Of the many sins humanity has visited upon the world, war is surely the most grievous. For the benefit of the privileged, their pride and or their gain, the many are asked to sacrifice their liberty, their luxuries and their lives in order to execute unimaginably murderous engagements with the enemy. Perhaps, if the bloodshed could be confined to the battlefields, war could be granted some minimal respect as a means for conflict resolution. Invariably, though, its corrosiveness spills over onto perfectly innocent bystanders whose families and livelihoods are destroyed by the ambitions of men and women who do not know them and would not care about them even if they did. How often are these costly campaigns actually worthwhile? Is there truly no other way to mend what is broken? Or is humanity so brutal, so pig-headed, that nothing short of mass-violence can satisfy the honor and the dignity of the ruling class? With savage grace and cynical humor, Mr. Abercrombie asks these questions and more in the darkly entertaining The Heroes. The answers he finds amidst the blood and the corpses leave little room for a notion as silly as hope.
In a world of winter and stone, of greedy nobles and ruthless sorcerers, the armies of two kingdoms have come together, on here-to-for unwanted ground, to act out the violent will of kings. From the south comes the rapacious Union, a coalescence of fractious states forged into a unified whole by the ancient and whimsical Bayaz, first of the Magi. Accountable only to destiny, Bayaz long ago manipulated the Union into being as both a beacon of civilization and a bulwark against the cannibalistic forces gathering in the deserts beyond the Union's southern reaches. From the north come the Northmen, an alliance of warlike tribes bound by blood, by marriage, and by the black-hearted competence of their chieftain. Individualistic to a fault, the Northmen are disinclined to suborn themselves to the softness and the regimented order of the Union, preferring the familiar chaos of the clan-like lives they have always known.
Having recently suffered political and economic setbacks elsewhere, the Union is eager for victory and conquest against what it considers to be an easy, northern foe. Having recently enjoyed a resurgence in strength and focus under their pitiless leader, Black Dow, the Northmen are eager to test themselves against the Union in hopes of cementing their sovereignty and satisfying their pride. The result is a gruesome and costly three-day engagement in which thousands of Union soldiers and northern clansmen fight and die in what is bound to be remembered as a pointless and bloody skirmish for land neither side cares about. On this do the fortunes of great men rise and fall. On this are the modest hopes and dreams of commonfolk tested and dashed. This is war...
The Heroes will only serve to enhance Mr. Abercrombie's well-earned reputation for bloody nihilism. For this is nothing short of a black-humored, 550-page treatise on the ugliness and pointlessness of war. From pride-blinded rulers to their ambition-soaked generals, from cynical mercenaries to patriotic soldiers, the author creates a gallery of war's instigators and its adherents, its promoters and its customers, in an effort to reveal it for what it is; a murderous enterprise that harm's the many for the benefit of the few. In making this point, Mr. Abercrombie is far from militant. He neither laments nor agitates against this state of affairs. Rather, he begins with the basic premise that authoritarian societies are inherently violent, that their violence is fed by the capacity for violence that lives within man's soul, and that there is nothing for it but to laugh at its absurdities, cringe at its costs and get the fuck out of the way of its ravenous path. For if we know anything about the nature of war, it is merciless.
No, Mr. Abercrombie does not give birth to any legendary characters, nor does he spin any labyrinthine plots. Though these are skills he has summoned in the past, they are not evident in The Heroes. No, here, Mr. Abercrombie is a critic of the soul of man and of the societal constructs man creates. And in this, he is wonderfully witty and masterfully insightful. Futility has rarely had a more expressive champion. (4/5 Stars)
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