Now, I read very little fantasy these days, and my knowledge of the genre is pretty pathetic. I can remember a couple of years ago when The Blade Itself came out I had a review that described the book as having a “Vancian reminiscence.” “Vancian?” I asked my editors, with one eyebrow raised. “That’s right, like Jack Vance.” “Jack Vance?” I asked with both eyebrows raised. They looked at me as if I’d asked who Elvis was. I’ve read Tolkien, course. Dragonlance, Eddings, bit of Jordan, guilty as charged. Martin, Moorcock, and LeGuin, yes. But more recently, you can pretty much forget it. Bakker, not a word. Erikson, not a peep. Mieville, not a sausage.
I believe if you’re going to be a serious critic, you need to know the genre you’re talking about pretty damn well, so you can see where a piece stands in relation to others. Furthermore, as a writer of fantasy myself, I find a) rating other people’s work is a bit close to the bone, since I know how it feels to be rated myself, and I don’t always enjoy it, and b) I find it very hard to get properly submerged in fantasy writing now – I’m always picking at it, thinking how I’d do it differently, and so on – like a glassblower looking at someone else’s beautiful vase and moaning that he wouldn’t have done the fluting just that way. Some writers are critics too, and the best of luck to them, but I’m not one, really, except in the “like arseholes, everyone’s got opinions” sense. But Simon Spanton at Gollancz asked me for mine (opinion, that is, not arsehole) on sf author Richard Morgan’s foray into the world of epic fantasy, The Steel Remains.
I will not presume to review it, there’ll be folk enough doing that shortly, I’m sure. I’ll just say how it struck me.
This is a good book. It may very well be part of a really great series. It’s an extreme book, a challenging book in all kinds of ways – themes, content, and style. It reaches the parts most epic fantasies don’t reach and many fantasy readers may not want to have reached. Morgan seems to say to them – tough shit, and you’ve got to greatly admire his bollocks in doing so. No-one could accuse him of moving into fantasy in order to take the easy commercial path. NO-ONE.
Larry from Wotmania was recently examining bad criticism in the genre, and pointing out that there’s nothing lazier than talking about one book by glibly comparing it to another. I will now, therefore, encaspsulate The Steel Remains by glibly comparing it to a whole load of other stuff that it’s only vaguely like. Observe me in action:
There’s not much Tolkien in the mix at all, not much epic massiveness, no good and evil whatsoever, just loads of evil, and boy is there no romanticism. But there’s not much Martin either, which surprised me, because that’s more what I was expecting – Morgan’s isn’t a low magic world really, in fact there’s quite a range of the wierd and wonderful in there. Elves (but messed up), Lizardmen (kind of), Dragons (of a sort), Magic swords (ish), sorcery (maybe). If I had to say what the world made me think of (work with me, Larry, work with me) it’s probably closest to something like the sweaty back-streets of Fritz Leiber’s Lankhmar, with a bit of the endless steppe from the Conan the Barbarian movie, and the lost, ancient technologies of the Elder Scrolls computer games. A world full of the strange and unexplained, but also a very grim one, constantly in the shadow of old and terrible wars with lashings of religious bigotry, sexual oppression, messy executions, and slavery.
I’m probably doing it a disservice and making it sound piecemeal, which it isn’t really. In fact it’s pretty interesting with quite a few (to me at least) original notions in there, especially as the book goes on. A surprsingly tasty cocktail, for one with so varied a set of ingredients. Certainly the book doesn’t feel at all like some ham-fisted reaction against fantasy, just a very different take on it. Some would probably say it’s light on the worldbuilding, and be confused as to where x is in relation to y, but that suits me fine, as you can imagine.
What else can I compare it to? It has the explosive violence of, well, Richard Morgan (only about twice as explosive), the moral ambiguity of vintage Moorcock (but about three times as dark), with the explicit sexual content of Martin (only about ten times more explicit, and I’m not kidding), the harsh language of Scott Lynch (times about 1,000,000). If those things put you off, really, don’t bother. The first couple of pages will probably give you a bit of mouth sick. The lyricism of Patrick Rothfuss? Not so much. The languid descriptions of Robert Jordan? No. The charming rural laughs of Eddings? No. No. No.
Anyway, I was honoured to be asked for a line or two on it, so here’s mine:
“Bold, brutal, and making no compromises – Morgan doesn’t so much twist the cliches of fantasy as take an axe to them. Then set them on fire. Then put them out by pissing on them.”
I suspect the last sentence won’t make many press releases, but I like to think that Mr. Morgan would approve. I ended up liking The Steel Remains a lot, and I think a lot of other people will too, but I must admit it took me quite a while to get there.
For one thing, I’m not used to reading other people’s manuscripts, and since it looked kind of like one of mine, it took me a while to just read it without thinking stuff like, “no, no, wrong adverb.” Setting and binding definitely helps to give books authority – I find reading proofs a bit odd, in fact, so this was quite weird to begin with. Also, Morgan’s approach to fantasy feels somewhere in the same ballpark as mine. I mean, it’s not actually alike in any meaningful way, far further apart than a whole host of writers are to Tolkien, say. But close enough that I felt not just like a glass-blower assessing someone else’s glassware, but a maker of little glass unicorns looking at someone else’s glass unicorns. A pathetic metaphor. What I’m trying to say is it drops you in at the deep end, in the middle of the action, and lets the reader sink or swim. It’s harsh, with some occasional black humour, has used-up, world-weary, semi-likeable characters, some heavy violence, a very modern sensibility and a feel of edgy realism. Probably it was that much harder for me to achieve “submersion” in it, if you like, than it will be for most, because it’s my cup of tea, and I was therefore tasting it with much greater and more critical discernment than usual. It’s my cup of tea, only a lot stronger than I usually take it, I must admit. Real brown and soupy. Like the bag’s been left in overnight, or something. This is some strong medicine, and as I was going through, I must admit that I found myself often wondering – how extreme, in all sorts of ways, is too extreme?
It’s not that I’m a prude (he says, loosening his well-starched dog collar by just the tiniest fraction that strict social decorum will allow), and often I got caught up in it all and the heart would be pumping, but sometimes I’d wipe the latest explosion of gore, shit, or spunk from my face and just think, “must we? Must we, again?” It occasionally gave me that feeling of, “if you’re playing on 10 all the time, and you want that little bit more, where do you go?” Some will definitely love this book and some will definitely hate it, but a few may reasonably think it could have been just a tad less lurid at times and gained punch as a result…
There’s
also an unremitting grimness that makes it all pretty heavy-going in places. Ariel coined the term “Brutalist Fantasy” and I think that’s very apt. Everyone is in fear, in danger, alone, oppressed, hated, self-loathing, tortured by their pasts, and the result is that it feels, at least for the first half, perhaps a bit one-toned. The upside is that a couple of deft touches of humanity later on, from some of the places you least expect them, shine brightly against the grim backdrop, and when the central characters finally come together for the finale, the bond between them is surprisingly effective and really quite touching.
But probably the biggest problem I had with the book, and this is a personal reaction rather than a general criticism, is its utterly unflinching modernity – in the prose, and in the dialogue. No doubt it’s entirely intentional, but I did find it jarring. Barbarians use phrases like “back in ’55”, everyone from swineherd, to knight, to emperor, says “yeah,” frequently, and everyone, and I mean everyone, says “fuck.” They say it a lot. They say it a fucking lot.
Now, don’t get me wrong, I despise faux victorian romanticism in prose and dialogue as much as the next man. A lot more, in fact. I’m not asking anyone to go all “prithee”, “pon mine honour” and “ifaith, my liege”, but at the same time I feel the words you pick are very important, and for me some of the language didn’t necessarily communicate much about the characters and the settings in question, in fact it conflicted with them quite badly, at least at first, and gave it all an oddly schizophrenic feel. An epic fantasy with the prose of … well, of a Richard Morgan dystopian sci-fi. The issue of what is or is not anachronistic is one we could spend a great deal of time discussing, so I’ll duck it like the coward I am. I must say I got used to the unflinching, unapologetic modernism over time, but I never quite liked it. I would not be at all surprised if Morgan has used the word “fuck” more in one book than Scott Lynch in two and me in three all put together. In fact I’d be surprised if he hadn’t. He may well have used it more than in all of his previous books put together. I love a bit of swearing, I’ve written empassioned defences of its use in fantasy but there definitely is such a thing as too much. I wouldn’t consider it an anachronism, but in the end, five times in one paragraph, it just gets repetitive, boring, ineffective. Obviously, everyone will have a different threshold there, but for me, there was waaaaaaay too much, at least early on.
Now I know what you’re all thinking. “Joe, you hypocritical bastard, these are just the same criticisms you’re constantly and shrilly defending yourself against!” Ooops. You’re right. Modern verbiage. Too much swearing. Too much dark. Over-the-top violence. I can only scratch my head and say, it’s all a question of balance, and every reader or writer will find theirs in a different place, and if you think my stuff is in any way extreme, then think again, rapidly, because fantasy just got a whole lot more extreme, guys. I am proudly middle-of-the road, now. I am made bland, and inoffensive, and believe me, so is everybody else.
Anyway, these are details, really, which made me struggle at first, but that generally fell away as the book went on and I got drawn into the setting, and the people, and the unfolding of the mystery. By the last hundred pages or so I was properly gripped. It’s a slow builder, and takes a bit of time getting there (another criticism everyone always has of my books), but has a cracking action finale, and an ending that would seem to promise some very interesting developments as the series goes on. It also strikes a nice balance between resolution of a book and setting up of a trilogy, something that’s harder than you might think. I hesitate to say, “if you like the works of x, y, or z, then give The Steel Remains a try,” because really it’s pretty much unlike anything else, and that’s why you should give it a try. You might love it, you might loathe it, but you’ll certainly find it difficult to ignore…
25 comments so far
I will not presume to review it
Bloody hell! I’d hate to see what you’d call a ‘review’ then, Joe!
Hehe, that was a great non-review though and I’m jealous as hell that you got your hands on a pre-release manuscript. This is a book I’m looking forward to reading as I am a fan of Morgan’s and was blown away by his first book, Altered Carbon. I made friends’ ears bleed by nagging them to read it (you’ll be pleased to know I’ve done the same with your works) I now have a lot of friends but they’re all deaf…
Best,
Bob
You’re probably right that the last sentence won’t make the cut, but it would be hellaciously funny if it did…
It’ll be interesting to see how this book goes down. I’ve seen some vague mutterings in various internet forums about the apparent surplus of ‘gritty fantasy’ at the moment and have even heard it suggested that it’s becoming a cliche in itself.
To then unleash a book that takes it all to a new level could cause some sparks to fly.
It does sound pretty good though, and personally I do like my fantasy gritty or ‘brutalist’, so I’ll probably check it out.
I forecast a one-time use of a ten-point rating scale…with you getting a 0 out of 10, for being too glib there, Joe. Feel my wrath!
Or not, since I’m quite sensitive…
I hate you for getting to read this so early, Joe.
~Aidan
A Dribble of Ink
“Bold, brutal, and making no compromises – Morgan doesn’t so much twist the cliches of fantasy as take an axe to them. Then set them on fire. Then put them out by pissing on them.”
There is no quote without the last line. It tells you just about everything you need to know. The rest of it is just the nail waiting for the hammer.
We’ve heard the cliche twisting before, but ain’t nobody pissed on the flames.
This is a great review, though I’m a little disappointed that the following was not your chosen quote:
“The first couple of pages will probably give you a bit of mouth sick.”
I can see it emblazoned on the front cover in embossed lettering. It would certainly tempt me to buy it. I will most likely check this book out, if only to imagine this quote on the front.
Aha – been looking forward to Dickie Morgan’s fantasy take since it was announced – with a quote that hinted at a level of sweary, violency, uncompromising realness.
He’s made his mark in sci-fi (tho my fave is ‘Market Forces’ the least SF in flavour and has great car chases) and now seems to be going to take the Fantasy genre by the throat and ‘kick the ass’ out of it, as only a blue-belgiumed, steroid-abusin’, dis-respectin’ homie can.
I’ll probably not like it. But I’ll love reading it – and it’s already pre-bought on Amazon!
Bob,
I think fans of Morgan’s will be very much split on this. It will be very interesting to see what folks make of it.
Elena,
You can laugh at it whether it makes the cut or not.
Larry,
That is just such a Jonathan McCalmont meets Cheryl Morgan meets Rick Kleffel thing to say. I give your comment 3.152 broadswords out of 7.
JG,
It is gritty, but it feels like something very other. It’s not really part of a tradition, to me, so much as it really does stand apart. I don’t think I’ve ever read a fantasy book that is less like fantasy. I’m not even sure it is fantasy, really. I don’t think anyone will be thinking of it as cliched. I think everyone will concentrate on the extremeness, but putting that to one side, it really does have a unique flavour, and though some details irritated me that ‘feel’ has really stuck in my mind after finishing it. It could be a truly ground-breaking series, certainly too much so for some.
Aidan,
Your hate hurts only yourself, man.
Joe/jdp,
Piss and sick is the least of it.
Ady,
This book may not be quite what you’re expecting…
I think that should have been a 22/7 rating, rounded to the nearest millionth decimal place. You’re slacking, Joe.
I am interested in reading this one. For me, the writers who achieve the best balance of grittiness and readability are Bakker and Kearney, who both go pretty extreme at times but then know to pull it back so as not to make the reader, for example, hurl over the book (which I find inhibits the reading experience).
I put Morgan in this bracket as well, based on Altered Carbon and Black Man, but if he goes far beyond even those books I could see it becoming a turn-off. I’m looking forward to see how he does with it.
Hmmmmm…I think I need to agree with you Joe on this wrt the swearing, too much tends to loose impact (which surly is the point) & for me can jar you out of the moment, having said this you do actually pique my interest on this so I think I’ll have to keep my peepers pealed for some more reviews…reminds my of the amount of coverage I’ve read regarding the rape in Donaldson’s first Gap book, it seemed to blind some ppl from just how excellent the rest of the book & subsequently the series was, lets hope that something similar doesn’t happen to this.
Ah well at least yer non-review does suggest that the label of ‘misogynist’ (very unfair to you by the way) won’t be levelled at him as you suggest that he treats everyone with the same level of contempt 😉
“if you’re playing on 10 all the time, and you want that little bit more, where do you go?”
LOL I think you could almost apply that line to the pursuit of a perfect 10 out of 10 review…
So now that you’re middle of the road I won’t need to worry about wiping gore, shit & spunk from my face as I immerse myself in yer next series…
Just an average sci-fi fan here–if you can call being 60 years old and female “average”. Very interesting review–having read sci-fi for 50 years I have to admit RKM is my favorite author (sorry Joe!) and am looking so forward to all the controversial and bad stuff. As for the language–RKM can’t say fuck any more than my ex ever did.
I’m reading your books right now (you can thank Pat at Fantasy Hot List), though I think they’re more for a 20-something male, they’re pretty good. Have to wonder, though, why I keep picturing Monty Python in some of your scenes..??
Ady said: {{take the Fantasy genre by the throat and ‘kick the ass’ out of it, as only a blue-belgiumed, steroid-abusin’, dis-respectin’ homie can.}}
But while I haven’t read the book yet, I heard a long time back that Ady’s view here is wrong — there’s one key word that needs to be changed — but I’m not going to tell you what it is because Joe’s managed not to let the cat out of the bag either…
But guess what, everyone? I got an early look at Joe’s latest!
Larry,
I’m not a professional reviewer, so I leave off at 3 decimal places. I’ll leave that millionth decimal place to the hardcore gourmets.
Adam,
It’s partly about the fact that this is fantasy, and in fantasy readers are used to certain things. A certain tone of voice, particularly. The violence is probably the area in which it is least challenging, just because epic fantasy is often pretty damn violent already.
vlg,
yes, it is more hating of humanity in general than of any given group.
anonymous,
Cheers for the comments. That’s one foul-mouthed ex you have there.
John,
Ah, my latest. Now that IS exciting.
“Then put them out by pissing on them.”
I need to get some lines like this into my reviews…
Great to meet you at the FP signing and again at Orbital.
Den
My review copy of this showed up. From the first 100-odd pages I think your review didn’t quite emphasis the humour in the book. There are several laugh-out-loud moments in the first few chapters. The sex and violence stuff though is going to be a problem for a lot of people. It makes GRRM and even Bakker look like My Little Pony writers by comparison :-O
Adam,
I guess maybe the humour was often inextricably linked with the swearing and the modern language, and I was having my problems with those, especially early on, so I probably missed the laughs in my efforts to get to grips with the whole thing.
I can’t stop reading this bokk 14th time and going for more irresistable!
I just wanted to log and tell you that you have acquired a reader in me by the sheer entertainment value and insight of your blog posts. I have subscribed and sincerely wish you luck in all of your writing endeavours, blog or novel.
I had heard your tone was a bit tongue-in-cheek but you had a darker style of fantasy, and I went ‘hmm that’s odd’ and could not reconcile those two things in my mind. Now, having read your blog posts, I think I get it. I will buy your first book today, actually.
I just bought this book (audio version) and now i am kinda worried. After reading your review (where you make it sound like my next favorite book) i just had to have it. But now i am starting to think is it that good of a book or is it just that it's JOE who could make the phone book sound like the best thing ever written if he wanted to. I just hope your taste is on the same level as your amazing ability to entertain.
Dear Joe,
As an avid fan of your books, and of your writing in general, I beseech thee to please, PLEASE read yourself some Jack Vance.
His most well known book is probably his “Dying Earth” series, which can be found in one handy omnibus edition at any decent book store. There are many other books of his that I would recomend, such as ‘Lyonesse’ or’The Dragon Masters'(for which he won a Hugo for best novella) but these books can be somewhat scarce unless you chance upon one at a used book store (which I have:).
Anywho, please for the love of everything you hold dear, read some Jack Vance! The man has an inimitable writing style and a wry sense of humor that makes him a pleasure to read. Do yourself a favor and pick up a copy of ‘The Dying Earth’, you won’t be disappointed!
[…] gritty, the gory, and the obscene. A wonderful mix. Which explains why Abercrombie wrote a rather enthusiastic review. With the surprising (given Abercrombie’s own prose!) reservation that “a few may […]
I am in the middle of it right now, and I’m kind of divided. The anachronisms feel a little jarring– I’m not used to seeing “Yeah” constantly in a fantasy setting, though I have to admit the overuse of “Fuck” didn’t bother me overmuch– you see, I had read this Abercrombie guy.. and there’s this character with nine fingers.. nay, I digress, prithee!
I did get the sensation that your novels and this one inhabit very similar spheres, but I got less of a sense of bleakness from the First Law, and more occasional light hearted moments. I’m enjoying THE STEEL REMAINS, in any event– I liked some of the decisions he made for his protagonists, that took some guts.
Thanks for non-review, even if I’m reading it 4 years after
It’s comforting to know I am not alone, in several meaningful ways, as it pertains to my thoughts on this book. Also, regardless of how any given person feels about audio books I can tell you that my experience was much the same with the audio version as it appears others have with the print version. I restarted it at almost 50% complete. I am glad that I did. Here is where I feel I deviate from others. I do not see where this is any more grim or nasty than other books. A few too many “fuck” here and a “cock” there, but I’d have to compare manuscripts and final copies to know who claims the tital of “most vulgar characters by measurement of being oversensitive, undereducated,and sexually loose while being morally justified in argument’in order to really know. Gritty? Check. Dark? Check. Inspiring? Check. This is a great title. If you started and stopped, do yourself a favor and start again.