"A King Must Win, The Rest Is Dust". I cannot pick up my proof copy of Joe Abercrombie's new Viking-esque fantasy without adding a mental roll of thunder to the rather melodramatic front cover. Sensibly perhaps, the publishers have decided to restrain themselves to a more subtle front cover for the actual first editions of Half A King, but to my mind the overblown original rather suits Abercrombie's novel. His ambitious saga is convincingly doorstopper-ish and starts off promisingly, but as I find myself racing through it, ticking off clichés one by one, my hopes start to wilt. Abercrombie describes his book as "punchy", but I found myself groaning at some of the torrid prose, littered with blunt phrases such as: "He dug as if his life depended on it. It did". Abercrombie says on his website that he aimed to "deliver a slap in the face with every page", but it feels more like he's beating you over the head with a sledgehammer to get his point across.
In retrospect it was probably a mistake to visit Abercrombie's website, as I have a very low tolerance level for authorial self promotion, and his claims that his narrative is "heavy on the vivid characters, the visceral action, the mixture of wit and cynicism, the twists and surprises" do not make me feel particularly well disposed towards the book. Even so, I can't deny that there are some spectacular bombshells towards the end of the book, or that several of Abercrombie's characters – the protagonist Prince Yarvi, his mother Laithlin, and his tutor Mother Gundring in particular– are indeed very well drawn. The characters do not divide neatly into good and evil, and the whole story throws up interesting ethical questions, so that by the end the reader is completely torn over whether or not they actually like Prince Yarvi. Abercrombie is also to be applauded for shying away from conventional sexist stereotypes, which makes Half A King a far more interesting read than many fantasy novels. In the end though, while the book does have definite strengths, the narrative basically boils down to just disaster following catastrophe following disaster. With tighter prose and a more even pacing and structure, this book could have been brilliant. As it was, though the ending of Half A King was superb, by that point I was ready to get to the end anyway.
• Buy this book at the Guardian Bookshop
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