of things. It must really frustrate the marketing department. He subverts nearly every expectation. And his characters are rarely heroic, never really good, but always sympathetic. There are definitely no heroes in Abercrombie’s fictional world.
One nice thing about Abercrombie’s books is that you don’t really need to have read his previous books to enjoy his present one; it just enriches the experience. Even if you never read any of his other books, you’d still understand what’s going on in The Heroes. The novel, essentially, chronicles a three-day massive battle between two of Abercrombie’s fictional nations, the Union and the North. The story is told through three main protagonists; Bremer dan Gorst, the Union King’s disgraced Royal Observer, Prince Calder, the younger son of the deceased King of the North who’s famed for being a lover more than a fighter and for being a schemer, and Curnden Craw, a veteran Northern warrior who’s known for being one of the few truly honest men left. Add to these three several secondary characters as focalizers, and you end up with a rich complex tapestry that Abercrombie weaves together. Each of these people faces challenges that cause them to struggle with their very beings. Some find redemption of a sort, some plunge down the rabbit hole, some struggle to get out. It’s a bloody three-day war, filled with realistic advances and reverses, and no one leaves unscathed.
The historical basis for Abercrombie’s fictional world is obvious from the first book; the North is Scandinavia, the Union is probably the Holy Roman Empire, Styria (the setting of Best Served Cold and spoiler! just might be the setting of the next novel) is Italy, and the Gurkish are most obviously the Turks. For time period, he seems to draw upon the late middle ages/early renaissance; that period right when Europe was just figuring out the uses of gunpowder and the benefits of standing armies. At first, you might find this in-your-face use of European history as a bit of a drag; after all, if he’s going to be so original and genre-bending, why go for the stereotypical cliché European-inspired fantasy? Well, for one, because he does it so damn well. It is a huge element of his genre-bending style; his work reads like historical fantasy but in a secondary-world setting, as I said above. And it just works, because he has the writing chops to create compelling human drama out of these obvious references. And certainly what helps him stave off the really dangerous Eurocentric clichés is the beautiful moral ambiguity that he infuses every page with. There are no good guys in his novels, not even those you think are the good guys; consequently, there are no real bad guys either. There are perhaps characters that the author favors, but he always makes sure to keep everyone completely human. That’s how these books manage to work.
You might also say about Abercrombie’s novels: they’re all blood and battle and men – they’re for boys. It’s true; not all women would appreciate all of the content. And he does write primarily about men and men’s concerns and the interaction between men. But Abercrombie also has a talent for creating at least one really awesome female character per novel. They’re not just tough and smart, they’re women. They struggle with the same moral concerns that the men do, but with the added pressure of living in a man’s world and operating from within that sphere. In this novel, the female character that really stands out and gets her own character arc is Finree, the daughter of Lord Marshal Kroy and ambitious wife of a young army officer who she knows is the opposite in morality to her. She, like all of these characters, grows considerably over the three long days of this war.
Abercrombie spends a good deal of time on world-building and on structure, it’s clear to see. But he has a great ability for not letting it show; like his manipulative wizard, Bayaz, he’s working behind the scenes, constructing and controlling a vast political landscape. The secret, of course, is in making the political human, in crafting characters that are, in many ways, despicable, yet utterly sympathetic for the reader. That’s the hook that keeps you reading.
Plus, I’ll admit I keep hoping that Abercrombie will finally give Bayaz his comeuppance.
Find out more about Joe Abercrombie on the author's website.