Shy South and her cowardly stepfather Lamb return home to find their farm burned and Shy’s younger brother and sister kidnapped and set out in pursuit, as you do. Meanwhile, Temple, a lawyer in the service of infamous soldier of fortune Nicomo Cosca, begins having conscience issues as Cosca’s mercenaries, the Company of the Gracious Hand, are hired by the territory-hungry Union to terrorize the Far Country, so as to make the Union’s forces look like saviours when they arrive. Both are heading west, into recently settled, hard-scrabble frontier country filled with desperate miners and desperate businessmen and all the desperate people who lived there before, now struggling with the arrival of “civilization”.
Red Country is Abercrombie’s sixth novel, and takes place in the same fantasy setting as all his others. His first three books, The First Law Trilogy, are a take on epic fantasy that utilizes many of the genre’s tropes — political strife, invading armies (of dark-skinned people, for bonus stereotype points), a quest for a magical object that will lay the righteous smackdown on the evildoers –, but emphasizes cynicism and the complete moral equivalency of the forces initially set up as “good” and “evil”, and subverts the idea that characters’ arcs will see them grow and improve throughout the course of such a story. This, now, is the third of three semi-standalone novels that take place in the years following the trilogy, telling individual stories that explore different parts of the setting, bring Abercrombie’s brand of cynical, low-magic fantasy into contact with other genres, such as the war story and the revenge thriller, and, fairly clearly, lay groundwork for future conflicts in this setting. Red Country is Abercrombie’s western, and it contains all the grim, chiselled jaws and badassery that could be wished for in its few, frenetic, filthy action sequences, as well as all the discomforting of the myth and romance of the frontier, of the notion of progress, of the noble and rugged explorer, that might be expected from Abercrombie. His vision of a frontier town, a western staple transported onto the edges of fantasy territory where Abercrombie’s novels live, is, for instance, almost hellish: a crumbling, decrepit, grime-covered press of people grasping desperately at the needs and wants they’ve convinced themselves they’ll be able to satisfy in the west.
A lot of the specific characters we focus on evince a similar, largely futile desperation. Shy goes west to find her kin. Temple hopes to evade his past crimes-by-proxy and become a better person in a vague sort of way simply by running from his former life. Some of the older characters, a couple of them returning from Abercrombie’s previous novels, are going west to recover something of their former selves. Temple’s mercenary boss Cosca’s portrayal in particular has a frantic air about it, and I think this is very deliberate, rather than a sign the author’s running out of steam: He cracks old jokes — Abercrombie’s longtime readers know they’re old, because Cosca’s cracked them in previous novels –, lies about his exploits to such a chronic degree that it’s unclear whether or not he half believes himself, cannot mount or dismount a horse without help, gesticulates uselessly where once his drinky, fetid, grungy facade concealed a genuinely keen mind. What happens to the incorrigible rogue, the book asks, when his graceful surface deteriorates, and all that remains is the undisguised slimeball, with no wits to mask the slime?
Everybody’s staking something of themselves on the west, ignoring the desires of those who live there already and just want things to go back to exactly how they were (a goal that, in a move you may or may not find offensive depending on how colonial the whole thing rings to you, is in and of itself problematized). And, in its resolution of these searches for fulfillment in the west, I’d argue that this is simultaneously Abercrombie’s most and least cynical novel yet. On the one hand, in a move to acknowledge that the world entire is not absolutely always and inevitably a complete bowl of shit for everyone everywhere for ever and ever, a couple individual people’s lives actually improve over the course of Red Country, which is kind of new for Abercrombie. I’m so proud, Joe. So proud! On the other hand, don’t worry; he’s not losing his touch. Most people still get screwed, and the book casts a very jaundiced eye over pretty much any and all large-scale ambition or hope for the futures of groups, rather than individuals. Red Country’s full of the trademark Abercrombite insistence on people’s tendency to do the wrong or easy thing, gleefully dirty and unglamorous settings and characters, depictions of the indigenous inhabitants of the Far Country as rag-clad scroungers on their last legs that almost get by because the whole damn cast is portrayed precisely this same way but still feel rather dirty, and hints that a bare few might yet get a chance at lives. It’s ostentatiously hard-nosed and nihilistic fantasy fiction punctuated by dark humour, and there’s a reason Abercrombie is the internet-crowned king of this niche: there really is a lot to be gotten out of this if it’s your thing. I read it in the right mood and enjoyed it thoroughly, even though I find I’m in the right frame of mind for Abercrombie less and less often and have increasing reservations about his fiction. It is strong medicine, though. I usually feel kind of tired after finishing an Abercrombie book, like I won’t need another for a little while, and Red Country’s no exception in that regard. Not
my very favourite book by Abercrombie — the bar is high, despite the problems — but an often excellent novel that plays to the author’s strengths, focuses them into a lean, narratively economical package, and begins to show hints of his power to subvert not just fantasy mainstays, which he lampoons wonderfully (and perhaps occasionally overzealously), but also his own insistent grimness. Start here, as it’s standalone. Or, if you want to follow the series in chronological order and thus get the full impact of the character arcs that culminate in Red Country, start with The Blade Itself, the first book of The First Law.
Recommended: If you like very grounded, irreverent, nihilistic fiction, and like or think you would like this method of storytelling applied to fantasy, Abercrombie pretty much rules the roost. Think of it like George R. R. Martin’s A Game of Thrones, but with more irreverence and less of the underlying sense of majesty and tragedy that always runs under the grim surface of Martin’s fiction.
Avoid: Abercrombie’s novels, with exceptions, are about how life is a festering cesspit and people do not and cannot change. Yes, in my opinion some of the notes on which this novel leaves its characters make it the author’s most hopeful and sympathetic work to date, but this is still Abercrombie. He’s always being cynical to a purpose, mercilessly puncturing and problematizing romanticized cliches, but the technique as deployed here is persistent to the point of overwhelming, so if a heaping helping of cynicism isn’t your bag a pass might be most judicious. In particular, the first part of the novel’s climax involves an extended series of scenes covering the comprehensive massacre of an entire group of indigenous western people and the looting of their homes by greed-crazed invaders which puts the lie to the narratives of noble exploration that so often crop up in both fantasy and frontier fiction very thoroughly but in terms of being grueling to read is pretty much the worst, and which some people may just not be interested in reading whether they think the book’s well-written or not.
Thinking in the Dark About Shiny Things 