My Week In Media September 14th -20th
So I watched the finale of Reservation Dogs, the finale of Brooklyn 99, Archer, What We Do in the Shadows, Only Murders in the Building, and re-watched all of AP BIO last week in part to write the big entry about it from last week’s Media Journal, but really what I did was read The Wisdom of Crowds by Joe Abercrombie so instead of a typical media entry everyone gets a free essay about my favorite living fantasy author.
The Glorious Tyranny of Narrative Point of View
An Essay on the First Law World by Joe Abercrombie
In the nine books that make up Joe Abercrombie’s First Law world (The First Law of Euz, “It is forbidden to touch the Other Side Direct…) it’s hard to find characters worth liking, and in the end if you do find one worth liking they’ll only end up breaking your heart and letting you down.
In the two trilogies and three stand alone novels that make up Joe Abercrombie’s First Law world (…Forbidden to communicate with the world below, forbidden to summon Demons…) it is hard to find characters you would actually root for in any other circumstances, especially with an objective eye.
In the pages upon pages of subversive, merciless realpolitik, and the use violence as a showing of human weakness as much as a necessity for self preservation which make up Joe Abercrombie’s First Law world (…forbidden to open the gates of hell.), it is hard to find likable characters, but it’s also impossible not to love the pieces of shit that lie, blunder, and slaughter their way through the circle of the world… Yes, even the ones that break Great Euz’s Second Law, “It is forbidden to eat the flesh of men” and who gain superhuman powers via cannibalism are occasionally triumphantly likable.
We live in a sophisticated world of flawed protagonists and antiheroes.
We live in a post Sopranos world where the better part of the last twenty years of television has been teaching us how to root for dipshits and monsters of all kinds (but usually cisgender, heterosexual males who are either bald or have brown hair…), only to leave us realizing that we’ve been empathizing with the villains all along. So, since HBO, FX, and AMC have done the heavy lifting for me (I’d include Showtime in that list if they ever succeeded… okay, Dexter… maybe…) I don’t really need to spend a lot of time talking about how familiarity and perspective in narrative creates emotional connection, empathy, and sympathy1.
This is compared to how in real life, as the saying goes, familiarity breeds contempt for the shitty people we may know. And okay, it can also breed contempt in fiction, but intrigue is in its own way a kind of affection. Rooting for someone to get their comeuppance is just having warm feelings for their downfall, it is an emotional bond, and the satisfaction of hate in fiction usually climaxes in the moment of justice being delivered…
…but justice is fleeting.
Justice is temporary.
Justice in these books is killing, and to quote many characters “Once the killing starts, it’s hard to stop.”
Thematically all of these books tell stories about the tyranny of systems, the limitations of personal goodness, and the brutality of power in how it grounds down those under it and those who have to compromise to use it. This is seen no more clearly in that all magic comes from The Other Side/below/demons/etc., so all magic comes from breaking the two laws that Euz, a sort of god/teacher/avatar of power in the ancient world, laid down for his disciples.
And while there’s not a lot of magic in these books, the people wielding magic are few, far between, and their magical powers are terrible. In books that are, as stated, centered on power, the ability to kill someone with a thought, or knock someone’s head from their shoulders with a lazy backhanded slap are more than fantasy flourishes, they are statements on destructive power originating in corrupting places.2
In short, the First Law is a series of fantasy novels that is not particularly interested in complex magic systems, or layered world building, if Great Euz has more than two laws Abercombie hasn’t bothered to share them, or share any details of the world that aren’t immediately relevant to the characters and the various circumstances. What it is interested in, and this is why ultimately it is impossible not to love the characters in his books, are heroes.
Abercrombie’s First Law books are character, dialogue, and action driven, propelled by characters doing heroic things, and it is not random chance that only the biggest shitheels in his books actually think of themselves as heroes.
If a hero is someone who does heroic things, who makes a hard choice to take a stand, and to try to do some good, then each and every book is chalk full of heroes. If a hero is someone who ultimately stands up, fights, and spills blood to save the people they love, or those who can’t save themselves, or strike down someone who has done no end of wrong, then to read any of these books is to be steeped in heroes.
Of course those characters who all blunder into heroic acts are also tortures, ineffectual drug addled princes, war criminals, murderers, aristocrats that own factories powered by child labor, and other assorted villains that would fill the roles of just about any other story, fantasy or not.
This isn’t to say Abercrombie’s heroes are exclusively villains cast in a... well not a sympathetic light, or who are likable only by comparison to the even worse cretins and fiends that inhabit his pages3… or that they are stagnant entities existing to prove a point about the realities of violence, human weakness, and corruption, because there are a few genuinely good people…
And not all of them die.
In fact, it’s not the deaths that break your heart in these books, it’s what Maya Angelou said, “When people show you who they are, believe them the first time.”
And this is where we come back to the tyranny of point of view, the glorious, head splitting, body mutilating, wrathful, immolating, power of narrative perspective.
Very few of Abercrombie’s characters are not self aware, and as his voice and style are generally anachronistic (no thees and thous, no faux Shakespeare… oh, we’ll get back to Bill the Bard shortly), their inner monologues and thoughts sound very much like our own, and those few characters we spend time with that lack self-awareness, receive very harsh wakeup calls.
This isn’t to say they don’t also lie to themselves or delude themselves, of course they do because these are modern novels grounded in character over setting, but what they do with that knowledge, how they grow, and what they strive for, is usually what collides with the forces of the world that caused them to pull their heads out of their own asses.
I’m keenly aware at this point that it sounds like these are books full of bad people, where the good guys never win, and everything is as politically miserable as real life… and as true as that is, that’s not what his books are as a whole.
The First Law world is a series of stories that looks at the cost of winning, and what happens in the and after the shockwaves of violence that inform victory. The books are full of generational feuds, hereditary and institutional power, and the chains of events that prove killing may end one problem, but it will create a vacuum as likely as it will create another feud. The various heroes of the stories are, it should be obvious by now, deeply flawed, and ask the reader to consider someone’s life not as balance or scale, but an accumulation of acts as a whole.
It would be trite to say that Abercrombie’s most reprehensible characters have the most noble and just intentions, and that his most virtuous characters are the most loathsome. Nor would that be an accurate assessment, but it’s close, and it’s close because the characters tell us who they are, and Abercrombie shows us who they are as well, but we choose not to see them for what they are the first time because of the tyranny of point of view.
In the first book of the first trilogy, The Blade Itself, when berserker warrior Logen Nine Fingers4, named because he only has nine fingers, having lost one in one of the many duels he won, in consumed by The Bloody Nine, the berserker part of his inner most self, and starts murdering inquisitors and goons, we see that he is a remorseless, uncontrollable killing machine, but we’re so taken by the catharsis of justice in that heart-pounding set piece at the end of the book that we miss the truth.
We don’t miss the implication, because Abercrombie shows us in the prose, and the character tells us as he tells the other characters, that he is a monster, but we don’t listen. Even if we understand foreshadowing and narrative scaffolding, we still look past it, yes, even if we put it in our back pocket we don’t think about what it really means.
We don’t see what The Blood Nine is until we see it through other characters, in other moments free from our bloodthirsty desire for justice in a bloodthirsty world.
And that brings us to his most recent trilogy, The Age of Madness, which is Shakespeare’s histories set in the industrial revolution, by way of an Iron Maiden album (probably Power Slave).
Between the first trilogy and this one, there were three stand-alone novels that filled about a two decade time jump5 that saw gun powder and steam engines enter the world.
Those three stand-alone books are essentially Abercrombie’s versions of: The Count of Monte Cristo, The Battle of Gettysburg, and a whole bunch of westerns, with some characters that bridge the first trilogy to the second, and expand his world as a whole. These world changes lead to a story that begins with soldier coming home from a foreign war to discover that the public lands used for sheep grazing have been bought up by factory owners, and that everyone in the valley he’s been dreaming of coming home to have been bought out and evicted.
This veteran is one of seven main characters that run the range of the bottom of society to the very top, and despite their different stations all seven end up swimming in blood and human tragedy.
This trilogy is very timely, and shows that Joe Abercrombie is in the Garth Marenghie6 camp of, “I know writers who use subtext, and they are all cowards” school of thought, typified as much by the trilogy’s blatant disregard for unchecked capitalism as by its closed doors meetings of powerful people saying things like, “We must make The Union great again”, and “There are too many brown faces here, not enough proper Union men.”
Without diverging into a whole other essay about how the 1990s being “the end of history” gave us a false optimism about the state and future of the post Cold War world, leaving us wholly unprepared to recognize the rise of and immanent threat of anti-democratic corporate feudalism and technocratic monarchy, Abercrombie bluntly hammers home that our world now is running parallel to where it was 100 years ago, because again, subtext is for cowards.
And this is where the Shakespeare of it all comes in.
So effective was William7 Shakespeare’s propaganda about various Henrys and Richards who sat the throne of England, that we think about his versions of them before we think about their actual histories. In Richard II Shakespeare was tasked with preserving the divine right of kings and of monarchy while also recognizing that Richard II had to be overthrown. To veer too far into the will of the people and validating rebellion and revolution would be to undermine the crown, and in the later Henry plays he had to play to divine right, by inflating Henry IV and Henry V, then in turn smearing Richard III (yes, I know Richard III didn’t follow Henry V, keep reading for why I mention these monarchs in particular).
In the Age of Madness trilogy while a nationwide workers revolt8 bubbles under the surface, the aristocracy faces its own internal struggles and attempts at revolt, with a would be Henry IVs becoming a sort of Richard II, and a Hottspurs becoming Richard IIIs (also with some Cromwell) by way of Lady Macbeth (okay Macbeth isn’t a history per say but as propaganda piece…), and there’s even a Fallstaff to boot.
All of these historically/literary allusions occur as one cycle of violence, while another cycle of violence in “The North9”, one less grounded in the bloody ground between metaphor and applicability, plays out as it has in four of the six previous books.
Both narratives run parallel and intersect in a figure eight that Abercrombie has established, with every intersection leaving more dead even while more alliances and hopes of lasting peace are made, and again this happens because subtext is for cowards.
The truth of Abercrombie’s work is not that history repeats itself, or that people are rotten, it’s that the one enduring element of human history is humanity itself… and also Baez, First of the Magi (but you’ll have to read the books to get the score on that guy.)
Abercrombie’s heroes (not to be confused with Heroes by Joe Abercrombie, the second in his three stand-alone novels) are heroes because they do heroic things, but they’re also pieces of shit and do shitty things, because the rest of them time, well… they’re people, they’re just like us.
The tyranny of narrative here isn’t just the one imposed by Abercrombie’s prose, it’s the one we bring as people.
We hope people are more than they are, and we are hurt when they’re less than we hoped. We want individual heroism to mean more than it does, and we want our justice to be cathartic, we want it to quench our bloodlust and even all the scores and wrongs of the world, we want this even though we know the truth,
“Once the killing starts, it’s hard to stop.”
We’ve all lived it by now, and we’ve probably lived it ad nauseaum, so even if you’ve never thought about it, you already understand it on an emotional level or via the osmosis of narrative consumption.
I ascribe Robert Caro’s sentiment that power reveals more than it corrupts, but in these books the magic of wizards and Eaters (Cannibal’s with superpowers from cannibalism) is the magic of violence, and so the power to deploy mass violence is a corrupting force.
This is the standard maneuver to make your edgy antihero or otherwise shitty person likable by comparison.
The band of heroes that go on the great quest of the first trilogy feel very X-Men-y, and Logen is very much a Logan/Wolverine type character. While I haven’t done any research to see if he’s conformed it, the name and character archetype seem very deliberate.
Suck it GRR Martin, that’s how you pull off a time lapse and central character pivots.
Garth Marenghie’s Dark Place is a cult TV series about a faux Stephen King horror auther named Garth Marenghie who is the host of a TV adaptation of one of his novels. The performances are brilliant in how terrible they are in the way a great singer knows how to sound terrible. When last I checked you can watch the whole series for free on YouTube, and on Peacock.
Bill, if you’re warning kids about living in a van down by the river.
Akin in many ways to the Russian Revolution of 1917
Abercrombie’s North is roughly Scotland adjacent, while The Union is kind of a Holy Roman Empire, and there are more loose equivalencies of other places in his world to our world…