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Mark Lawrence’s debut offers many delights, including economical yet elegant prose and compellingly brutal action sequences, but the introduction of Jorg Ancrath to the Canon of great fantasy characters stands as his principal achievement here. A disinherited prince, Jorg strides across a far future Europe where some form of Apocalypse has seen humanity revert to a mediaeval state, pursuing a vendetta against those who killed his mother and brother, an event that has transformed him into what can only be described as a monster. It would be easy to dismiss Jorg as simply a psychopath with a genius IQ, but Lawrence doesn’t let us off that easy. By making Jorg by turns charming, fiercely intelligent and possessed of a keen wit, not to mention a somewhat brilliant swordsman, Lawrence compels us to find him as fascinating as he is repellent. He is also exactly the kind of personality that rose to prominence in the mediaeval era, take a look at the career of William the Conqueror for a real-world example.
It is one of the most common, and mistaken, assumptions about fiction that we must like the central protagonist. I didn’t like Jorg any more than I liked Hannibal Lecter or Paul Atreides from Frank Herbert’s Dune books; he tortures, he rapes and he kills without hesitation or regret. But he also fascinates and in doing so forces you to think about the satisfaction as well as the emptiness of vengeance, not to mention what it takes to make a King in a world as broken as his. Highly recommended.