The Wisdom of Crowds
The Wisdom of Crowds by Joe Abercrombie My rating: 4 of 5 stars Joe Abercrombie brings the Grimdark with the brutal The Wisdom of Crowds a fittingly nihilistic conclusion to the Age of Madness. The citizens of Adua have risen, the Burners and the Breakers are set to overthrow King Orso and the Closed Council. Poor Orso he only gets a brief moment to bask in his victorious smugness before utter carnage is unleashed. Short tense paragraphs evocate a frenetic descent as the breakers and burners take over Adua. We meet dreamers, workers, soldiers, opportunistic criminals and innocent bystanders washed along or away with the great revolutionary flood. There are graphic beatings, stabbings and score settling as the citizens of Adua succumb in one way or another to the Great Change, a citizen body morphing into a 'demon of many voices'. Abercrombie’s prose conjures a vivid bleakness in a philosophical juxtaposition where high ideals meet brute reality. The Great Change is darkly satirical social commentary bursting with a furious howling outrage and polemical grandstanding (Hi Twitter!) ridden to obvious violent conclusion. The fantasy elements hang lightly and the narrative is more reminisce of revolutionary histories. The genre setting, often a safe boundary between the reader and unspoken fears, does nothing to save us from a dark realisation of our modern world. In light of recent modern politics it raises a decidedly queasy uncertainty. A febrile atmosphere lingers throughout the prose and every character interaction is undertaken with a sense of fatal threat. The leaders of the Great Change are filled with a cruel vein of self-righteous judgement, pogroms, purges and insanity, daft pamphlets, all the fears one could have about a revolution Abercrombie taps to create a truly horrific and literal descent of man and woman. It is not just a case of ‘if’ the POV characters survive but how the great change err changes them. Abercrombie continues with gritty and realistic character development. The main characters are picked up with in the aftermath of battle with King Orso being a little smug about his victory over his rival Leo Dan Brock. In an act of mercy, naïvely taken but true to form, Orso spares Leo the noose. An act done for the love Orso holds for his half-sister and former lover Savine wife of Leo Dan Brock, it's err complicated. A tad melodramatic even, but the love triangle, or quad as don't forget Rikke now tenuous ruler of the North, has her own and political backstabbing subtly influences Leo’s bitterness and envy, that and the fact Leo lost an arm and a leg at Stoffenberg, to act out, shall we say. Leo’s actions do drive the plot onwards and they come at an opportune moment as Abercrombie has a tendency to stretch out the torture porn revolutionary spirit of the Breakers and the Burners a tad. For Leo, Savine and Orso it all comes to an emotionally complex denouement. I’ve always found Abercrombie’s main characters to be gritty and real, frustratingly so, falling into their flaws or using their strengths to act badly, Abercrombie seems to delight in misdirecting a reader’s faith in heroics, as a classic fantasy reader it's traumatising to be honest, but there are subtle moments where he gives you just enough to make it worthwhile. The Great Change touches everyone in surprising ways, and in the new normal nothing is cleanly resolved or action taken morally unambiguous and like in life, events are often frustratingly devoid of a real satisfactory resolution. And just like that the Great Change is over and for those who forgot this was a fantasy book there is a pleasing jolt as with a shock reveal a long game is exposed, the real powers make their presence felt, a debt is called and seeds are dropped for a future series. Which is good news if you want more from the world of the First Law. View all my reviews
