Today’s Sunday Salon is brought to you by two cups of black currant tea, one mug of French press coffee, and Joe Abercrombie.
One little detail before I get on with my thoughts on the book. The title is a misnomer. Only one person gets hanged in the book. There is no they
involved on the recipient end of the hanging. He’s sold you a bill of goods. Okay, done with the spoilering.
Before They Are Hanged is the second book in Joe Abercrombie’s debut fantasy series, The First Law. I say debut because that means he’s up for some prize at the World Science Fiction Convention and he’s been campaigning to get it. I’m not a member and don’t vote. After going to NorWesCon one year, I shall be staying away from any event where fandom dresses in costume. Never again. But I digress.
Continuing the series, Before They Are Hanged is three stories in one. Unlike the first book, there’s only a bit of interaction between the plots. One plot concerns First of the Magi, Bayuz, and his band of intrepid and mismatched explorers as they journey to the edge of the world to find the Seed, the remnant of the underworld which can be used as a great weapon. Bayuz intends to use it against Khalul, the prophet of the Gurkish south continent who has incited his followers to revert to ancient evil ways. This story is told from the perspectives of Jezal dan Luthar, an overconfident arrogant sword-wielding nobleman, Logen The Bloody Nine
Nine-Fingers, a brutish and brutal expatriate Northman, and untrusting Ferro Malthiss, former slave, whore, and angry killer of the Gurkish. Sub-plot number one is mainly a tale of will they grow up and get along, this malcontent band
as they travel westward across the old continent.
Tale number two concerns Sand dan Glokta, now Superior of the King’s Inquisition of Dagoska. Dagoska is a city situated on a lonely peninsula on the southern continent, separated and far from the Kingdom’s main territory. He’s been given a King’s Writ to take charge of the city, not just the inquisition, and defend it against the Gurkish Empire which threatens to take Dagoska. Not only do they have an army, the Gurkish Empire also owns traitors on the Dagoska ruling council. Who best to find a traitor than the Inquisition??
And story number three is the kingdom’s fight against the Northmen led by Bethod, newly installed as their first king. This one is told from the point of view of Colonel West, a commoner with a commission in the army, a truly unusual circumstance. Other folks that get the story told from their eyes are a band of Northmen exiles led by Rudd Threetrees, former opponent and companion of Logen Nine-Fingers. Wily and battle-hardened, their aid may be all that keeps the army from being routed by the cunning Bethod.
Abercrombie’s strength is his characters. There are fewer points of view in the second installment, which makes for better continuity. Those on the journey west with Bayuz are fun, but we’ve seen their like in many fantasy tales before. They are a bit less interesting than I wanted, Nine-Fingers in particular. In book one I remember him as extremely world-weary, almost having lost his will to live. He’s gained some of that back, and comes across as the reticent wise veteran here. I have a big complaint about Ferro that I’ll get to later. I liked Jezal dan Luthar though. Again, fairly stock archetype, but Abercrombie does a great job of taking us from the arrogant young nobleman to the wiser soldier at the end. There’s no one magic point where the transformation occurs, and he retains parts of his youthful ways even to the end. He’s done pretty well.
Sand dan Glokta gets to show a bit more human side this outing. We’ve always known he’s a self-aware torturer. He knows he’s doing bad things, and he does them anyway. That’s always been the beauty of Glokta’s character. It makes him even more monstrous than the pain-loving Practicals in his employ. Glokta doesn’t do these things because he must, but because it’s his job and he’s good at it. He has a conscience, a slight one, but ignores it. It’s a tightrope for a character, but it makes him a good anti-hero. One I became invested in, despite what he does. I read somewhere that there is a non-series book to be set in this world. It wouldn’t be too bad a book to tell Glokta’s story, though there’s a lot of danger there since it would be a prequel.
I’m going to skip the soldiers in the north. They were well done, but I just don’t have much to say about them.
I do have something to say about the female characters in the book though. The word that comes to mind when I think about them is misogynistic
. I know it’s a loaded word to throw out there, but I can’t think of anything else. The vast majority of the characters in the book are male. Contrast that with Lois McMaster Bujold’s Paladin of Souls which I didn’t like all that much, but which included many female characters. I can think of only four in this book, three of them minor. The one to get the second most screen time is Cathil, who serves little purpose except as a semen receptacle. One of the big parts of Ferro’s character is similar, she’s a former slave/prostitute who must shut out a life of being used sexually and uses that to fuel her rage. Female character three is West’s sister Ardee. While not a bimbo, she spends the entire book waiting for her male saviors. Practical Vitari is a pain-loving torturer list her co-workers. But, minor and unimportant spoiler here, she’s revealed to have a soft spot for her multiple children. All four women defined by very stereotypical attributes. An argument can be made that anything modeled on Medieval times should follow Medieval culture, a very patriarchal one. But if we get to build a fantastic world, one with majic and invented geographies and societies created from the mind, could we not discard the typical female roles for a while? I know it’s too late for Last Argument of Kings, as that book is probably already on the shelves in England.
I do like the book, even if not as much as the first in the series. The westward journeying folks got tiresome. But the war in the north was a decent page-turner. Abercrombie kept the action moving. And Sand dan Glokta down in Dagoska is riveting read. I didn’t know how either plot would turn out. I half-expected the army to lose one or both wars and see the kingdom overrun. You’ll have to read to find out. But usually you read those kinds of stories and get an immediate feeling that while the babyfaces will have a rough go of it, there’s no way they can lose except temporarily. That would be the end of the story. David Anthony Durham’s Acacia has that quality. When his empire falls early, you know the second half of the book is going to be all about how they regain it. Abercrombie puts you in the place of peopel who deserve some to lose, and you don’t feel as if there’s some great comeback necessarily coming, because the protagonists aren’t by their nature the right kind of people.
Despite the negatives, which you can blame on me being a burned up shell of a man, I recommend the book after you’ve read the The Blade Itself. Joe Abercrombie has talent.
Late-breaking addition: Joe Abercrombie’s response.
Title: Before they are hanged
Author: Joe Abercrombie
Series: The first law; 2
Imprint / publisher: Pyr / Prometheus (originally Gollancz in the U.K.)
Format: Paperback
Length: 539 p.
Publication date: March 2008
ISBN-10: 1-59102-641-5
ISBN-13: 978-1-59102-641-9
LC classification: PR6101.B49 B45 2008
