Review: A Little Hatred by Joe Abercrombie

The more things change, the more they stay the same.

In A Little Hatred we return to the world of Abercrombie’s The First Law series 30 years after the apocalyptic Battle of Adua that closed out Last Argument of Kings, and the times, they are a changin’. An industrial revolution is well apace, the common lands are rapidly enclosed, and exciting new inventions and manufactories seem to create new opportunities for the rich to get richer and the poor to get ever poorer. This shift has been carefully foreshadowed in some of the standalone novels (The Heroes and Red Country) but Abercrombie really nails the intricacies of an early-modern-era setting here, leaning on literary traditions far afield of your typical fantasy: The poor live in brutal conditions that won’t be unfamiliar to readers of Charles Dickens or Victor Hugo, while the wealthy citizens of the Union spend their lives carefully preening to participate in a cutthroat vision of “high society” that brings to mind the works of Jane Austen. Naturally, there is still plenty of manly combat to be had in these pages, the overall shift is to a register of social rather than physical conflict. Even magic has seemingly been leached out of the Circle of the World (Bayaz, the First of the Magi, here appears in a business suit, carrying a crystal-topped cane in lieu of his wizard’s staff), but the threat of violence and cruelty is never far from the surface.

The plot centers around an interesting quartet of characters (Savine dan Glokta, Leo dan Brock, Rikke, and Crown Prince Orso) brought together and torn apart by fate, blood, desire, and happenstance. These four figures, two men and two women, have some intriguing parallels and oppositions built into them that I think will be interesting as the series moves forward (the book frequently feels like a winking examination of the tropes of romance novels, with some very funny undercutting of eroticism that had me cracking up at times). Unfortunately, while all of these four (along with a few additional POV characters) are fun, unique, and rather likable, none of them so far has attained the “breakout” stature of characters from Abercrombie’s earlier books, like Bayaz, Inquisitor Glokta, Monza Murcatto, and of course Logen Ninefingers. The shadow of earlier generations is quite long, and the would-be heroes of the “Age of Madness” have a ways to go before they emerge from it. A big part of the problem is the fact that the majority of the characters Abercrombie introduces here are both quite young (and thus lacking in the twisted, brutal backstories that made figures like Glokta and Ninefingers so instantly intriguing) and the children of famed heroes of the previous age. It’s a difficult tightrope to walk, and I don’t envy Abercrombie the task of making this new generation the equal to their parents… Overall I think he does about as well as one can.

Abercrombie uses his full set of literary tricks here, from a “Wandering Rocks” style chapter that switches points-of-view to encompass the chaos of a worker’s revolt (a technique he previously deployed to great effect in The Heroes) to his perhaps-too-frequent utilization of cutting witticisms and folksy pearls of wisdom (“Battles may sometimes be won by the brave, but wars are always won by the clever,” “When you tell a lie, you have to sound like you believe it. Goes double for the ones you tell yourself,” etc, etc). The overall feeling is of literary richness, almost to overflowing, and there is much to enjoy here on a linguistic and literary level, above and beyond the machinations of the plot.

Overall, I definitely enjoyed this return to the Circle of the World, and it was a ton of fun to look at Abercombie’s vision of his world a generation later (I don’t think I would recommend that a reader jump right into this without reading at least the original trilogy… this is far less self-contained than one of the standalone novels like Best Served Cold). I’m definitely looking forward to the next books in the series, The Trouble with Peace and The Beautiful Machine… How delightful that they will be arriving so soon!