He starts the book mean and vicious, trying to make a name himself and win the favour of his king through violence. Raith, a self-declared “bloody little bastard”, is a typical Abercrombie anti-hero. The second point of view is that of Raith, a character mentioned in passing in both previous book in the series, as one of the white-haired twins who carries the sword and shield for Grom-Gil-Gorm, King of Vansterland. Skara barely escapes with her life with the aid of an old sea raider named Blue Jenner and seeks refuge with King Uthil and Queen Laithlin in Getland, where she starts to carve out alliances and makes plans to return to her throne, secure her kingdom, and take revenge for her father. This killing is retribution for the fact that Throvenland had made a short-lived alliance with the two kingdoms in rebellion against the High King, being Getland and Vansterland, and even though Fynn got cold feet at the last minute and tried to realign with Skekenhouse, it was obviously too late to win back the High King’s favour. It’s really not much of a spoiler to say that she soon becomes Queen of Throvenland, when her father, King Fynn, is slain by the High King’s emissary, Bright Yilling, in chapter one of the book. The first point of view character in our trio starts the book as Princess Skara of Throvenland. Though, admittedly, Abercrombie doesn’t lose much of the intimate focus of the previous volumes, aided by his usual skill in thrusting the reader into close-up third person perspectives.
Sure, there is a certain aesthetic harmony to this pattern, but it also means that this third book is more sprawling and perhaps more in the vein of other similar epic fantasies, being, well, more epic. You see, book one, Half a King (reviewed by Mark Yon here), was told through a single perspective with book two, Half the World (reviewed by Mark Yon here), we had a couple of viewpoint characters and, this time, book three offers, no prizes for guessing, three view point characters. Having said this, and keeping in mind the high esteem in which I hold the previous two books in the trilogy, I did find this third book in the series not quite as tightly written and a little more laboriously plotted than the previous books. To my mind this is a shame, as I believe this latest trilogy from Abercrombie is up there with the strongest work he’s done to date, being more focused and efficiently plotted than much contemporary epic fantasy. Abercrombie is a perennial favourite of ours at the SFFWorld forums, but it strikes me that this latest series has received a less than enthusiastic response compared to his previous novels set in the world of the First Law, with some treating the book, ostensibly marketed as YA, as being “Abercrombie-lite”.
Half a War by Joe Abercrombie marks the conclusion of his Shattered Sea trilogy.
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