The Trouble with Peace by Joe Abercrombie
My rating: 3 of 5 stars “Only the mad could be steady here.” The Trouble with Peace (2020) is another dip into Joe Abercrombie’s grim epic fantasy world, where there are no good heroes or altruistic mages but plenty of hard choices, treachery, and graphic ultra-violence. This second book in the Age of Madness trilogy takes place right after the first one, A Little Hatred (2019), and about twenty-eight years after the events of the First Law trilogy (2006-08). As in his other books, third-person narration rotates among a varied set of flawed point of view characters in different locales and situations, often outside their comfort zones. Newly-crowned ex-party prince King Orso sits the Union throne uncomfortably, aware that he’s hated by both nobles and commoners and that the Breakers and Burners are fomenting rebellion—the Great Change—from among the lower classes. And he’s still feeling dead at having been dumped without explanation by his quondam lover Savine dan Glokta (we know it’s because she learned they were siblings). Must he let it all be handled by his Closed Council (including Savine’s spy master father Arch Lector Glokta and the First of the Magi Bayaz, no Gandalf but a terrifying free-market banker puppet master)? Savine is still snorting up pearl dust and trying to get over having been caught in an uprising in Valbek, when she had to flee a mob at one of her factories, shave her head, live among the poor, and scrounge garbage to survive. Her business interests are suffering, and she’s pregnant with a bastard. Is her only solution to marry Leo dan Brock, the Young Lion, the current hero-darling of the Union? With her connections and his fame, what might they not accomplish? “If the world had to lose so she could win, so be it.” Leo is the new Governor of Angland (the northern land of the Union), but he’s still afflicted by the festering leg wound he received when besting the Great Wolf of the North, Stour Nightfall, in a duel. When Leo visits the capital city of the Union to try to get King Orso to understand Angland’s plight, he’s invited by treasonous nobles from the Open Council to help them “free” King Orso from the corrupt Closed Council. What’s a brave, brainless hero who’d rather lead a cavalry charge than strategize to do? “No corpses, no glory.” Rikke, the daughter of the Dogman, the leader of Uffrith, a Northern protectorate of the Union, is ever more plagued by the fits attendant upon her raging Long Eye gift/curse of prophetic vision, leaving her unable to eat and often unable to distinguish between past, present, and future. Is her only solution to visit a verboten mountain lake to meet an undead witch whose face is stitched together with gold wire? “What use are straight answers in a crooked world?” Jonas Clover is a grizzled Northerner who follows survivor precepts like it’s better to stab a sleeping enemy than fight him in a battle, and it’s better to stand with the winners. Thus, when Stour Nightfall murdered his uncle to become King of the North, Clover stabbed his old friend Wonderful in her back to (appear to) stand with Stour. How can he stick to his policy of avoiding battles when given a troop of Northern fighters to lead onto Union soil? Victorine “Vick” dan Teufel, the loyal spy-pawn of Arch Lector Glokta, arrives at the border crossroads city of Westport to prevent its aldermen from voting to leave the Union to join its bitter enemy Styria. Will she find the right balance of favors, threats, and violence? Will her scrawny right hand boy Tallow ever touch her conscience? Finally, the hulking veteran Gunnar Broad is living in uncomfortable luxury with his beloved wife and daughter while thugging for Savine to improve “labor relations.” (Don’t stand near him when he removes his spectacles!) Will he ever act on his feeling that the workers he intimidates would live and work better with higher pay and safer working conditions? The way Abercrombie manages those point of view characters and their predicaments and sets them on collision courses is page turning, if not enjoyable. It's challenging when point of view characters you like do things you dislike, but it becomes intolerable when they unconvincingly do them for plot contrivance, and it’s worse still when they repeatedly rationalize their behavior, all of which gets irritating with Savine, Leo, Vick, and Broad. Abercrombie similarly mistreats supporting characters like Glokta and especially Leo’s mother Finree. In A Little Hatred, she’s a calm, informed, wise, brave, and effective leader, Governor and General of Angland, controlling Leo’s worst heroic inclinations. Here, she’s suddenly pathetic, blind to what her son’s up to and then pleading and shrieking with him about it when it’s supposedly too late. I didn’t quit on this book because Abercrombie nonetheless made me need to find out what would happen to his characters, and because Rikke and Orso and their friends are so surprising and appealing. And because Abercrombie skewers heroism (“Heroes are defined after all not by what they do or why but by what people think”), mocks war (“farting bugles and bumbling drums”), and shows its horror (utter madness in which only insane people are capable). However, he writes exciting and suspenseful war scenes, so that despite their awful absurdities and graphic violence, we do read them on the edge of our seats. He's NOT writing a truly anti-war war fantasy akin to the likes of Red Badge of Courage or All Quiet on the Western Front, which deny the reader any kind of morbid thrill. I enjoy his wry humor, as in lines like “It occurred to him now, the way the slaughter man occurs to the pig.” I get a kick out of his characters’ cynical wisdom, like “Hoping for a thing often seems to be the best way to bring the opposite.” And he writes biting banter, like: “Being your father is the only thing I’m proud of.” (Glokta) “And you’re not even my father.” (Savine) “That should tell you about everything else I’ve done.” (Glokta) And Leo’s homosexuality and homophobia are a potentially neat development. I like Steven Pacey's reading of the audiobook, especially his ever-surprisingly high voice for Orso’s herculean ex-hero bodyguard Gorst. Finally, the novel contains two prime surprises, and it ends with enough closure and enough juicy loose ends that although I don’t need to rush to the last volume in the trilogy, I will read it to find out how everything will end up. View all my reviews
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