Book Review: The Devils
Hello Dear Readers!
I just finished up The Devils by Joe Abercrombie, so I thought I would share some of my thoughts with it.
This was my first novel by Joe Abercrombie. While I tend to be a lot of rainbows and sunshine, I do enjoy a good grimdark novel. (Notable other favorites include works by Christopher Buehlman and Richard Swan.)
There is probably some kind of micro-genre for this type of book that I’m just not aware of, but I’m going to call it “religious-historical-fantasy”. This book is set in alternate version of medieval Europe where elves are an ever present threat of invasion and a religious schism has taken place dividing The Church into East and West over different ideologies.
Enter Brother Diaz, a monk summoned to the Holy City by the Pope. Hoping for a promotion, he ends up getting saddled with the worst “congregation” imaginable. Brother Diaz ends up in charge of a rag-tag group of devils set on installing a long lost princess on the serpent throne of Troy.
This congregation of devils includes a Baptiste a jack-of-all-trades, Balthazar the necromancer, Baron Rikard the vampire, Vigga the real blood and thunder Norse werewolf, Jakob of Thorn the undying knight from the crusades, and lastly Sunny the elf. It is this group of unruly evil-doers that Brother Diaz suddenly finds himself in charge of. Together, they must take the orphaned street rat Alex and get her safely to Troy and crowned.
“He’d fought many duels. Enough to know when he wasn’t going to win. But when you can’t die, a draw is enough,”
There is loads of chaos and mayhem along the way, not to mention plenty of fights and lots of blood and gore. This book is not for the squeamish and makes no qualms about its grimdark nature. Alex, soon to be Empress Alexia Pyrogennetos must get all the way from the Holy City (the equivalent of Rome) all the way across Europe to Troy, which is in Turkey. They have to face Alex’s evil cousins, her deceased aunt’s unholy creatures, get help from a variety of unsavory characters, and more along the way.
There is quite a bit of philosophical musings throughout the book on the nature of the soul, what makes a good person, can a devil truly be saved, what it means to be ‘clean’, and the hypocrisy inherent in most social hierarchies.
“These two went to war...” Balthazar considered them with folded arms. “Spreading fire and murder across the region they are meant to care for, causing untold death and destruction... over a lover’s tiff?”
Baron Rikard tipped his head back to consider the shifting clouds. “And they call us monsters.”
This was not a book I was able to zoom through. Sometimes I can devour a book in a weekend. This one took me a couple of weeks. Not only is quite lengthy at 547 pages in full sized hardcover, but I don’t think this is zip-through-able material. At least not for me. The main cast gets kicked around quite a bit. It feels quite heavy at times. While I really love a book that makes you think and asks you to engage with some of the questions it poses, sometimes that makes for slow going in reading. (This is neither good nor bad in my opinion, it simply is.)
We do get to explore several different character’s point of view and they all have distinct and unique voices. The characterization is great and the cast is quite varied. Each character feels like they have some depth, and their own wants, desires, hopes, dreams, as well as temptations, doubts, fears, and vices. Some of the characters feel more tragic than others, and some of them we empathize with while others we have much less sympathy for. I found myself with some of the heaviest feels in Vigga, Sunny, and Jakob’s parts. Balthazar you just want to roll your eyes at.
I do feel like some of the characters had very real growth or developed in some way by the end of the book. Some of them grow, only to end up back where they started, or worse, which is very sad but sort of true to life in a lot of ways. I saw someone on Reddit comment something along the lines of “No matter how much they’ve grown or changed, monsters don’t get happy endings”. Which about sums it up for this book.
Abercrombie’s writing style is fun to read and I enjoyed his prose with one exception. While I don’t have a problem with swearing, I did actually get very tired of the number of times I had to read “God damn it” in this book. It began to feel tedious and excessive. The character illustrations in the book were pretty cool. I love it when books have artwork. :) Joel Daniel Phillips did a great job and I highly recommend you check out the illustrations.
Jakob of Thorn, a knight of many crusades. He took some oaths, was cursed by a witch, and now he cannot die. Artwork by Joel Daniel Phillips
Overall, I think I would have to give this book somewhere around a
💀💀💀💀/5
The world building is interesting, the pacing is quick, there are lots of cliff hangers and the stakes feel very real. It was a slow, heavy read, despite being so fast paced with very minimal down time for our characters, but still a good one that I really enjoyed. I will be thinking about a lot of these characters for a long time to come.
Have you read The Devils yet? Any other grimdark fantasy you might recommend? Let me know what you thought about it in the comments!
Till next time dear reader! <3 Tiff
