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| The Heroes |
As advertised, The Heroes, by Joe Abercrombie, returns us to his First Law world to witness a three day battle between viking-like Northerners and vaguely Anglo-German Unionists from the perspectives of everyone from lowly raw recruits, to the King’s Observer, to an army wife, to a prince. We see everything from the initial skirmishes to the peace talks at the end. Even though it’s a fantasy novel, a genre often dismissed as pulp, this book could teach an attentive reader about the bloody futility of war.
The battle takes place in a valley with little strategic importance. It just happens to be where to the two combatants fetched up when the leaders decided to stop dithering and start fighting. Over three days, we watch as land is taken and re-taken, characters die messily, and the leadership make mistakes. There are some jingoistic stereotypes here, but it didn’t take away from my experience of the book. The characters whose viewpoints we do see are fully fleshed out characters. We learn their histories, their motivations. We get to feel a taste of their terror as they take their place at shield walls or participate in charges.
One of the things I very much enjoyed about reading this book was watching how small events and mistakes could completely change the outcome of a battle. I could not help but think of the old bit of doggerel: for want of a shoe a horse was lost, for want of a horse the rider was lost, for want of a rider the battle was lost. Messages go lost, preventing attacks. Trickery is used, causing panicked retreats and colossal casualties. Even though there is leadership in place, large parts of this book read like chaos theory in action.
Last year I read Abercrombie’s Best Served Cold, a terrific revenge story. In that book and in this one, readers see that there is a larger not-so-cold-warish conflict going on. I want to read the first trilogy to see if there are more clues about what’s going on, who is fighting, and why. But Abercrombie lets the mysteries stand. I don’t pretend to know why, but I will say that it gives the world depth, a sense of history. I love books where you know that the world will go on even after you run out of pages. In The Heroes, there’s so much politicking that you know the armies will end up fighting again.
The Heroes is utterly gripping. Even though it’s over 500 pages, they flew by. I’d sit down to read and the next thing I knew, it would be an hour later and I’d be another 100 pages in. I just had to know what was going to happen next.