The Heroes by Joe Abercrombie

The Heroes is a good, old fashioned, battle book. A tale of people on different sides all coming together to fight each other over a short period of time. It's perfectly well constructed and solidly written. It draws heavily on genre pieces such as the battle of five armies from the Hobbit, any number of novels about World War One and has a distinctly american western feel to it.

The story itself has a couple of components, the first being that of the intimate and imminent lives of those actually fighting the battle, the second being the politics behind the conflict. The latter is suggested at rather than discussed at length, and to be honest I'm glad of that as I feel Abercrombie's world is weakest at this macro level. He is strongest, and probably unsurpassed at the moment, in writing gritty and grim stories about individual people suffering in conflict.

Is this a literary novel? No. Not at all. Don't expect hugely well drawn out characters, don't expect to be shown everything rather than told and don't expect characters to make decisions that make sense from your point of view. Frankly, if you're reading this for that you've picked the wrong genre - this is about bloodshed, escapism and the myopic focus of the moment which forces itself upon people who could very well die from an unaimed and unexpected spear. It rips through the battle, split into segments spread over each of the days of the fight and sees it from both sides. As you might expect from Abercrombie, neither side is anywhere near being paragons of virtue and almost every character is either venal, grasping, cowardly or stupid. In fact a good many of them are all four. This might sound a bit clichéd - that's irrelevant because it makes for hugely entertaining reading and, as ever, I am looking forward to his next book.