lia-tam

Another excellent novel from Abercrombie, set in the same universe as his First Law trilogy and very similar in style and tone to those books. That would be my only criticism: that his work is starting to feel a bit repetitive. It’s such good stuff, though, that I can hardly object. This tells the story of a three-day battle between the Union and the Northmen. There are several familiar faces but the point-of-view characters are mostly new, with the exception of Bremer dan Gorst, who’s one of the most compelling. The characterizations are what I enjoy most about Abercrombie’s work, but I continue to be impressed by the vivid battle scenes. I particularly liked a couple of isolated sequences where the point of view jumps from a soldier who’s just been killed to the one who struck the fatal blow, and then to the man who strikes him down in turn, and so on. Abercrombie carries on with his cynical, nearly fatalistic themes. The book’s title can refer to a circle of standing stones called The Heroes, but there is much discussion of the nature of heroes in general and of the pointlessness and inevitability of war. While I can easily keep the characters straight in each book, I’m beginning to have trouble keeping track of all the Named Men over the whole series. I remember that the Bloody-Nine thought you had to be realistic; that Shivers was trying to be a better man; and now Craw wants to do the right thing. But the Dogman and Black Dow and some of the others are starting to run together. In this book I admit to being disappointed in Finree, the soldier’s wife who is described as “venomously ambitious”, but I'm not so sure about the “venomously” part. Her thought processes didn’t seem to sync with her actions, and I didn’t find her a believable character. Overall I liked this more than Best Served Cold, and I look forward to his new book: Red Country, which is supposed to be written in the style of a Western.

2023-06-21 12:41