Instead they shout, bellow, scream, thunder, hiss, yelp, mutter, mumble, murmur, snap, chuckle, grumble, blurt, snarl, whimper, bark, stutter, stammer, grunt, croak, wheeze, roar and even intone – fucking intone! I did not make a single one of those up. Characters in The Blade Itself rarely ever “say” anything.

I’m not expecting Peter Carey when I read a fantasy paperback, but what particularly drove me up the wall was Abercrombie’s dialogue attribution. The second is Abercrombie’s writing style. The first is the plot, which starts out fairly slow and obtuse, but picks up a bit towards the end (when it irritatingly ends just as it starts to get interesting).

There were two reasons I found this book difficult to get into. (I feel compelled to point out that if you want to “single-handedly redefine the fantasy genre,” as Abercrombie apparently did, you probably shouldn’t begin with a main character who is a barbarian warrior from “the North.”) Events draw them together in Adua, the capital city of the Union, where preparations for war are underway and magic is returning to the world. The Blade Itself, first novel in the First Law trilogy, revolves around Inquisitor Glokta, a crippled torturer Jezal dan Luthar, a spoilt young noble and Logen Ninefingers, an infamous barbarian warrior. Joe Abercrombie’s novels seem fairly popular as swashbuckling fantasy adventure yarns, and he gets extra points for writing a trilogy rather than an ever-extending ten-book “cycle” or whatever they call them these days. Martin’s Song of Ice and Fire series (and less successfully with Gene Wolfe’s Book of the New Sun). I’m trying to read a bit more fantasy after successfully dipping back into the genre with George R.R. The Blade Itself by Joe Abercrombie (2006) 536 p.

The blade itself book review