This was another of my Hay-on-Wye One Pound Bargains (the first being, of course, Locke Lamora) except it's been gathering dust under my bed for the past six months. What can I say, the cover was a bit lame and the blurb on the back made it sound a bit generic and, let's face it, it was available in bulk via an outlet booksellers on the Welsh Border for less than my breakfast croissant so how good could it be? Well I'm pretty much kicking myself for the delay because the answer is bloody good actually. Bloody bloody good. Possibly the best fantasy I've read for a very very long time.

Into a cocked hat with you, Mr Locke Lamora. This is the Real Deal.

The Blade Itself, which is the first part of a trilogy because fantasy cannot be anything else although it gets points from me by not being a fucking septology, has three main protagonists, and the story unfolds through each of their perspectives. They are: Captain Jezel dan Luthar, a shallow and feckless swordsman in the King's Own, Logen Ninefingers, a battle-weary barbarian and Sand dan Glokta, a crippled and bitter Inquisitor who was horribly tortured during the war. So much so GRRM I know, but here it really really works. The POV switching is deft and absorbing and there's a genuine difference in narration and perception between the three characters - Glokta's sections are dominated by his sarcastic interior monologue and Jezel's actually seem to pout and whinge at you:

He had always assumed that everybody loved him, had never really had cause to doubt he was a fine man, worthy of the highest respect. But Ardee didn't like him, he saw it now, and that made him think. Apart from the jaw, of course, and the money and the clothes, what was there to like?

The stories interweave but only occasionally overlap; however the fleeting opportunities to see a character you've grown familiar with through the eyes of another are fascinating and serve to deepen your understanding of both characters in a quite subtle ways. It's also a world-building winner because knowledge of the world (which seems quite detailed but, thankfully, is never presented in those indigestible chunks so popular with fantasy writers) filters down to you gradually through the different character's responses and preoccupations. When you first see the city the other characters inhabit through the eyes of the barbarian, for example, it's startling and arresting and gives you a whole new insight into something you've pretty much taken for granted throughout the book so far. If Abercrombie's technique can be faulted at all (and I hate myself for even mentioning it), it's that he's presented his three protagonists so effectively that his occasional deviations into other characters (and to be fair, these are rare) seem jarring and I often found myself skimming in order to get back to the people I cared about as quickly as possible.

The secondary cast consist of a finely tuned assortment of the types of people you might expect to find in this kind of book: a man of common birth striving for advancement and recognition in the King's Own, a scheming Arch-Inquisitor, a cantankerous old man who may or may not be (but probably is) the all-powerful First of the Magi, a feral slavegirl, grasping nobles, pretentious officers and corrupt officials. The world they inhabit is dark and gritty (typical low fantasy fare in fact): the book is set in the Union, a sprawling confederacy of disparate countries (presumably an analogue to Europe) united under a, in this case, completely weak and hopeless King and a parliament of hereditary, bickering nobles. The Blade Itself concentrates mainly on establishing its characters and their position within the larger events taking place on the fringes of their awareness: there's clearly going to be A Big War although the details are as hazy to the reader as they are to the characters. Bethod, ruthless Barbarian king cementing power in The North, the Emperor Uthman al-Dosht eyeing up The East.

I think this may be The Blade Itself's only arguable weakness: it's pretty much a 400 page prologue. There is a sense of a gathering storm but there's very little elucidation of the over-arcing plot, which I presume will focus on the Big War through the eyes of the individuals caught up within it. This is not to say the book is devoid of excitement or tension, it's just that if you want to get into the thick of things straight away ... well ... why the hell are you reading fantasy trilogies? It may be a slow build but it it's so damnably well done that it's a pay off all on its own and I found myself so absorbed by the characters that I didn't care it was primarily set up for the books to come.

The other thing to note here is that my crude summary in no way does the book justice. Its generic premise and easily recognisable fantasy world are actually strengths: Abercrombie manipulates the usual fantasy tropes so skilfully that the book is both a delicate riff on the epic fantasy genre itself and an epic fantasy masterpiece in its own right. Its sly playfulness is one of the (many) pleasures of the book:

"How's the book?" asked Jezal.

"The Fall of the Master Maker, in three volumes. They say it's one of the great classics ... Full of wise Magi, stern knights with mighty swords and ladies with mightier bosoms. Magic, violence and romance, in equal measure. Utter shit."

To some extent it reminds me of The Lies of Locke Lamora but only because they both seem to share a similar self-referentiality when it comes to the mainstays and expectations of the genre, and a healthy affection for the word fuck. If I was feeling momentous I'd dub it post-modern fantasy. But actually I think Abercrombie is better, particularly because he has a fine ear for dialogue and, although there are plenty of irreverent fast-talkers to be found within, it is at the very least possible to distinguish between them. His characters are complex, complicated and far from sympathetic but nevertheless they feel utterly and convincingly human. Jezal may be a shallow and selfish waste of space but you applaud his occasional moments of heroism. Glokta tortures people for a living and yet still you root for him. And although Logen, the thinking man's barbarian, was initially the least interesting of the three to me, after a while I really came to appreciate Abecrombie's take on this fantasy staple. Logen is a killer exhausted with killing, living in a world that has no other use for him:

He could have bragged and boasted, and listed the actions he'd been in, the Named Men he'd killed. He couldn't say now when the pride had dried up. It had happened slowly. As the wars became bloodier, as the causes became excuses, as the friends went back to the mud, one by one.

"I've fought in three campaigns," he began. "In seven pitched ballets. In countless raids and skirmishes and desperate defences, and bloody actions of every kind. I've fought in the middle of the driving snow, the blasting wind, the middle of the night. I've been fighting all my life, one enemy or another, one friend or another. I've known little else. I've seen men killed for a word, for a look, for nothing at all. A woman tried to stab me once for killing her husband, and I threw her down a well. And that's far from the worst of it. Life used to be cheap as dirt to me. Cheaper.

I've fought ten single combats, and I won them all, but I fought on the wrong side and for all the wrong reasons. I've been ruthless and brutal, and a coward. I've stabbed men in the back, burned them, drowned them, crushed them with rocks, killed them asleep, unarmed, or running away. I've run away myself more than once. I've pissed myself with fear. I've begged for my life. I've been wounded, often, and badly, and screamed and cried like a baby whose mother took her tit away. I've no doubt the world would be a better place if I'd been killed years ago, but I haven't been and I don't know why."

Logen, if anything and unlikely as it sounds, is (at the moment at least) the moral centre of the book. Although his battle cry is "I'm still alive" his life of violence has led him to a point where mere survival is no longer sufficient and the decisions he makes over the course of the book are based on an emergent, personal moral code. For the battle weary Logen, fighting has become something he will no long do out of necessity or for profit: he is fighting for a cause. Jezel, by contrast, in training for the fencing Contest, fights for glory and even then he only really puts any effort in because he wants to impress a girl. And Glokta, who does terrible things to people over the course of the book and knowingly allows himself to be used as a tool by the ambitious Arch Lector Sult, too physically and emotionally broken to really take any pleasure in survival at all, has no idea what motivates him to do the things he does.

That same question came into his head, over and over, and he still had no answer.

Why do I do this?

Why?

Glokta is most certainly the most difficult character in the book. Really, he can be thought of as a little more than a villain but the agony of his day to day life is described in such detail, and with such bitter wit, that it's very hard not to feel sympathetic towards him. However, although he's a fantastic character, I cannot help but wonder if his portrayal is entirely successful. The fact of the matter is, he kills and hurts people without remorse or regret and yet it's remarkably easy to forget it as you get drawn into the story. You might say this is yet another strength of the characterisation but I think that if you are going to find yourself responding positively to a character who is a torturer then you have to be able to do so with full knowledge of what that character is capable of doing. You might also say that this is a problem with me as a reader and that I shouldn't need to see constant and gruesome teeth-extraction scenes to remind me that somebody is a Bad Man but I actually suspect it's something to do with the nature of fiction itself (yeah, heaven forefend it was me).

Seriously though, and with all due self-irony, it's easy to forget - especially when it comes to fantasy where getting completely subsumed in the world is an expected part of the reading process (or "fun" if you're feeling generous) - the artificiality of fiction. We do not, however we might wish to pretend otherwise, respond to fictional people and situations as if they were real. We do not grieve for the fictional dead. We don't care about the billions of lives lost on Alderan, we just think it's really damn cool and evil that a whole planet got blown up by Darth Vader. Similarly, the people Glokta tortures have no narrative presence of their own. Therefore, it's hard to care that horrible, horrible things happen to them and it's hard to condemn Glokta for perpetrating the horrible horrible things. The issue here is not about morality it's about narrative: it's not whether or not the reader should be able to forgive Glotka for his unforgivable actions, it's why they should be so easy to forget.

But to bring this back to where it's supposed to be: The Blade Itself is an exceptionally accomplished and, indeed brilliant, debut. I can't recommend it highly enough.

Just one more thing: Fantasy Rape Watch

Women raped: 0

Somebody give the man a big gold star.

A brief aside on the subject of women in The Blade Itself since it's something that seems to be preoccupying us here at Fb: women tend to be peripheral to the novel as a whole. However, given the world, this seems entirely appropriate. The few female characters who do have parts to play are well-written, interesting and can hold their own against the men. None of them get their pale breasts fondled by rough barbarian hands. Win!