A Little Hatred by Joe Abercrombie

Another book review here, and another sequel to a well-loved fantasy trilogy from decades past. This time it's A Little Hatred by Joe Abercrombie, his first foray into the world of the First Law since Red Country, and his first trilogy in that world since Last Argument of Kings, the book that wrapped up that trilogy. Another similarity to Empire of Grass and the Lost King of Osten Ard trilogy is that this book picks up around thirty years after the previous trilogy ended, allowing readers to catch up with the characters from the previous books, as well as their offspring.

Unlike Tad Williams's trilogy, I haven't re-read the First Law, or the three standalone novels Abercrombie wrote after those (Best Served Cold, The Heroes and Red Country). This shouldn't imply any judgement on the quality, incidentally - Memory Sorrow and Thorn may rank as one of my favorite series ever, but I've long extolled the virtues of Joe Abercrombie, and I've eagerly snapped up every one of his books as they've come out, apart from the short story collection Sharp Ends.

The reason I bring it up, though, is that this lack of familiarity affected my reading of the book, to an extent. The First Law trilogy can be thought of as analogous to the original Star Wars trilogy, while the three standalones are like Rogue One, Solo and the Mandalorian - outrigger novels that take place in the same world but don't exactly advance the plot or require much prior knowledge. Rather, these more recent books allowed Abercrombie to shift pieces around to prepare for this latest trilogy, entitled The Age of Madness.

However, by not re-reading the previous books I'm a little at sea about who certain characters are. There are callbacks to The Heroes or Best Served Cold, but I'm left wondering if most of the characters whose POVs I'm reading were in those earlier ones (other than Caul Shivers, of course). If you're getting ready to read A Little Hatred, I'd recommend skimming through the previous ones.

Fitting for a writer who epitomizes the "grimdark" sub-genre, to the extent that his Twitter handle is Lord Grimdark (even if he's a little bemused by all the fuss and the epithet attaching to him), the book starts out dark. There's violence, swearing, dodgy sex scenes - everything that characterized his previous books, so if that's what you're after you'll be pleased. It started out a little tough to read, perhaps because I knew I'd be lending my copy to my dad after I finished, but as the book goes on the plot takes shape, allowing Abercrombie to go into more than eviscerations and heads being crushed (lots of those, btw).

Other reviewers have singled out the setting, so I'll do that too, and note that it's fun to see a sort of industrial revolution type of backdrop. The wizard Bayaz, central to the First Law, seems to be involved in a great leap forward to an industrial society and the resulting human misery. This is another area where Abercrombie pulls no punches, depicting not only the horrors of completely untrammeled capitalism but also the madness of the uprising that occurs when one city's workers are pushed too far.

Ignoring the speed with which his secondary world moves from invading "vikings" to dark satanic mills, it allows Abercrombie to tell a story that feels a lot more relevant to the world we're living in than one where we're expected to continue rooting for hereditary government and the divine right of kings. I'd even go so far as to say that perhaps this is a story only a British writer (and a northern English one, at that) could write, since the excesses of the industrial revolution are ingrained into the British soul much more than they are here in the US.

I called Empire of Grass an almost perfect sequel, since it expanded upon the previous trilogy in intriguing ways. It's maybe a little early to say whether The Age of Madness does the same, because I've read just one of the books so far, compared with the two from Tad Williams. It is however, a very good re-entry to the world of the First Law - I may have felt a bit at sea with identifying the characters, but that also made it a good introduction for completely new readers, and the really important stuff is alluded to in ways that make me remember what happened before.

More to the point, there's the feeling of a great big world that Abercrombie can't wait to introduce us to, when we get to Book 2 and Book 3. I just hope we'll get to find out more about what's going on with Bayaz and the infernal bankers of Valint and Balk.

The other thing I'd like to point to is the characterizations. None of the main POV characters is completely great, but nor are they completely awful. Savine dan Glokta's reaction to the uprising is not shocking or overly cliche, and Crown Prince Orso's motivations when he's sent to deal with the uprising are fascinating - he'll be a fun character to watch as we get to the sequels.

I've said it before and I'll say it again: Joe Abercrombie is probably one of the best stylists in fantasy fiction at the moment. If he's not quite as lyrical as Guy Gavriel Kay or Neil Gaiman, he's certainly one of the best at putting you in the scene. That it's rarely a pleasant scene is beside the point - we'd be lucky if half the writers of fantasy were as good as him.