Book Report: Red Country

Red Country by Joe Abercrombie

Shy sets out with her stepfather Lamb to rescue her young brother & sister from the men who kidnapped them.  Along the way they cross path with famous frontiersmen, a mercenary band currently fighting for the Union, the Union's inquisitors, Rebels, Ghostwolf plainsmen and lawless gold prospectors.

It is an exciting story, told well enough.  The characters are intriguing.  Altogether the book is okay.

But just okay.

As intriguing as the characters are, the only thing that differentiates them is their pasts, thier individual stories.  They mostly don't have distinct personalities.  Instead they all speak with the same cycnical voice, share virtually the same outlook on events regardless of their history or current positions or loyalties or whatever.  There are a few exceptions: Waerdinur, the Ghostwolf who adopts the children; Zubair, the mercenary who sees his work as God's.  Characters who feel like they would have their own fascinating stories.  Unfortuanately, they play relatively small roles in this story.  It ends up less the story of Shy and Lamb and more like Joe Abercrombie telling a fable.

About half way through the book it suddenly struck me that I had read another book by Abercrombie, Half a King, and it had the same issue. Which is primarily why I never continued reading the Shattered Sea trilogy.  It was also an all right book.  Good enough that I finished it, right?  But I think I can find better.

I've got to admit there's something else that bothers me about Red Country.  Abercrombie borrows elements of his world from a quasi US history setting.  Western expansion, gold rush, wild plains natives, lawless frontier towns.  Notably, a land divided between Union and Rebel sides.  Throughout the book there is a theme that good and evil are just the stories we tell about men when in actuality, we all will do what we must to survive or thrive.  For some reason, in his story, Joe Abercrombie choose to portray the Union side as evil and the Rebels as good.  And I'm not just talking telling the story from the perspective of a Rebel soldier who faces a Union army burning across his homeland.  I mean, the Union is portrayed as a tyranny supported by a Spanish-type Inquisition while the Rebels are all freedom loving, don't tread on me individualists and certainly not slave owners.  I could understand it if he was just changing perspective to support his theme.  What bothers me is that in portraying the good & evil in his story he inserts an evil that wasn't there and omits the evil that was.

Maybe I'm reading too much into it.  It's not a Civil War history, after all.  Yet it does bother me that he would borrow from that history, even use the same vocabulary, but warp it into something it wasn't.  That dissonance distracted from his story.  Or maybe the dissonance is intentional.  Abercrombie's way of illustrating how wrong it is to let storytellers define the sides for us.

In the end, I guess if you've got nothing else to read and this is sitting around ... it is an exciting read.  But I bet you could find better.