The Blade Itself: Book One (World of the First Law, #1) (First Law Trilogy, #1)

by Joe Abercrombie

'Delightfully twisted and evil' GUARDIAN

'Highly recommended ... seek it out' Joe Hill

Inquisitor Glokta, a crippled and increasingly bitter relic of the last war, former fencing champion turned torturer extraordinaire, is trapped in a twisted and broken body - not that he allows it to distract him from his daily routine of torturing smugglers.

Nobleman, dashing officer and would-be fencing champion Captain Jezal dan Luthar is living a life of ease by cheating his friends at cards. Vain, shallow, selfish and self-obsessed, the biggest blot on his horizon is having to get out of bed in the morning to train with obsessive and boring old men.

And Logen Ninefingers, an infamous warrior with a bloody past, is about to wake up in a hole in the snow with plans to settle a blood feud with Bethod, the new King of the Northmen, once and for all - ideally by running away from it. But as he's discovering, old habits die really, really hard indeed...

...especially when Bayaz gets involved. A bald old man with a terrible temper and a pathetic assistant, he could be the First of the Magi, he could be a spectacular fraud, but whatever he is, he's about to make the lives of Glotka, Jezal and Logen a whole lot more difficult...

• ISBN10: 0575079797
• ISBN13: 9780575079793
• Publish Date: 8 March 2007 (first published 4 May 2006)
• Publish Status: Active
• Publish Country: GB
• Imprint: Gollancz
• Format: Paperback (B-Format (198x129 mm))
• Pages: 544
• Language: English

Reviews

Don't get me wrong. I knew this was going to be a "nothing happens in this book"-book. But still...

I definitely liked it but it also felt as if I have read nothing of use? I know the characters now but... I had expected that at least at the end something would happen. Well, I guess I am looking forward to reading the next book... this felt more like a prequel.
I am honestly really confused about how I feel. I liked it but I also did not really like it enough?

[Ashley]

Stopped reading at 13%.

I might give this another shot at some point, but for now, it actually felt kind of… childish? In one chapter, a character described everyone's personalities like this:

“He sat back in his chair and hunched his brawny shoulders with a frown that said, ‘I am big and manly, and have a quick temper, so I should be treated with respect by everyone.’”

[Brint] licked his lips with an expression at once careful and slightly desperate, an expression which seemed to say, ‘I am not young or poor. I can afford to lose this money. I am every bit as important as the rest of you.’"

There were like four or five character descriptions like that. It seemed so… juvenile. It was just a whole bunch of telling me who every character was, what motivated them, etc.

I know I didn't give it much of a chance, so I might give it another shot. Or I might just jump straight to A Little Hatred. I know The Blade Itself was Abercrombie's first book, so it might not necessarily be his strongest. And if I'm honest, A Little Hatred is the one that really interested me; I just picked up this one for the back story.

[bumblingbookworm]

DNFed at 84 pages. I can’t work out if I’m not in the mood for this, or if grimdark fantasy isn’t really my thing. Do I like some grimdark (eg Nevernight) but not others? I think it depends on how the violence is presented, and this is too graphic for me right now. 2020 is the year of not forcing myself to read books I’m not enjoying, so maybe another time.

[charlton]

Joe Abercrombie creates his characters so rich and full.His fight scenes are dark and gritty.This first book is a lot of posturing,getting the right people to the right places.It was really an enjoyable read for me and I'm to start the second book tonight.

[viking2917]

Great, memorable characters. Wonderful black humor. So-so plot and world development. Good fun for a plane ride.

[Mercy]

4.5/5

[tellemonstar]

An interesting adventure novel with a diverse cast of characters who pull you in as unlikely (and unwitting/unwilling) protagonists.

[celinenyx]

Gruesome. Grim. Gory.

This is one of the best fantasy books I've read in a long time. The only thing that would make it better would be some more kick-ass ladies - though towards the end of the book we're introduced to some of them. Am looking forward to the second part of this trilogy.

[Rinn]

Also posted on my blog, Rinn Reads.

I have to say, after finally reading the first book in the First Law series by Joe Abercrombie, I now understand why he is ‘Lord Grimdark’. The Blade Itself felt like a whirlwind of a book, despite probably being the slower of the three as it builds things up. Of course I was expecting the book to be grisly, but it was definitely grimmer and darker than I thought it would be – and that’s no bad thing. There are several points of view within the story, and each felt unique.

I really loved the range of characters that Abercrombie has created to populate his world. Inquisitor Glokta is the crippled, vicious product of two years of torture, both despairing of what his life has turned into and using his disfigurement to his advantage. Occasionally, just very occasionally, I got small glimpses of what he was like before, or how he could have been, had he not been tortured, and I actually felt sorry for him. Jezal may have been, at first glance, the handsome young hero of the story, but actually as it progressed it was clear that he was an arrogant and spoiled young man, clinging to his heritage and wealth and using them as a stepping stone to make his way up, rather than pure talent.

And then there were others – Logen as this battle-scarred, grizzly warrior, whose misunderstanding of foreign cultures occasionally made him feel like a small child trapped in a hulking great body. It was really interesting to see him after reading one of Abercrombie’s other books, which is technically set after the events of The First Law series, and I’m looking forward to seeing how he changes from one man to the other. Of course, I can’t forget Bayaz and Brother Longfoot who, for me, especially in Brother Longfoot’s case, provided the comic relief. It’s definitely going to be an interesting journey…

There is a medieval feel to the book, as you often find with fantasy – that sort of society, but with added magic which is always a bonus. One thing that would have been nice would be more female characters. There were only two, and the first didn’t appear until around halfway through the book, the second about three-quarters. More time for them over the next two books, please?

The Blade Itself is definitely not the book you want to read when you have to be up early the next day. It’s a page turner and a half, and will keep you reading well into the night if you’re not careful. Definitely HIGHLY recommended for all fantasy fans, especially if you’re looking for something a bit (or rather a lot) darker.

[Metaphorosis Reviews]

reviews.metaphorosis.com

3.5 stars

As war threatens on every side, the members of a quest slowly gather from their disparate circumstances, under the leadership of the myterious Bayaz, First of the Magi.

I picked this up because I've been seeing Abercrombie's name all over the place, including via reviews at Goodreads. Word was that his work was bloody but realistic, and well done. I found that to be true, but with some caveats.

The writing itself was good, but not entirely confident. There was a modest number of grammatical and tense errors - few enough that I would normally ignore them, but persistent enough that it was clear they were not simple typos or edit remains. It's possible that the book just needed cleanup, but the impression I had was more of a manuscript that had needed grammatical editing, and didn't get quite enough. Perhaps that's simply the result of it being a debut novel.

In terms of pacing and plot, Abercrombie was on firmer ground. The book moves reasonably fast, and held my interest throughout. I didn't really know where it was going at first, but it eventually became clear that this was the 'fellowship formation' book of an epic quest story. Here, I give Abercrombie credit for giving the process the time it deserved. If some aspects feel forced or a little mechanistic, he also doesn't rush the process, and we get time to know many of the characters (though the women get shorter shrift - literally). Most quest narratives skip through this process, and it's a shame.

Abercrombie is careful not to make value judgments about his characters, and thus presents a fuller, more realistic range than do most authors. It still feels like most of them are on the side of good, but not all of them are good; in fact, many are clearly not. On the down side, there's a lot of torture in the book. I'm not necessarily against that - a lot of writers have used the idea, and I've written one pretty vivid torture story myself. Abercrombie does throw in some hints that torture is ineffective, but I did find it disturbing that it was used so often, so freely, and without much in-story comment. At most it seems to be regarded as something distasteful but in one way or another useful. If it didn't seem there might be less of it in the following volumes, this value-neutral torture element would cause me to think twice about reading them.

The whole length of the book is spent gathering (at times literally) the quest participants, and when the work is done, the book stops. It's not exactly a cliffhanger, but there's no pretense of a standalone novel, either. There are a few characters outside the quest group, but not many, so I presume the next volume will be about the quest itself. In this volume, Abercrombie has thrown out a handful of hints about the world's mythology, and it's interesting, but the hints are dissatisfyingly sparse.

All in all, a good book, if not quite the revelation many reviewers claim. (I was much more struck, for example, by Brandon Sanderson's Mistborn or Brent Weeks' Night Angel trilogy). But if you don't mind a certain passivity towards torture, this is a book (and perhaps trilogy) worth picking up.