Revenge is a powerful emotion. It can sustain us through the darkest moments, burning away all of our secondary concerns to leave a hardened core of vengeful purpose. But for all of revenge's potence, it is ultimately a corrupting and abrasive emotion, the use of which erodes both morals and personality. For in time, even the hardened core must inevitably give way and then what is there left but a grim, purposeless void, an emptiness that can never be filled up by light. This is the enduring and oppressive lesson of Prince of Thorns, Mr. Lawrence's first and uneven novel.
In a world riven by war and rivalry, life labors onward in the Broken Empire. A once united whole that gathered up everyone from the knights down to the peasantry, the empire has since shattered into a hundred fragments, fiefdoms ruled by warlords who masquerade as nobility. Titles that once denoted honor and chivalric service are now merely pretty decorations to distract from the awful truth that there is very little of actual nobility anywhere in this realm, let alone in its landed classes.
Deeply scarred by being a witness to the murder of both his mother and brother, Honorous Jorg Ancrath is but thirteen and already a man. For he has spat into the eye of death and lived to tell of it. The leader of a band of cutthroats, he fully intends, before his grave is dug, to wear crowns, first a king's and then an emperor's. But to realize his ambitions, he will have to regain his hard father's prickly faith. For that is the avenue to power. But when even his own family betrays him, Jorg is left with no choice but to summon his will, his determination, and his cruelty to forge his own bloody path to victory. For there is nothing left but to make revenge upon all those who have taken from him the life he could have had.
Prince of Thorns is a vulture, an irredeemably bleak adventure that'd as soon pick out your eyes as look at you. Its dirty, jagged world is strongly suggestive of a far future England limping along after a global, nuclear holocaust. Though the environment appears to have recovered somewhat from the Day of a Thousand Suns, society has gone the other way, descending from chaos into authoritarianism. From authoritarianism, matters have regressed even further into a kind of fractious feudalism where the law, as such, resides along the sharp edge of a swordblade. While other cultural elements have survived the holocaust -- Christianity, if not its church; historical text, if not their meaning --, this medieval society, animated by mysticism and ghoulishness, has, by far, the strongest sway.
This is a difficult novel. While it presents a portrait of the bleakness of medieval life that is rightfully stripped of all its romantic claptrap, the utter lack of any redemptive elements makes the novel a bitter pill indeed. Anyone interested in gritty fantasy should be braced for such grotesque grimness, having no doubt cut their teeth on the likes of Abercrombie, Morgan, Kearney, et al. And yet, for all their cynicism, moments of levity and hope broke through the unremitting blackness of these other tales. True, they were lights that glowed but weakly, sickly, but they glowed nonetheless. The extent to which Mr. Lawrence has taken this theme to its nihilistic conclusion, total gloom, is either the natural progression of a genre ridding itself of High Fantasy's nonsense, or it is simply the efforts of a hack to carve out some space for himself in a genre that demands more skill from its authors than he can summon. Genius or failed mimicry? I lean towards the latter, but I may well lack that spark of brilliance that allows those rare few among us to spot genius even while it emerges.
Bold and provocative, but if you needed a sickbag for Joe Abercrombie, you'll need a mental enema for Mr. Lawrence. (2/5 Stars)
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