Certainly there are connexions in the plot to the Belgariad – like the idea of a small brotherhood of long-lived disciples-turned-mages, or the idea of a wizard seemingly-randomly (but with hidden motivations) assembling a party (each from a different nation) for a quest (into an old empire across the sea) for a mysterious magical artifact of immense power for reasons that are not explained (though its a Seed rather than an Orb this time). My immediate thought when reading The Blade Itself was how much it reminded me of David Eddings.

Inevitably, we begin to look at new things through the lens of what is familiar to us. But instead, I grew up with the fantasy of the 80’s and ‘90s, and there there’s a lot more similarity. To be fair, if my only previous exposure to fantasy were The Lord of the Rings, The Chronicles of Narnia, and then (skipping a long way forward) The Wheel of Time then yes, I’d probably find this a bit of shock. Indeed, given the author’s stated purpose in writing the novel – “to single-handedly revolutionise the fantasy genre”, I’m just surprised to find something so intensely old-fashioned. And that’s not a criticism per se – I’m a fantasy fan, after all – but it leaves me a little confused as to why so many intelligent people have seen this book as the start of something new, and why they’ve developed strong opinions on ‘grimdark’, whether for or against. It feels like a very traditional, conventional fantasy novel. But as it stands, I’m not really seeing anything… different… about The Blade Itself. Perhaps the next couple of books in the series are very different. What is grimdark? What makes it different from non-grimdark?Īnd, to be honest, I come away a little puzzled. So in reading this… yes, of course I wanted an enjoyable experience, and to see what this popular author was like, but I also wanted to see what grimdark was really like in the flesh, outside of the polemica and caricature for and against. I have read the occasional book that might be considered to be within that area (like Hurley’s God’s War, though that’s science fantasy rather than straight fantasy), but the big names of the movement – Abercrombie, Lynch, Lawrence and company – I’ve never gotten around to. I came to it expecting what’s widely considered a foundational text for the (relatively) new subgenre of Grimdark.

It’s tricky to know just how to review The Blade Itself, because, I must confess, I didn’t exactly come to it expecting just a novel.

The blade itself review