The Devils - Joe Abercrombie
Last year I began a read-through of all of Terry Pratchettās Discworld novels. I didnāt finish them - didnāt even come close to finishing them, truth be told - but one thing I observed early on is that Pratchett regularly revisited old ideas, approaching them from new angles and trying to make them work a little better than heād made them work the first time around.
Joe Abercrombieās The Devils is his first non-First Law book in a decade, and it very much feels like heās taking a second run at some ideas heās played with in the past. In a lot of ways it serves as a Greatest Hits of his style, for both better and worse. Many of the characters feel like people weāve seen before: the grizzled old veteran, scarred from a lifetime of unyielding violence, who just wonāt die no matter how many holes you poke in him or how many tall buildings you throw him off; the berserker who tries desperately the keep a handle on the monster that lives inside them, who will kill everything in its path if itās allowed to be free; the wounded old soldier whose greatest enemy is stairs; the arrogant, dangerous expert, a master in his field, who wants nothing more or less than to be vaunted above all others. (Interestingly, three of the four archetypes Iāve mentioned there are represented across two characters).
Structurally, too, this is a story shape weāve seen him dabble in before, most notably in Best Served Cold, my least-favourite of the standalone First Law novels. Where Best Served Cold is the story of a quest for revenge, this is a journey to seat a new Empress thatās beset by constant attacks by her political rival, in a manner that brought to mind the League of Evil Exes from Scott Pilgrim Versus The World.
When I say that this is a āGreatest Hitsā novel for Abercrombie, I donāt just mean that itās repeating a lot of things that heās done previously. Itās also very much a distilliation of everything that heās been doing stylistically over his career. Chapters are short and punchy, often revolving around characters having An Observation thatās repeated regularly - sometimes too regularly - before the scene ends on a bit of a punch line that refers back to said observation. Thereās a sense that Abercrombie doesnāt really enjoy the interstitial scenes that get characters from one set piece to the next, and so he simply skips over them - with the result that the book is almost wall-to-wall action and excitement, lacking some connective tissue that helps us ground ourselves in the When of the novel.
This was a problem I had with Best Served Cold in particular, and one that carries on into the Age of Madness trilogy. In both cases I struggle to get a sense of how much time is passing between scenes, for how long the characters have been journeying before they reach their destination. The problem isnāt as pronounced here, but itās definitely present, and itās a facet of Abercrombieās writing that I find really interesting. The original First Law trilogy has plenty of long journeys, and Red Country is almost entirely a long journey, and yet this compression of time and lack of temporal landmarking isnāt an issue there. I suspect that whatās happening is that Abercrombie finds writing long journeys quite dull and so chooses to compress them, but if thatās the case then I have to wonder why he keeps plotting novels that require long journeys.
This may all sound very critical - and it is - but despite all that, I think this is the best novel Joe has written in years, perhaps since The Heroes. While itās a distillation of all the problems I have with his writing, it also distills all of the good parts of his writing, too. Itās hugely confidently written, and itās probably his funniest novel to date - not least of all because itās one of his least nihilistic books. Itās grim and violent and messy and bloody, yes, but unlike a lot of his other work it isnāt bleak. This, I think, was my main problem with The Age of Madness, that thereās very little joy to counteract the po-faced seriousness of it all. In The Devils itās very clear that Abercrombie is having a ton of fun writing these characters and this story, and thatās carried across over every page.
And despite these often being characters weāve seen in other incarnations in his work, I liked spending time with them a lot more than I enjoyed spending time with anybody in his last trilogy. I cared about these characters in ways that I never cared about anybody in The Age of Madness. Arrogant necromancer Balthazar Sham Ivam Draxi may well be a thinly-veiled revisiting of Best Served Coldās poisoner Castor Morveer, but heās a character I actually liked and wanted to spend time with, who showed actual character growth, who I wanted to succeed despite being a self-absorbed shit most of the time.
Itās also really, really nice to see Abercrombie coming back to a world steeped in his own specific take on magic. The magic in The First Law trilogy is weird and dangerous and Iāve always wished we got a chance to see more of it (specifically the stuff about the spirits and Logen breathing fire in The Blade Itself, which has never been revisited or mentioned). Itās a theme across that series that industrialisation has killed the magic in the world, and each subsequent book has strayed further into territory that interests me less and less. The Devils comes screaming back into a place that I find incredibly fun, and I want to see more of this weirdly magical alternate-Europe that heās created.
This isnāt a perfect book, but itās one that I had a great time with. I think Iām very much in the minority of readers who didnāt enjoy The Age of Madness, and so I went into this a little hesitant and a little worried that it was going to be another series from Abercrombie that didnāt interest me. But despite the flaws - or, if not flaws, then āthings that donāt quite align with my personal tastes as a readerā - I enjoyed the hell out of this, and I want to spend a lot more time in this world. Sign me up for the sequel.