Best Served Cold by Joe Abercrombie is yet another extremely dark and extremely brutal installation in the First Law world. The primary rule of this world seems to be eat or be eaten. There is always someone to seek revenge on and always someone that deserves to be killed or tortured. This world exists exclusively on principle of hatred and revenge with little to concern for anything or anyone else. Characters that do try to show a care or love for someone else usually end up dead or with any sort of love eradicated rom them. Shivers is an example of this. He strives to become a better man, but any attempt to be better only leads him to deeper darkness and blacker pain. All attempts to be a better person quickly turn sour and he left much worse than he began, all joy and light sucked out of him, an empty carcass of a man, a pure killer. But one almost thinks that he is better of that way because the world of Abercrombie doesn’t really leave much space for there to be anyone who isn’t pure killer. If you are a “good” person then you will be killed. In order to survive you have to be cold and bitter. Throughout the book there are multiple references to how farmers suffer the most in war, how the innocent and the civilians are the ones who pay the highest price for the fleeting glory of the nobility and their petty wars.
This book is about nothing, but in the absolute best possible way. When I say this book is about nothing, I don’t mean that there is nothing happening in this book or there is no theme or no point, but that this book is, literally, about nothing. This is the most detailed and believable exploration of nihilism I have ever encountered and shows the utter tragedy of what happens when humanity is left entirely unfettered with nothing greater to think of than the self. Every character in this book thinks first of themselves and then everyone else. And look where that gets everyone.
The only true critique I would have of this novel is that Monza has to be yet another hard-bitten, angry woman. I am so tired of the mad woman trope. If you are going to be a woman who fights, you have to be extremely angry, extremely hard, and extremely dedicated. You have to be entirely consumed with thoughts of revenge. Women, after all, can only fight if they want revenge. This emotion-fueled image of the woman warrior is so narrow and incomplete. A woman can go to war for reasons besides revenge, but it doesn’t seem like literature (or any other art form) really gives a woman any other option. And her only way to fit is to become the most bitter, hardcore, ruthless, merciless fighter available because otherwise she won’t be “accepted.” If this is truly a fantasy world, just make gander equality a thing and move on with it. Give the reading public a more interesting female character because we are sick of this kind of woman.
While I appreciate the empty brutality of Abercrombie’s works, I could definitely do without the gender stereotyping and closed-minded roles for women. The men in his books are allowed to have a much greater range of emotions and reasons for doing things, but the women seem to only ever be fueled by one thing. Toward the end of the story, there is much more revealed about Monza and what she is capable of, but I think that took too long to reveal.
My only other real compliant is that the ending was a bit deus ex machine. Shenkt just sort of appeared from no where and was behind the whole thing the whole time. His master is all shadowy and confused (although one assumes it is Bayaz) and he is probably an Eater but he has obviously way too much ability to just resolve everything. It gave the ending a very unsatisfying feel and not in the good way one wants from something as broken and dark as this story is.