Damn you, Joe Abercrombie, damn you. I was fully intending to wait until Best Served Cold came out in paperback but I made the mistake of “perusing” it in Borders coffee shop while waiting for a friend. Well, one thing led to another and, what can I say, less than an hour later I'd bought the thing. My attitude to Joe Abercrombie is probably best described as ambiguous; I found The First Law trilogy exciting but also frustrating and ultimately, I ditheringly concluded, unsatisfying. As with The First Law trilogy, I started Best Served Cold in a paroxysm of wild enthusiasm that got more and more complicated as the book progressed. By the end I wasn’t entirely sure what I thought, although the fact I got there at the speed I did proves one thing at least: the man can write a gripping story. And, even though I have yet to fully establish whether I actually like what he writes, I’m still hopelessly intrigued by his books.

Best Served Cold is one of those rare, under-appreciated jewels: a fantasy one shot. It’s also, as the title indicates, a revenge-tale, with all the attendant heritage. The heroine is a member of a deadly assassin squad but when she tries to leave the group, their leader finds her and shoots her. But she doesn’t die, she just goes into a coma and when she wakes up she vows to get even on all the people who tried to murder her … oh wait that’s something else. Let me try again. The heroine is the leader of a mercenary army but when she gets too powerful, the man she is working for arranges to have her murdered. But she doesn’t die, she just horribly scarred and broken and when she wakes up she vows to get even on all the people who tried to murder her.

Okay, my plot summary is now unhelpfully crap because I wanted to make a cheap point about revenge stories. The heroine is called Monzcarro (Monza) Murcatto. Her nemesis is Grand Duke Orso, although her hit list totals an ambitious seven, all of whom were in some way involved in the brutal attempt on her life that led to the death of her beloved brother. Along way to vengeance she assembles the expected motley crew, a distinctly unmagnificent seven. What starts out a relatively simple slaughterfest soon spirals out of control in a way that cannot fail to affect not only those caught up its immediate vicinity but a battle-torn kingdom. The cast encompasses some familiar faces from the First Law trilogy, the Northman Caul Shivers, Glokta’s assistant Vitari, and, of course, the famed soldier of fortune, Nicomo Cosca, but they’re joined by an array of new and original misfits, including Morveer the self-proclaimed master poisoner, his pretty assistant Day and Friendly, the number-obsessed, borderline autistic murderer.

The main problem with revenge stories is that you have to suspend your disbelief over the premise itself. So you have this Duke, right. Who’s so totally ruthless he spent the last eight years subduing Styria so he can be King on’t. Who’s so totally ruthless he’s willing to murder his Captain General for fear of betrayal. Who’s so totally ruthless he gets five guys to carry it out while he and a random banker look on. But who’s not quite ruthless enough to ensure he’s done the deed probably before flinging the body down a cliff.

As Dan would say, that’s a very specific level of ruthlessness.

If that doesn’t bug the crap out of you from the get go, I suspect you’ll do all right with Best Served Cold.

It should go without saying but: there’s gonna be spoilers okay but nothing too catastrophic

Like The First Law trilogy, there’s an extent to which Best Served Cold is an act of deconstruction, aimed both at the fantasy genre and at the tropes of the revenge plot as well. One of Abercrombie’s strengths was a writer is the way he constantly forces his reader to evaluate her own expectations by refusing to fulfill them. Best Served Cold, which is presented in a rather episodic way, is a succession of misdirections and wrong-turnings. This is reflected in the chaotic way the events unfold, repeatedly defying even the most meticulous planning, and in the flawed, inadequate interactions of the characters, for example the spiraling tension between Morveer and his assistant, and the abortive love affair between Monza and Shivers. Revenge piles upon revenge, betrayal upon betrayal, and the personal and the political become hopelessly entangled. The problem, however, with the revenge story is that, deconstructed or not, Abercrombie doesn’t seem to have much to say on the subject beyond “is not so great acktually.”

Although I did it primarily for laughs, the comparison between Kill Bill and Best Served Cold has slightly more thought behind it than I initially indicated. If I was feeling particularly glib I might be inclined to say Joe Abercrombie is the Quentin Tarantino of fantasy fiction. He’s obsessed with genre conventions, he’s extremely stylish, violent and action-orientated, but when you stop and think about it for a moment it’s all just a little bit shallow. Here’s one of Monza’s victims on the subject of revenge:

"If you could get even what good would it do you? All this expenditure of effort, pain, treasure, blood for what. Who is ever left better off for it ... not the avenged dead, certainly. They rot on regardless. Not those who are avenged upon, of course. Corpses all. And what of the those who take vengeance what of them? Do they sleep easier, do you suppose, once they have heaped murder on murder, sown the bloody seeds of a hundred other retributions?”

It’s all been said, and shown, a thousand times before. What Abercrombie does accomplish, however, alongside standard meditations on the futility of revenge, is its diminution to something banal. Everyone’s got something against someone, and the nested sequences of betrayals and retributions are very effective. Ultimately, Best Served Cold is well worth a read. If you’re a supporter of stand-alone fantasy, you enjoyed The First Law trilogy or you like your fantasy low and nasty, I’d heartily recommend it. Abercrombie writes well, especially his action sequences. He’s one of the few fantasy authors I’ve encountered whose battle scenes I can read without glazing over. I don’t know how he does it but not only do I understand what’s going on in them, I’m actually interested:

“The Baolish were breaking through in earnest, boiling out of the widening gaps in Rogont's shattered right wing like the rising tide through a wall of sand. Monza could hear their shrill cries as they streamed up the slope, see their tattered banners waving, the glitter of metal on the move. The lines of archers above them dissolved all at once, men tossing away their bows and running for the city...”

He’s also very funny, in a grim kind of way. Here’s Nicomo Cosca (famed soldier of fortune) hiring some violent scumbags who claim to be entertainers:

Their eyes darted about, narrow and suspicious, dirty hands clutching a set of stained instruments. They shuffled up in front of the table, one of them scratching his groin, another prodding at a nostril with his drumstick
“And you are,” asked Cosca.
“We're a band,” the nearest said.
“And has your band a name?”
They looked at each other. “No, why would it?”
“Your own names then, if you please and your specialities, both as entertainer and fighter.”
“My name's Solter, I play the drum and the mace.” Flicking his greasy coat back to show the dull glint of iron. “I'm better with the mace if I'm honest.”
“I'm Morc,” said the next in line, “pipe and cutlass.”
“Olopin. Horn and hammer.”
“Olopin as well.” Jerking a thumb sideways. “Brother to this article. Fiddle and blades.” Whipping a pair of long knives from his sleeves and spinning 'em round his fingers
The last one had the most broken nose Shivers had ever seen and he'd seen some bad ones. “Gurpie. Lute and lute.”
“You fight with your lute?” asked Cosca
“I hits 'em with it just so.” The man showed off a sideways swipe, then flashed two rows of shit coloured teeth. “There's a great axe hidden in the body.”

The other big advantage of reading Abercrombie is that he ruthlessly cuts through all the crap I hate about fantasy fiction. I still remember the dizzy joy I felt when, after a small amount of build up regarding the invasion of the Gurkish in Before They Are Hanged, the Gurkish did, in fact, invade. Instead of waiting obligingly until the climax of book three. In Best Served Cold, the first vengeance-killing occurs within the 50 pages, and the next about 50 pages after that. Words cannot express how much I adore the way Abercrombie has things happen in his books. And it’s refreshing to see the usual conventions of fantasy get torn down around you – people break under torture and the damage is permanent, love and sex aren’t redemptive, if you go up against a superior swordsman you will lose.

The characters are your usual Abercrombie Bag of irredeemable, flawed but somehow weirdly sympathetic arseholes. Because there’s a significantly larger major cast than in The First Law Trilogy, I found Abercrombie’s handle on them a little less assured. Unlike The First Law trilogy in which changes of perspective were, for the most part, limited to chapters, the POV jumps around quite a lot and it’s easy to lose track of whose head you’re supposed to be in. They mostly have distinctive voices – Shivers says ain’t and ‘em, Friendly thinks in numbers, Morveer is florid – but it feels like linguistic frosting. Possibly I’m just wearing my Nostalgia Glasses but to read the First Law trilogy is to be completely saturated in the thoughts and worldview of Glokta, Jezel and Logen, whereas Best Served Cold seems to offer only the tourist highlights of personality. Furthermore, juggling such a large cast means there are some characters who barely register – Vitari, doting mother and torturer, is sidelined (again) and I have no idea what Abercrombie was trying to do with Morveer’s assistant, Day.

I had trouble with Monza, as well. She’s not designed to be a sympathetic character but, I suspect, she’s meant to be understandable and even attractive. She’s certainly a more successful attempt at a strong woman than Ferro was. I usually find there’s a point in vengeance narratives in which I lose all ability to empathise with the main character, the moment when Dantes becomes Monte Cristo; a deliberate device, on the part of authors, I’m sure, to show the de-humanising affects of an obsession with revenge. However, I never lost touch with Monza in that way, which, again, contributed to the way revenge functions in the text: not as something alien and outlandish, but as something common to all. The problem was, I didn’t really manage to invest her in the first place. One of the main reasons Monza retains her humanity is that her revenge is as much for her brother as for herself. This taps into yet another convention of the genre: the idea that vengeance for others has an inherent nobility, compared to vengeance for oneself. As the story unfolds, we learn that Monza’s brother is a traitorous, avaricious waste of space, which, I suspect, is meant to problematise Monza’s crusade, and undermine any nobility we might have attributed to her. Unfortunately, since her brother is practically introduced as Bastard McBastard of the Principality of Bastardry and everyone, I mean everyone, is constantly going on about what a bastard he was, the overall effect of this is to make Monza look like a total idiot. And I can’t imagine that was deliberate.

On the other hand I did really like the way her relationship with Shivers developed and then fell apart. At first it seems that Shivers, clinging to his vow to be a better man and characterised by by an innate sense of decency, might serve as a redemptive influence upon her. And there’s a nice gender-reversal to it at as well: he is both materially dependent upon and emotionally vulnerable to her. Shivers, in his way, wants to find hope in the world. Monza believes there is none. Watching them ruin and break each other, each at times denying the other salvation, and Shivers’ eventual transformation into Monza’s creature entirely (albeit not in any way she would want) is deeply unpleasant but also strangely satisfying. It is a tale not so often told, and rarely done well.

The other stand-out character of Best Served Cold (I’m deliberately not mentioning Nicomo Cosca, famed solider of fortune, of whom Abercrombie is blatantly far too fond) is Castor Morveer, master poisoner. Again, he is deconstructed over the course of the novel from leet poisoner stereotype to self-deluding fool whose dedication to science and maxims of caution offer no protection against the cruel whimsicality of the world in which he lives.

He was beyond doubt the greatest poisoner ever and had become, indisputably, a great man of history. How it galled him that he could never truly share his grand achievement with the world, never enjoy the adulation his triumph undoubtedly deserved. Oh, if the doubting headmaster of the orphanage could have only witnessed this happy day, he would have been forced to concede that Castor Morveer was indeed prize-winning material. If his wife could have seen it, she would have finally understood him and never complained about his unusual habits!

Yes, he’s a messed up little bunny and so utterly broken, hopeless and thwarted it’s hard not to feel a certain pity for him although he’s also a masterpiece of irritation. Although they have little in common on the surface, he reminded me a great deal of Jezel in the sense that both are characters who exist to have their illusions of themselves utterly shattered. As with Jezel, the presentation of Morveer made me faintly uncomfortable, not so much because of who he was or what happened to him, but because of an ill-defined extra-textual element. I remember finding Jezel as much as the victim of authorial malice as anything and, again, I rather felt that Abercrombie wanted to condemn Morveer for his hypocrisy. This is pure speculation of the kind that would get me thrown out of any lit class in the land, but I think one of Abercrombie’s personal bugbears (and one he shares with Dan, actually) is “people who are more shit than they think they are” and that he takes a grim pleasure in having such people come face to face with irrefutable evidence of their own shitness (there’s even a brief cameo from Jezel, suitably cowed). Unfortunately it’s very difficult to communicate the subtleties of that effectively, and the result is characters like Jezel and Morveer, who come face to face with their own shitness primarily because the author wants to show it to them.

They are presented as characters whose self-perceptions are flawed but they are flawed primarily insofar as they differ from the author’s. The result of this is to highlight their artificiality in that you’re always aware of them as an authorial creations, and the only possible perspective you can take is the one prescribed by the author. I didn’t like Jezel but I did sympathise with him greatly (I think, perhaps, his shitness resonated with my shitness), but I felt there was no room for that within the text, because the author had nothing but contempt for him. Essentially, when constructing self-deluding characters, there must be a distinction drawn between “this character thinks they’re great but they’re not necessarily as great as they think they are” and “this character thinks he’s awesome, I (the author) think they’re a dick, therefore they’re a dick.” And that, for me, is the problem with Abercrombie’s Jezel/Morveer archetypes.

There’s something Chaucerian about Abercrombie’s work, not just in a shared relish of jokes about poo, but in the sense that the primary virtue espoused by both writers is not necessarily moral good but a kind of animalistic cleverness. Rewards, such as they are, come to those who are smart enough to know when they are beaten (Glokta) and those with the wit to see themselves as they truly are (Cosca). For everybody else, there is merely destruction, self-destruction and death, as they become helpless slaves to the cruelty of others, their own needs and the vagaries of fate.

There’s a lot to like about Best Served Cold. A well designed world, snappy dialogue, some great writing, colourful characters and lashings of ultraviolence. It bogs down a little about 3/5s of the way through but finishes nicely. But there’s also a certain sense that Abercrombie may be a one-trick pony. It’s set in the same world, it has a similar approach, similar characters and, hell, even the same damn cover. It has the comparable strengths and weaknesses of The First Law Trilogy, except the weaknesses bothered me less and the strengths seemed more pronounced. In short, if Joe Abercrombie is a one trick pony, it’ll be a fucking stallion by the time he’s done.