Joe Abercrombie, Best Served Cold (Orbit, 2009)
Joe Abercrombie, fresh after writing the First Law epic fantasy trilogy, has come up with a novel idea: let's write a story. Set it in a fantasy world. Give our heroine a mission, of revenge, and give her a rag-tag team of rascally misfits, beggars, thieves and experts to help her accomplish it, but with a twist. The twist? Instead of making this an exciting tale of adventure and discovery and colourful world building -- let's make it nauseatingly violent, overwhelmingly bleak, relentlessly depressing, while coming this close to being utterly pointless.
Monza Murcatto, leader of the mercenary group the Thousand Swords, is famed for her numerous (and incredibly bloody) victories on behalf of Grand Duke Orso, a man who has ambitions to become King of all Styria. She and her brother Benna are invited to his palace, ostensibly to receive his thanks, only to be viciously betrayed. Benna is butchered in front of Monza's eyes, and Monza herself is brutally beaten and thrown down a mountain.
Monza survives, barely -- only barely. Her right hand now crippled, she trains with her left hand, shambling forward with a body filled with bones that click with every movement, causing her near-constant pain. She vows revenge on Orso and the six other men who witnessed her downfall.
Offering her cleverly-stashed horde of treasure, along the way Monza hires compatriots: Morveer, a notorious poisoner, and his comely apprentice Day; Friendly, an obsessive-compulsive convict who finds comfort in counting and numbers; Vitari, a torturer with underworld connections; Cosca, a former mentor of Monza's, fallen on hard times; and Shivers, a good-hearted Northerner who left his homeland to escape violence but doesn't get far.
The novel is divided into seven parts, one for each of the men Monza's planning to kill. At the beginning of the novel, Monza explains that mercy and cowardice are the same, that the world is a meaningless, bloody pit of greedy people biting and scratching for a place near the top of the pile. The next six hundred pages, without pause, serve to demonstrate how the world is a meaningless, bloody pit of greedy people biting and scratching for a place near the top of the pile -- only this time with much more description and gruesome imagery.
As Monza progresses down her death list, her comrades one by one succumb to despair or their darker urges, one powerful corrupt official is violently murdered only to be replaced by an even more corrupt official, and the author proceeds to throw in a million other incidents to further prove how People Suck and War is Bad and the World is a Bottomless Shithole.
For all of Abercrombie's colourful writing style and description (often too colourful: Abercrombie wins the dubious honour of being the first to make this reviewer feel physically ill after reading his gratuitous renderings of violence), his novel is hampered by a lack of thematic conclusion. There's too much build-up for too little narrative payoff. There is no point to his story of vengeance. There is no light at the end of the tunnel, because Best Served Cold is nothing but one big, long tunnel that comes to a dead stop at one end. Characters do not improve, and ultimately they do not change. While the world of Styria experiences upheaval, it quickly settles back into bloody-mindedness again. Hope glimmers only to be snuffed out.
By novel's end, Monza learns (surprise, surprise) that People Suck, War is Bad, and the World is a Bottomless Shithole. Oh, but maybe also that Revenge is Bad, too. A ridiculously tiny step in the character development of one person is the reward for more than six hundred pages of callous murder, unpleasant sex, fountains of blood, armies of corpses, good deeds violently punished, several random and poorly-explained characters (a vampire mummy? A super-strong cannibal assassin?), and all the while our main group of characters (who are, admittedly, an empathetic and well-drawn bunch for all their sociopathic tendencies) get every last good thought beaten out of them by the cudgels of Fate.
To prevent this review from doing the same, this reviewer will mention some of the novel's better aspects: Abercrombie's world building is impressive, and Styria's politics and wars are well explained by immersing the reader in a well-detailed setting without resorting to infodumps. Abercrombie's writing is rich and evocative, and he is master of creatively describing the exact way a human skull shatters like a ripe melon. And as for his protagonist, Monza is a vivid character. She's single-minded on vengeance without being underdeveloped, and mouths her "morals are for suckers" mantras even though it's obvious she cares a lot more than other people think. This is part of what makes it so frustrating how little she learns from her experience.
If fans of the First Law trilogy insist on reading this novel, this reviewer would like to suggest they take the necessary precautions. Remove all razors, painkillers, and lengths of rope from your house. Keep Prozac close to hand, along with a teddy bear and a copy of The Sound of Music. Maybe even a dog-eared copy of The Lord of the Rings, where the good guys actually win once in a while. Have a friend call you every two hours to make sure you're still alive. You should be all set.
