The Trouble With Peace - Joe Abercrombie

 

The Trouble With Peace, the latest book in the First Law universe, is both brilliant and bloody. 

I’ll start here: fans of Abercrombie will not be disappointed. The masterful characterisation, the whip-smart dialogue, and the thick vein of cynicism traced with capillaries of hope, are all immediately evident. As is the world, as broken as ever, as treacherous as ever, and as full of chances for redemption, truth and love, as ever. Also, if you’re here for people sticking sharp bits of metal into other people, for battles where you can feel the dirt underfoot, quail at the cannonades, and realise the existential futility of the whole thing while messily taking someone apart with an axe - well, then this is the series for you.

This is a world that is, in theory, at peace. Just this once, the Union isn’t at war with anyone. Which is novel. It does have rather a lot of enemies, but who doesn’t? And just this once, the North isn’t at war with anyone. And neither is the protectorate of Uffrith, which is sandwiched between them, and is definitely not very nervous about that. Everyone is rebuilding from the last war, and just wants to be left alone. In theory. In practise, the court of the Union is a seething nest of vipers. They’re torn between social climbing, cutting each other dead at parties, oppressing their workers, and high stakes politicking. Pressures are coming to bear on the Union from all sides. Workers are rising up against their chains, against working a fourteen hour day for an unlivable wage. Nobles are determined not to sacrifice any of their privilege. Parts of the Union, now that the wars are over, are manoeuvering for advantage, questioning why their taxes are so high, or talking about why they’re in the Union at all.

Peace, for the Union, is merely the absence of armed conflict. It’s a complex system, limping along on the dream of what it should be, and the brutal control of the levers of power exercised by those at the top of its systems. Of course, those who would like to break off those levers aren’t often very nice themselves.

Still, Adua, the capital of the Union, is a thriving city, filled with as much light and life and technological advancement as it is with misery, oppression, and sudden disappearances at the hands of the secret police. A study in contradictions, Adua sees itself as the height of civilisation, whilst also acting with a pragmatic and ruthless brutality when it feels threatened. Adua, indeed, the Union as a whole, is a system. One of the key tensions in the text is between systems and individuals. The king of the Union is one of our viewpoints, as, indeed are other prominent worthies - and its notable that they all struggle to manipulate, drive or change the system, and all lament the inertia and expectation which causes so many of the worst excesses. They live in a systematised world, which cares less and less for the individual, and not a lot more for the aggregate - it merely exists to perpetuate itself. That said, even as it does this, it produces marvels alongside horror, though of course, horrors alongside marvels.

The North, by contrast, is as familiar and as strange, and equally broken. The North is filled with space, with sprawling valleys, with Named Men leading bands of warriors. It’s populated by reputation, and by the ideal of honour. It’s more rustic, trading uniformed armies for berserkers, and cannons for the terrifying mystery of unknowable sorceries. But the North puts aside its virtuous pursuit of honour in the name of pragmatic ruthlessness when required. Reputations are built on being bloody and brave, but kingdoms are built from betrayals, or swift knives in the kidney. Still, you can feel the room, feel the ice water in the lakes, the culture built on loyalty to people, not to institutions. The contrast to Adua is beautifully done - as our characters move from one end of the world to the other, we can see that each system has its own strengths, and that hypocrisy and moral turpitude are as common as bravery and courage in both cases. Both societies may try and fool themselves into some superiority over the other, but they share more similarities than anything else.

In any case, the sprawling emptiness of the North, its strange majesty and desolation, stand as beautifully drawn and cunningly crafted as ever, alongside the bustling cities of the Union, even if the latter have traded in their horse-dung carts for the smoking towers of industry. These are societies on the cusp of change, and that, as well, is one of the tensions in this story. The Union is being driven to industrialise; its workers are renegotiating their relationship with the traditional capital using fire and steel, while the new owners of the mills respond in kind. The Lords of the Union are grumbling under the autocracy of the Closed Council, and the King is trying to find a way to do the right thing, whilst navigating all of these varied (and often malevolent) interests.

One of the beautiful parts of this book is that it so expertly threads the needle of motivations. The systems which people act in cause them to do ruthless things, bad things, and arguably, necessary things. But each of our viewpoints can be seen to be making a good case for what they’re doing, and why they’re doing it. Some of them are fooling themselves more than anyone else, that’s for sure. But when you can see both sides of the question as the heroes of their own story, it’s an absolute joy. In creating and sustaining this ambiguity, Abercrombie has proven to be a masterful storyteller. Everyone is not a shade of grey, a moral swamp of grimdark awfulness. No. They are, in their own lights, heroes. Doing the necessary thing, and often the right thing. That we can switch views and immediately see them as the opposition, as enemies to be crushed, is a marvel. It showcases the reality that each of these characters is not an ideal of heroism or villainy, but just someone trying to get stuff done. To build a better world, or hold what they have, or improve working conditions, or keep their family safe, or, or, or. As much as we all do, these are people who have hopes and dreams, lives, aspirations. That they all feel so human is a wonder, and in making their shared humanity cut across their antagonistic goals, we’re left asking questions about conflict. About why the choices we make are the right, or wrong ones. About whether there are any simple answers. About how the system drives people to do terrible things, or how individuals outside the restraints of the system do them anyway.

This book is poetry. It’s the poetry of errors. Of mischance. Of bureaucracy. Of armies tramping in the mud, to kill men with whom they share far more than the leaders who drive them. The poetry of leadership trying to do the right thing, in a world where nothing is certain, and where certainties are a trap. It’s a song about the sheer, bloody minded brilliance of people, who can be knocked down and get back up again, always reaching out for something better, always asking themselves how to make their dreams reality. It’s a story of how reality meets songs, and the compromises that means have to be made, and about refusing to accept compromise.

The Trouble with Peace is a page-turner. It less grabs your attention than walks up, slips a stiletto of narrative into your gut, and demands your attention. It’s smart. It’s witty. It has things to say about government, about systems, about finance, about power and the circumscriptions of power. And it also has things to say about the price we’re willing to pay for comfortable lives, and when saying enough is enough is the right thing to do. And about what happens when the right thing to do meets a different right thing, but more heavily armed. There’s battles, and politics, and some genuinely heartfelt emotional moments which made me choke up,and betrayals, reversals and revelations which will hit like an anvil, and in one memorable case, made me swear loudly in disbelief.

This is an absolutely top-notch work of fantasy, which deserves to be on everyone’s shelf. If you’ve made it this far, and you’re still wondering: yes, you should absolutely read this series, and if you’re reading this series, yes, you should absolutely buy this book. Thoroughly recommended.