The single nicest thing I can say about The Devils by Joe Abercrombie is that at least it's bad in a way that might be fun to pick apart. Anybody can write characters that all have the same voice or unearned emotional moments or lazy world-building - and to be clear, Abercrombie does all of that too - but fewer people can so clearly demonstrate the understanding of what makes good books whilst failing to make a single word of it effective. With 592 pages, you'd think he'd manage at least one win!
The Devils' main problem is format. My primary impression is that this is Abercrombie&friends' DnD campaign that he really wants to get picked up and made into a TV miniseries. It's certainly written for television. Eight characters are supposed to be having witty, fast-paced banter, except in order to keep the pace up Abercrombie neglects to tell us who's talking when. We'll allow this in a pair, but once your cast gets past four people you need to figure something else out. Lines are repeated with only slight twists - something that is largely allowable when heard but visually ugly when seen written down. A major twist would work if we only view the characters through a camera but makes absolutely no sense considering how long we've spent in this particular character's head. In fact, we could have had some actual stakes if we'd known* from the start that Alex was faking being Alexia! We're told all the time that she lies, but it's like Abercrombie doesn't trust us enough to show it.
*okay it, like many twists in this book, are blindingly obvious. There's nothing wrong with a twist you see coming. The irony can be part of the fun! It gets frustrating though when characters keep offering snide comments to the quote camera unquote about what makes a good twist in a story whilst said story only contains bad ones.
Brother Diaz sagged yet further into his damp saddle. "If not Ancona, then where?"
"The Kingdom of Naples is out, obviously."
"Obviously."
"Genoa or any of the western ports--"
"Genoa has its charms in the spring," mused Baron Rikard.
"--would mean sailing past Sicily. The place is alive with pirates."
In fact, The Devils doesn't even need to be made into a TV show. It would work quite well in any episodic format, from audio drama to comic run. This is because The Devils repeats itself a lot. Abercrombie clearly understands that humans like things that come in threes. He also understands cyclical structures (on a smaller, chapter-length scale, or a larger book-length one) as well as subversions of these repeating themes. But when every paragraph repeats itself, every statement is presented three times and every character riffs off another to try and be funny it is *exhausting*. You'd be more inclined to forgive it in shorter instalments but, again, 592 pages.
What's most frustrating about the endless repetition is that there's one moment that could've been really compelling. Vigga, a werewolf, has a catchphrase. Maybe a leitmotif, since it's in the narration. They all have something like this: Diaz repeats "Sweet Saint Beatrice", Baptiste "I should've quite after Barcelona" and Vigga's is "Even before the bite." It's established (many times over) that she was always [x] [y] [z]. Even before the bite. Where it finally comes together is at the bottom of a self-loathing spiral as everything is all going wrong. Vigga is reflecting on the good old days, when it was easy, or, as she comes to realise, it was never easy and never good and never simple. What we could have had is a great cathartic moment for our main character!, except we never spend enough time with her to feel like this realisation matters, we never dwell on it again and almost immediately undercut it with a joke. Swing and a miss.
She felt tears on her cheeks now, and wondered if there had never been a better time, only dead friends and burned nuns and spilled guts and worthless coins and blood on the white.
Had things always been bad?
Had she always been bad?
Even before the bite?
Inn the above paragraph I talk about one scene supposed to be emotional but completely undercut by humour. This happens all the damn time. Abercrombie is reluctant to allow us to sit with anything even vaguely uncomfortable. The Devils has plenty of tragedy and truly brutal violence but every single time it's ruined with a quote funny quip unquote. The humour is built on the back of Marvel films and those adult-aimed cartoon shows that think the concept of sex is the most hilarious thing ever. Something that might be kind of amusing on page 58 loses all its charm the twentieth time you've heard it.
I could go on. If I had more time today we could talk about the book's politics (bad), its character arcs (not present) or its plot (boring). The world Abercrombie creates feels like he read the Wikipedia pages for the Crusades and replaced every mention of "Muslims" with "elves", leaving implications that are never once addressed. Okay, sure, lets make our Fantasy Christianity fight wars against a uniformly-evil people from the east but don't worry because these guys aren't human. On a less harmful scale he also overuses italics and the book still has a couple of grammar mistakes. At least the copy I got from the library had fun illustrations?
"Pescara's awful anyway," threw in Baron Rikard. "Wouldn't be caught dead in Pescara."
"You are dead," said Vigga.
"But I wouldn't be caught."
