Review: Prince of Thorns (Mark Lawrence)
Medieval Blood Meridian Where Irradiated Hook-Briars Give You Super Powers
War is a thing of beauty, as I’ve said before, and those who say otherwise are losing. - Prince of Thorns.
Warning: SPOILERS.
Prince of Thorns follows a teenaged maniac, rapist, and sadist called Jorg on a quest to avenge his treacherously slain mother and younger brother. His long-term goals are to grow his warband, become king by the age of 15, and reunite the “Broken Empire” - the patchwork quilt of warring states and petty fiefdoms that now constitute what is clearly implied to be a neo-Dark Age Europe.
I’ll start with the good parts. The setting is an intriguing one - isolated oases of “civilization”, at least to the extent that medieval crapsack kingships can be considered such, surrounded by a post-apocalyptic horrorscape of ghost-haunted swamps and ancient mountain bunkers populated by mutants and necromancers. (We realize that that this is a post-apocalyptic world relatively early by the references to what must be concrete and rebar steel). The interaction of the relics of the technological world before the nuclear apocalypse (the “War of the Thousand Suns”) and the post-scientific superstitions of the present day are reliably amusing. I especially enjoyed the speculations about the origins of the deep concrete shafts in a bunker - at one point, Jorg speculates on whether the ancients used levitation to go up and down. In another scene, Jorg converses with what appears to be an LLM, which demands the password to the WMD storage room.
Lawrence has a knack for a good turn of phrase. The text is replete with these, mostly focusing on Jorg’s cynical, and at times nihilistic or absurdist, views on life and politics: “War is a thing of beauty, as I’ve said before, and those who say otherwise are losing.” Or here is how he describes a mutant: “The monster had been built in parody of a man, sharing Adam’s lines as a cow apes a horse.” They don’t always hit the mark, and sometimes they fall flat, as when Jorg describes the inhabitants of a castle afflicted by chemical weapons poisoning as “lobster red” to his brothers; I don’t think roadside ruffians from a poor interior kingdom would have any idea of what a lobster is. Regardless, the verbal bangers hit home sufficiently often and are sufficiently dense to spruce up and even make rather enjoyable what would otherwise have been a turgid and dreary slog of a read. And on that note, the bad parts.
Character is usually the most important part of a story, followed by plot and finally worldbuilding. The problem is that Jorg isn’t a sympathetic or very interesting character. It’s not that I necessarily dislike inhabiting the minds of “evil” people. Sand dan Glotka, the crippled torturer from Abercrombie’s First Law, is one of the most memorable antiheroes of the grimdark genre. And the multiple chapters exploring the dark recesses of Cersei’s mind almost single-handedly saved A Feast for Crows for me. They were both real, three-dimensional people whereas Jorg is a murder clown Gary Stu. Deranged, but also really smart. Well read, while leading a posse of psychotic goons. Fourteen years old, but regularly takes down armored knights, and heals from wounds that would leave mere mortals bedridden for weeks in mere hours.
I lost most of my interest in Chapter 8, which is where my suspension of disbelief collapsed and never recovered:
I leaned forward as if to hear him. The bodyguards reached for me but I did the old shake and twist. Even with me in armour they were too slow. I used Marclos’s foot as a step, where it stuck out from the stirrup, and got up alongside him in no time at all. He had a nice stiletto in a sheath set handy in the saddle, so I had that out and stuck it in his eye. Then we were off. The pair of us galloping out across the market field. How to steal a horse is the first thing you learn on the road.
This might work under RPG logic where you max out your Agility stats, win the initiative roll, and manage to score a critical hit with your first strike. But I didn’t get the impression that this world is an RPG or video game or that Jorg had reality-bending powers. In the real world, a 14 year old boy will not slide past a lord’s guards, leap on his warhorse, stab him with his own stiletto through the visor slit on his helmet, and gallop off while everyone looks around dumbfounded like slack-jawed yokels.
And this isn’t a one off. In a duel in his father’s court, Jorg’s solution to facing down a real blademaster is to sprint to a man-at-arms, seize his crossbow, and 180 no scope headshot his opponent (sic!). In another situation, Jorg has a plot-related need to get a suit of armor for an upcoming tourney. An knight and his retainers conveniently happen to pass by. Jorg kills him by… head-butting him. In the tourney itself, the young teen takes down multiple large men by reliably finding chinks in their armor with his sword.
Incidentally, speaking of swords, Lawrence subscribes to the common fantasy trope that swords are heavy:
In a real fight, and most fights are real, not the artifice of a formal duel, it’s fatigue that’s the big killer. A sword is a heavy chunk of iron. You swing that around for a few minutes and your arms start to get ideas of their own about what they can and can’t do. Even when your life depends on it.
Dude, if you’re writing medieval fantasy combat, take the time to watch a couple of HEMA videos. Ultimately, these are minor issues. But I am already in a state of disbelief unsuspended, and this isn’t helping matters. If you really want to do those tropes, at least make the swords magical.
Jorg’s maxed out Agility stats are matched by his formidable Constitution. He continues walking and fighting hours after breaking a few ribs facing down a challenge to his leadership from a buntive member of his band. At another point, he survives a dagger stab in the heart - thanks to having previously eaten the heart of a necromancer he’d killed, because - reasons?
It’s never explained where Jorg’s powers - if that is what they are - come from. When Jorg was 11, he was ambushed along with his mother and younger brother by one of his father’s rivals - Count Renar - in the “Hundred War” for the imperial throne. They were murdered, but he himself was unnoticed, having fallen into a nearby hook-briar; that is where the “prince of thorns” moniker came from. There are hints that the poison of the briar may have had something to do with his skills and resilience, which sounds extra corny in the story’s post-nuclear context (“Radioactive briar thorns give you mutant powers!?”).
Alternately, Jorg’s luck if such it is may have come as about as a result of a spell. In his initial quest for vengeance, he started by infiltrating the Count’s castle, but was intercepted by his court sorcerer, Corion. He made Jorg forget about his vengeance quest while leaving intact his thirst for revenge, which is supposed to explain his subsequent seemingly wanton bloodlust. Corion’s spell was supposed to be part of an intricate plot related to the “game of thrones” (the phrase is directly used) that the dark sorcerers and necromancers of the world play against each other, using the kings and princes of the world as chess pieces1. However, this spell was broken after Jorg was stabbed, but he continued to prevail against impossible odds in subsequent encountered. So his maxed out stats can’t be ascribed to magic.
Finally, not only is Jorg a walking whirlwind of destruction with maxed out Agility, Constitution, and Luck stats - but he is no slouch in the Intelligence department either. Intelligence in the sophomoric, smug, puerile style often seen in Dunning-Kruger dilettantes - so that, at least, struck me as plausible. Furthermore, he was a veritable bookworm. Not only was he physically strangling grown ass men at 13, but was reading from the age of 3: “I was talking with Socrates at seven, learning form and thing from Aristotle. For the longest time I had lived in this library.” He even maintained a small library of books on the road with his “brotherhood” of illiterate ruffians. Even consumed as Jorg was with visions of revenge and bloodlust, it is unclear to me why this supposedly intelligent, charismatic, and physically precocious teenager would waste his time on these roadside losers, since he clearly had the stats and pedigree for playing the game at a higher level than just sacking flyspeck villages.
It’s also unclear to me how Jorg managed to keep the “brothers” together. He is callous and indifferent to their welfare, and on a few occasions kills some of them for disloyalty or challenging him. There is none of the actual brotherhood, bleak and grimdark as it was, but brotherhood nonetheless, of Logen’s band in The First Law. Total personal nihilism within a warband might make sense in a grimderp fantasy, but it doesn’t strike me as conductive to long-term cohesion in principle.
With all the usual caveats - tastes differ, “continue reading”, etc. - I was not a fan of Prince of Thorns, and am unlikely to finish The Broken Empire trilogy. I’m aware Jorg does develop a character arc in the next couple of books, but AFAIK that limited “redemption” arises out of fatherhood, and that strikes me as far too trite of a cliche to keep me reading. So far as this kind of fantasy goes, Abercrombie remains the master of the genre, and I would also sooner check out Glen Cook’s The Black Company, though my interest in grimdark as a genre is limited and to the extent I do, I tend to prefer the ones that take it to its logical absurdist endpoint, as in the Warhammer 40k universe. Even so far as Mark Lawrence as a writer goes, I would sooner move on to his Red Sister trilogy, which strikes me as having a more interesting premise.
Conclusion: Jorg does not appeal to me as a character, and everyone else is completely forgettable. There are too many implausible contrivances to keep the author’s desired plot on track, and he fails to maintain suspension of disbelief - the single most important task you need to do as a speculative fiction writer. Consequently, I can’t give Prince of Thorns more than 3/5.
On a separate note, it’s also unclear to me why the sorcerers and necromancers engage in this “game of thrones” keep the Hundred War going indefinitely instead of just taking power themselves. Their sorcery and powers of mind control seem more than sufficient to just directly brute force their way into direct power. The in-universe explanation is that the commonfolk wouldn’t accept open usage of magic, but I hard see why their opinions should matter under the story’s own medieval crapsack premises.