Why did I get this book?
Picked it up in a bookstore. I thought about it for a while as I looked at the book and tried to decide whether to buy it, because I’ve been disappointed by a lot of genre fantasy that I’ve read in the last three or four years. In the end, I kept it on my pile and I’m glad that I did.
Is it what I thought it was?
In the sense that I was afraid it was going to be another generic attempt to imitate Joe Abercrombie or Scott Lynch, no, it is not what I was afraid of. Despite having a lot of genre hallmarks, including a plot structure that could be a D&D session if it were stripped down to its bare bones, it’s got a fresh and original feeling to it that kept me engaged throughout. I was primed to toss it aside and instead it grabbed me pretty hard.
What continuing uses might I have for it?
Well, I’m in for the sequel, that’s for sure. If you were someone who taught creative writing, this would be a good book to push on students in terms of how to do first-person fiction—the main character’s voice is a beautifully consistent thing considering how much that requires aligning the character with the complicated and imaginative setting. The character ultimately doesn’t feel like a generic wise-ass scoundrel or a thin disguise for the author himself, despite sounding a bit generic in the early going.
In my side project on the relationship between history and fantasy writing, I’ve got one essay on the economics of high fantasy settings that focuses particularly on magic. This is a great book for thinking about that subject—there’s some careful work on the issue that is very evident here.
Quotes
“Some things I’m shyte at. Not laughing when I find something funny, for example. Adding figures in my head. Farmwork. Lifting heavy weights.”
“I’ll watch while you sleep. Sleep while you watch. I’ll lie to you when it doesn’t matter, but I’ll also lie for you when it does. If you let me do the talking, I’ll make sure you miss the pennycock with the pizzle-itch and get the best wine in the merchant’s barrel. You’ll never again meet a door you can’t get through nor a wall you can’t get over. I need your arms, yes, but you need my nose. If you do the worst of the fighting, I’ll make sure you know where your foes are coming from and cull the weak ones. I won’t be your dog, but if you’re half the wolf I think you are, you’ve found a fox to run with.”
Commentary, asides, loose thoughts, unfair complaints
In addition to holding the main character’s tone remarkably steady throughout (no easy task, as he has to narrate not just wise-ass commentary but also some really dark and emotionally wrenching events with some sincerity), the book is a great model of how to do exposition. The main character, Kinch Na Shannack, is talking to us and explaining things as needed, but mostly in a way that feels inside the frame of the world and that comes in natural intervals, where it seems to make sense. There are little asides and then occasional dumps of information but precisely when the character himself is engaged in a plot-relevant reverie about his past or about the world around him. The protagonist isn’t omniscient—there are many things he doesn’t know and he knows that he doesn’t know them. He’s not quite an unreliable narrator in the classic sense but he’s got a distinctive perspective that is consistently rooted in and reinforcing of the character.
The protagonist and his allies are also really specific in their relative competencies such that the challenges they face seem very real, their motivations very grounded (and diverse), and their victories and escapes narratively specific. Nobody pulls out the Staff of Infinite Power halfway through a battle, and nobody does anything stupendously idiotic just in order to get the plot from A to B. (But neither are the characters improbably sagacious or prescient at any point.) And I also was really impressed with the way that Buehlman writes action and combat sequences in the book. I have to say that I usually zone out in a lot of genre fantasy at those points: battle scenes are second in line after sex scenes in a lot of fantasy writing when it comes to excruciating cliches and hack writing, but the fights here are very vivid and kinetic and full of imaginative high-fantasy thinking about magic, armor, weaponry, tactics and so on.
While you can certainly see the influence of Abercrombie and Patrick Rothfuss’ work (Buehlman mentions both in his acknowledgements) this really isn’t following a template—I honestly think this is more likely to become a template for others in its own right. It’s got a kind of chef kiss-perfect mix of darkness, sincerity, snark, and groundedness (this isn’t one of those books where the fate of the entire world or anything of that sort is at stake). It’s not as relentlessly bleak at Abercrombie (and some of his imitators) and Kinch is a much more rounded, complex and situated character than many similar types in other fantasies (in particular Kvothe in Rothfuss’ work).
Also high marks for the magic in the book—really nicely envisioned, with a lot of creative touches. Similarly, the cultures here are not just “Irish people with another name”, “German people with another name”, nor are they “generic medieval people who have lots of apostrophes in their words so that they seem fantasy-like”. I got a good handle on the three or four most prominent human cultures featured in the book despite each one of them feeling like an original imaginary construct.