I think I hate “A Little Hatred”…a little bit.

Before I judge this too harshly, I do have to take a step back and admit that \*Last Argument of Kings\* was the best part of the original First Law Trilogy. But immediately after that was \*Best Served Cold\* AKA “Best novel Abercrombie ever wrote.” And I accepted that it’s hard to follow up a perfect grimdark standalone book with something equally good, as Abercrombie wrote a war epic and then a western. But now we’ve arrived here, and even taking all of that into consideration, even admitting that at no point was this book ever outright \*bad,\* I still have to allow myself to say it: This is a deeply hollow, vacuous novel that mostly rides on echoes of past success. It’s the equivalent of an extremely talented, prolific actor showing up to give a phoned in performance. It manages to make every other Abercrombie book seem worse with its sheer shallowness, because it tragically reveals the limits of Abercrombie’s storytelling and worldbuilding.

I think the biggest, first problem that I see here, which makes every novel Abercrombie has ever written seem worse, is the book’s conception of history. The time skip that we experience before the novel starts is summed up as “a period of peace.” And holy shit. We get nothing else. On chapter one you’ve lost me. The idea that the society in this world is either at war, or \*nothing\* is happening, totally breaks Abercrombie’s world open. Even other grimdark writers like George R.R. Martin were willing to entertain the simple notion that \*the meaningful machinations of society\* that are worth telling the reader about continue regardless of whether the world is at war or at peace, that there are \*other parts of history\* aside from human beings killing each other. And that causes me to look back at every book before this and realize something: Abercrombie doesn’t just write about violence, he imagines a world that expresses itself only through violence. Did anything important ever happen that wasn’t just people killing each other? Every interpersonal character drama always seems to come back to violence eventually. And, especially after Red Country and The Heroes, it felt like Joe Abercrombie had said everything that he could possibly have to say about violence. If you were to make that assumption, you’d be right.

It’s not a sin to write a book that has no thematic depth of its own, and just retreads the same ideological ground. Plenty of books have no meaning at all and are still fun. But this is a far cry from what Abercrombie was doing before, and it doesn’t work as well the second time. Joining that complaint are the characters.

Every new character is less interesting than every old character. It’s remarkably consistent. A lot of them are much worse versions of previous characters. Leo Dan Brock is a bland shadow of Jezal Dan Luther. Prince Orso is inexplicably competent and we’re led to believe that he just didn’t believe in himself. Savine Dan Glokta is a girlboss with equally inexplicable affection for the commoners working beneath her that seems to defy the usual “warts and all” characterization of this series. She is not worthy of being her father’s daughter. Worst of all, she makes fucking Glokta a worse character, because Abercrombie actually struggles to portray him as a father. Not as in “Glokta is a bad father” or “Glokta is a good father” but just…any kind of sense of what the relationship between Glokta and his daughter is like.

And finally, the religious commitment to cynicism has officially made this series more predictable than anything else. Of course every relationship between two characters ends in irreconcilable differences. Of course all the prisoners are hanged, and of course every idealistic revolutionary gets tortured to death. Anyone who defies the most powerful characters gets poisoned every time. Every cultural precept means nothing and everyone ultimately betrays their values and morals and nothing goes well for everyone. I am not criticizing this because it is sad or dark, I am working around to criticizing Abercrombie’s storytelling in the same way I criticized his worldbuilding: there is actually nothing in this world but war and violence. The author simply is not interested in anything else. Nothing happy is interesting enough to write about, and if characters experience joy it needs to be kept brief so that they can lose it as quickly as possible. It’s simple and predictable, and therefore stale and boring. It seems like Abercrombie has actually regressed from moments when Glokta the torturer randomly showed mercy or when Logen Ninefingers genuinely tried his hardest to make friends with people. That author understood the power of shining a little bit of light in a world filled with darkness. This one doesn’t seem to value that, anymore. But of course, even desiring happiness for these characters means caring about them, and that leads us right back to the “every character is worse” problem.

I actually don’t think I hate it. But I don’t hate a lot of things, and I really have to consider whether “falling so far” is the only thing provoking this disdain. Right now I’m sitting hard on the fence and I really don’t know whether it’s a two star or three star book.

by MaichenM