Snap review: 5 stars, a dark, gritty and wry fantasy based on the sword-and-sorcery and epic fantasy templates. There’s no safe middle ground here: you’ll either love the raw gleeful energy, or you’ll find it too slapstick and cynical. Joe Abercrombie’s prose is deadly: witty and violent, well plotted and brilliantly told.
I was reluctant to begin a book with a blood-spattered cover lauded as ‘delightfully twisted and evil’. I’m not a psycho. I don’t fantasise about blood. But as a fantasy author, I want to know what’s happening in the fantasy genre, and so I stuck my neck out and got it chopped right off by the blade itself. It’s not what I was expecting. The Blade Itself is personal, brutish, and brilliant. Joe Abercrombie really packs it in, and I get the feeling that he takes great pleasure in writing this way. If he doesn’t like someone, they get smacked.
His characters scream “Character!” In a few lines of dialogue we meet some unforgettable rogues. Logen’s viewpoint shines! To enter a city for the first time and see all of its strangeness through the eyes of a barbarian was so very funny. (I felt not unlike a South African arriving in London). The book is worth reading for this character alone. But Abercrombie himself is the lead character – he expresses himself so strongly that I found myself wanting to read on just because of the way he told his story.
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