The Blade Itself, Chapter One

Intro

Chapter One, “The End”. The opening chapter starts with an ironic title and I’m on board. The narrator is a close third person POV, following Logen Ninefingers, also called the Bloody Nine. I’m sure him having two names won’t be relevant later.

Summary

A quick summary of the first chapter: Logen, separated from his group, fights two Shanka. He kills one and ends up hanging from a cliff while the other hangs on to him. Then, they fall off the cliff. The Shanka dies while Logen survives.

Analysis

The First Sentence

Logen plunged through the trees, bare feet slipping and sliding on the wet earth, the slush, the wet pine needles, breath rasping in his chest, blood thumping in his head.

Let’s consider the first sentence of the book. It’s the author’s initial contact with us, so the odds are they’ve spent the most amount of effort here to draw readers in. Especially when those readers are editors and book buyers.

To start, let’s break the sentence into fragments:

Logen plunged through the trees

We’re either outside or in an arboretum. Also, Logen is in a hurry, or potentially falling.

bare feet slipping and sliding on the wet earth, the slush, the wet pine needles

There’s a surprisg amount of setting here mixed in with the action. We have wet earth, slush, and wet pine needles. Those who thought the setting was an arboretum may have to reëvaluate at this point.

The pine needles suggest that this world, or at least this part of it, is earthlike. The slush alongside the pine needles corroborates that, since slush implies cold and evergreens like pines do better in temperate to colder climates.

Logen’s bare feet are a good bit of setting. It could just be that he lives a Huck Finn lifestyle where he runs around barefooted all the time, but given that there’s snow and pine needles on the ground it’s fair to assume a body doesn’t want to be barefoot. So, he’s somehow lost his boots, which is backed up by the rest of the sentence:

breath rasping in his chest, blood thumping in his head.

Logen is in a bad situation. People don’t tend run so hard that they lose their breath and start sliding on the ground, especially barefoot. When you do have to move that fast, it’s not for good reasons.

As a whole, we get the sense that something Logen wasn’t expecting has happened, and he had to run for his life without time to protect his feetsies.

I like this first sentence. It does a lot of work to bring the reader into the story, and the rushed, frantic headspace of the character. The sentence also degrades well; it’s still a good starting sentence without analysis. There’s action and the bare necessary facts of the story: we’re looking at Logen, he’s running, things aren’t quite right.

The next question is: will things stay this bad for Logen throughout the book? To be sure, we’ll have to read more than the first sentence. But they probably will.

The Whole Chapter

This first chapter is an interesting expansion on the opening sentence. Logen is separated from the others he was with and is relentlessly pragmatic. He can’t look for them at the moment because the Shanka are chasing him. Even if he did look for them, he’d only lead the Shanka back to his companions.

Then, while he’s fighting the Shanka, he’s not portrayed as an unstoppable killing machine, but as someone who’s afraid of dying. He uses the tree he’s hidden behind and his environment to get an advantage over the first Shanka before he kills him. Then, while hanging from the ledge with the second Shanka hanging from him, he exhibits more pragmatism. Rather than waiting to get tired, he pushes himself as far away from the ledge as he can and hopes to hit water.

Logen’s goal throughout this whole chapter can be summed up as: survive. He has a secondary goal of not getting his friends killed, but it doesn’t extend to saving them. He only refuses lead Shanka back to his friends.

But that’s all straight forward analysis that’s well supported by the text. Let’s start taking some wild, barely supported guesses.

First: I think the Shanka (also called Flatheads) aren’t human. They’re definitely humanoid, but the way they’re described by Logen gives them a feeling of another species, rather than another tribe.

This might be partly because Logen never gives a sort of tribal name for either his identity or the band of people he was with at the start of the chapter. This quote: a man won't fight if it would kill him, but Shanka never acted that way just before the Shanka bites Logen, says to me that Shanka aren’t part of mankind.

Second guess: let’s look at Logen’s nicknames. Ninefingers is self-explanatory, and I assume we’ll learn why Logen’s other nickname, “the Bloody Nine” is important later. This guess is entirely based on narrative economy – why bother having a second nickname unless it’s going to be important to the narrative?y

Takeaways

This is a really solid first chapter. On a surface level it’s entertaining to read and sets you up with a basic theme of the book: Logen’s in a bad spot, things get worse, but he survives while paying dearly for it. Then, there are more layers underneath that you can read into and appreciate how the author is setting up the rest of the book, at least for Lgoen and the Shanka.

It’s enjoyed it, and I’m looking forward to reading further in the book.

This is a series of posts where I read and comment on chapters of the book The Sword Itself, by Joe Abercrombie, part of the First Law Trilogy. If you want to know more, read the [overview post|/post/sworditself/overview].