On Vengeance, Collateral Damage, and Horrifying Eye Prosthetics

Monza Murcatto has spent the last eight years leading a mercenary company to fame and riches during the Years of Blood, a time of open warfare between the city-states of Styria. She and her charismatic brother Benna pay a visit to their patron, Duke Orso of Talins, the most powerful man in Styria, a man who is but a season of campaigning from vanquishing his enemies and becoming King. Unbeknownst to Monza and Benna, Orso sees in Monza a potential rival, as his grandfather leveraged his position as a mercenary captain to overthrow his own patron. Naturally, Orso orders Monza and Benna killed. Naturally, Monza survives (though just barely), and Benna does not. Naturally, she swears vengeance. And so begins Joe Abercrombie’s Best Served Cold, his first stand-alone novel and spiritual sequel (or maybe sidequel, I can never keep these terms straight) to his popular First Law trilogy.

First, a quick caveat: I imagine it’s entirely possible to enjoy Best Served Cold if you haven’t read First Law, but I wouldn’t recommend it. I read First Law last year, and while I enjoyed it, I remember quite a bit less of it than I thought (I think that the fact that I read the books in the weeks leading up to my wedding might have something to do with that… in fact, I finished off Last Argument of Kings on a beach on my honeymoon, which I highly recommend). Many of the characters were secondary or tertiary characters in First Law, though almost surviving character from the trilogy makes at least a cameo in some form or another, if only as a topic of conversation. For much of the book I had a sneaking suspicion I was missing the occasional small, non-essential bit or reference or cameo. So, yeah, there’s that.

Anyway.

Pushed by her insatiable desire for revenge (and aided by a cache of money she and her brother stole off one of the richest merchants in Styria), Monza assembles a motley gang of lowlifes, rejects, and psychopaths to kill not only Orso, but also his two sons, his banker, his bodyguard, his general, and Monza’s most trusted captain from her mercenary company, all of whom played a role in her betrayal. It’s very much Team-Building 101: Monza is the Leader, so she hires a Brute, a Fixer, a Rogue, a Techie, an Assistant, and a Wild Card. I don’t mean this in a bad way, as the recruitment phase is fairly brief, and all but the Fixer are interesting characters in their own right (about which, more below). And so they set off, but of course, Things Are Not What They Seem, and what seems like a fairly straightforward story gets progressively deeper and more complex. There’s nothing but shades of gray in this world. It’s part Kill Bill, part Count of Monte Cristo, part A-Team, or, if you prefer, a mashup of Seven Samurai and 47 Ronin (the actual story, not the weird magic plus Keanu movie that crashed and burned recently). You may recall that Kill Bill starts with a title card with the (not really) Klingon proverb: revenge is a dish best served cold.

The setting changes with each kill, which gives the book a fine travelogue quality that brings out the best of Abercrombie’s pseudo Renaissance Italy. If you’re familiar with Italy, you can even spot some of his influences: the Florentine towers of Visserine, the Venetian carnival in Sipani, the crumbling Roman megastructures of Talins, where the story begins and ends. Obviously Abercrombie isn’t the first to use the politics and architecture of the Renaissance as grist for the mill, and the fact that the characters travel around quite a bit means that we don’t get a good a sense of any of his cities as we do for, say, Camorr in The Lies of Locke Lamora. But Abercrombie has a talent for sketching out enough of a city to give you a good mental image, without layering on the description ad nauseum.

In fact, that’s a good segue to talk about Abercrombie’s writing, which manages to be evocative and workmanlike at the same time. Like I said, he doesn’t go in for wild linguistic flourishes (at most, he’ll use repetition, mantras, and metaphor), but wild linguistic flourishes wouldn’t really work for this story (or for First Law, for that matter). Best Served Cold is a grim, brutal book, where even the first line tells us that “the sunrise was the colour of bad blood.” As with Sand dan Glokta in First Law, Abercrombie does have a tendency to overdo the reminders of a given character’s physical infirmities (though in truth, I’m on the fence as to whether or not that’s a bad thing, as Glokta is a fantastic character, and Monza’s injuries give extra edge to her desire for revenge), and he isn’t immune to the occasional clunker, or poorly-wedged-in adverb, but then again who is?

Monza is a strong lead character, equal parts cunning, viciousness, and doubt. Physically shattered by the attempt to kill her, just getting back onto her feet is an accomplishment, to say nothing of being able to credibly swordfight. Of the supporting characters, the best drawn would have to be Caul Shivers, junior varsity Northman from First Law, here a verging-on-protagonist in his own right. Shivers, scarred physically and emotionally from the wars in the North, had come to Styria to try and be a better man (and perhaps seek his fortune as well). The fact that he falls in with Monza (as the Brute, naturally) should be a pretty good indication that personal betterment will be tough to come by. A lot of the book’s (fairly limited) comic relief is shared by Nicomo Cosca (the Rogue), former leader of Monza’s mercenary company (and previously seen in Dagoska in Before They Are Hanged), and Castor Morveer (the Techie), a Master Poisoner with poor people skills and no lack of self-esteem. In particular, the verbal sparring between the dashing and drunken Costa and the fastidious Morveer provide some of the funniest bits Abercrombie has yet written. More darkly funny is the eventual need for one of the characters to don a hideous prosthetic eyeball, which the less said the better but it manages to be both hilarious and gruesome. Strange combo.

However, it’s worth pointing out that, like many of his contemporaries, Abercrombie has fully embraced the gritty fantasy movement, for better and for worse. I have enjoyed most of the gritty fantasy books I’ve read, though there comes a point where the carnage, if not really artfully done, really starts to become a bit much. Battles are one thing (and while there’s nothing here to match the fantastic High Places battle of the trilogy, there is a pretty good battle towards the end), but wholesale massacre is another story. I get what he was doing at the end of the trilogy (which, no spoilers, but ooof), but the amount of collateral damage incurred during Monza’s quest for vengeance really begins to stack up. I won’t go into any details, but suffice to say, in a region that’s in the midst of what amounts to a nineteen-year civil war, her actions have consequences that go far beyond what’s on the page. Monza herself has something of a internal struggle about collateral damage, recognizing that in war, it’s the farmers who lose the most.

I’m not even really sure where I’m going with this. I certainly don’t fault Abercrombie for the darkness of his books, nor do I think he’s just blithely heedless of the damage his characters are causing. It’s a brutal time in a brutal world, and by no means am I hoping for a return to Manichean fantasy with elves and shit (on a side note, it occurred to me during the reading of this book that one of the major themes of First Law is “what if Gandalf was an asshole?”). To his immense credit, Abercrombie doesn’t glorify the evil deeds of his characters, doesn’t flinch from the damage they cause. But spare a moment of thought for the farmers.