Red Country

By: Joe Abercrombie

Narrated by: Steven Pacey

Length: 19 hrs and 52 mins

Publisher's summary

Shy South comes home to her farm to find a blackened shell; her brother and sister have been stolen and she's going to have to return to her bad old ways if she's ever going to see them again. She sets off in grim pursuit with only her cowardly old step-father Lamb for company. But it turns out he's hiding a bloody past of his own. None bloodier.

Their journey will take them across the lawless plains, to a frontier town gripped by gold fever, through feuds, duels and massacres, and high into unmapped mountains to a reckoning with ancient enemies, and force them into alliance with Nicomo Cosca, infamous soldier of fortune...and a man no one should ever have to trust…

Steven Pacey is best known for his role as Del Tarrant in the third and fourth seasons of the sci-fi series Blake's 7.

He has worked extensively in Theatre, TV and film for many years and in 2009 played opposite Graham Norton in La Cage Aux Folles at London's Playhouse Theatre. He has read numerous audiobooks including Joe Abercrombie's First Law Trilogy, Best Served Cold and The Heroes, and abridged titles by Matthew Reilly.

©2012 Joe Abercrombie (P)2012 Orion Publishing Group

Lamb

Loved the duel between Lamb and Glamor Golden 💔 and also how all the fighting scenes are built up.

Best one yet!

Besides the first law trilogy this is without a doubt the best of the books. Glad to hear more about Ninefingers and Cosca, some of my favorites from the first law books. Highly recommend it!

Good stuff

Listened the first law series and extra books based on the world created in them and have to say I enjoyed them all. Have to be realistic - the series was the better part and these additional books don't quite get to the same level.

Brilliant

Another banger by Abercrombie. And Steven Pacey is probably my favorite narrator at this point.

Abercrombie's best story with brilliant narration

For me, this is Joe's best story. Brilliant characters, with the ending the book needed.

Flawless narration

Flawless narration! The story is ok, a bit random at times. Worth the read, i think i liked this one the best from the standalone books.

Amazing characters and story

Lovely mix of old and new characters in another excellent book perfectly performed as always by this reader.

Cormac McCarthy and Jack Schaefer Do Epic Fantasy?

Joe Abercrombie’s Red Country (2012) reads a little like Blood Meridian crossed with Shane in an epic fantasy setting. Or like a grimdark fantasy by Joe Cook and Stephen Erikson with a strong western angle. Settlers are moving west through the Far Country, the land of the Ghosts (Native American analogues), looking for gold, following dreams, bringing “civilization” with them. There are cattle herds, river crossings, stampedes, and attacks by painted and motley-clothed Indians, er, Ghosts, circling the wagons and trying to take scalps, er, ears. There is the destination, the town Crease, run by and fought over by two saloon owners, the Mayor (centered in the Church of Dice) and Papa Ring (centered in the Whitehouse). In Crease the gamblers, gangsters, drunkards, beggars, and prostitutes outnumber the prospectors, and drinking, swearing, thieving, and fighting are rife.

Although Abercrombie offers a telling comment by Mark Twain as epigraph for one of the parts of the novel, “There are many humorous things in the world, among them the white man’s notion that he is less savage than the other savages,” and although one or two of Abercrombie’s main characters feel some sympathy for the Ghosts, realizing, for instance, that they are just people and that the settlers are engaged in “a brave but foolhardy effort to export the worst evils of city living into the middle of the unspoiled wilderness,” no main point of view character is a Ghost, they come off as rather pathetic (if colorful and dangerous), and at one point their leaders are treacherously and excrescently murdered by two of the men we’re supposed to be rooting for in our reading of the novel. In short, although Abercrombie pays lip service to the concept that all men are equally savage and that civilization is in many ways a plague, he gets the reader to want non-Ghost characters to come out on top of the carnage.

Fortunately, Abercrombie is really writing epic fantasy, with mutually antagonistic cultures like the Old Empire, the Union, and the North, so he also has more formidable and villainous non-Ghost antagonists for our heroes, like Captain General Nicomo Cosca, leader of the mercenary Company of the Gracious Hand, and Inquisitor Lorsen, leader of eight or so sadistic “practicals” from the Union’s Inquisition. Cosca is a prime villain, a luminously smiling, gregarious, geriatric Captain Hook, given to philosophizing and seeking personal gain without any ethics or morals. His company indulges in rapine and pillage and massacre, burning whatever will burn, taking whatever can be carried, arriving like a plague of psychopathic locusts and leaving devastation in their wake. They are under contract to the Union to cross the border into the Near and Far Countries to find rebel remnants so Inquisitor Lorsen may torture them for a brighter future.

One of the most interesting characters is the Gracious Hand’s lawyer Temple, who’s spent most of his life taking the easy way and leaving all his many jobs and careers half-completed, a man with the moral compass to be appalled by the Company’s atrocities but without the courage to try to stop them.

But the novel is driven by Shy “My knife is always handy” South, a one-quarter Ghost, red haired, gap toothed, sharp-tongued, hard-bargaining, ex-wanted thief and murderer, and her stepfather Lamb, a hulking, taciturn, middleaged northerner who avoids conflict and can’t bargain. After their farm is burned, their hired worker hanged, and Shy’s ten-year-old sister and six-year-old brother taken, Shy and Lamb set out from the ruins to track the culprits across the Near Country and into the Far Country. Once Shy starts a task she won’t stop till it’s done, but this one seems nigh on impossible. Fortunately for her, Lamb (not his real name) turns out to be more dangerous and infamous than Shy took him to be.

Abercrombie likes to set potent characters in motion until they collide in impressive set pieces with ever higher stakes as the story progresses. Here we have the Company of the Gracious Hand (and Temple), the Fellowship (of settlers), the Inquisitors, the Ghosts, the Dragon People (a strain of Ghost hiding away on or in a sacred volcanic mountain), a small group of scoundrels led by Grega Cantliss, and our “heroes” Shy and Lamb.

Especially memorable are the terse, teasing interactions between Shy (who sticks at everything she attempts) and Temple (who sticks at nothing), Nicomo Cosca’s self-aggrandizing BS delivered to his hack biographer Spillion Sworbreck, a tour de force wagon chase scene, and a hilarious treaty signing attended by the dread Imperial Legate Sarmis.

Plenty of dry, witty, cynical dialogue:
“Some day you can build a boat from ‘meaning well’ and see how it floats. Tried that. It sank with me on it.”
“A man with a missing eye after a man with a missing finger. There’s a song somewhere in there, I reckon.”
“What can you expect when you fish men out of rivers? Heroes?”
“Severed heads never go out of fashion.”
“Here is the perennial trouble with burying your past. Others are forever trying to dig it up.”

Plenty of vivid, evocative descriptions:
“She burst out at the edge of a dizzy cliff and stared far over high and barren country, sharp black forest and bare black rock, slashed and stabbed with white snow, fading into long gray rumor, without a touch of people or color. No hint of the world she knew.”

Audiobook reader Stephen Pacey relishes the novel, giving different characters from different cultures different accents, doing fine voices for the main characters, and doing a splendid Nicomo Cosca, such that at one point when Cosca shows up unexpectedly and Abercrombie is withholding his identity for a few paragraphs, Pacey reveals the villain’s presence more quickly than were we reading the physical book. Pacey enhances the story.

Readers of Abercrombie novels will recognize here their trademark features: painterly descriptions, unpredictable and visceral violence (that may become numbing), murky moral waters, and flawed narrative point of view characters who can’t escape their troubled pasts or who have difficulty making the right choice in moments of crisis, such that we find them oddly appealing as we wonder if they’ll ever be able to find a place of peace or do the right thing.

A brilliant story. Worth the time & money.

Would you consider the audio edition of Red Country to be better than the print version?

It's a great story to own and to listen to. It's brilliant to be able to take the characters on a run with me, making the audible version really convenient.

What did you like best about this story?

The development of Shy as a character is great. Lamb's slow entry and relatively low profile is brilliant, especially if you are a fan of his other books and are familiar with who he is...

Which scene was your favorite?

The ending of the book is wonderful and a significant ray of hope for humanity. I won't spoil it for new readers - something to look forward to...

If you were to make a film of this book, what would the tag line be?

For every action there is an equal and violent reaction...

Any additional comments?

It's a great conclusion to Joe Abercrombies books available on Audible. I'm really sad to leave is world and can hardly wait for his next installment of action, adventure and Northmen...

Best yet!

I loved the first three of the First Law books, then I felt Best Served Cold and Heroes didn't quite reach those heights, but then I listened to Red Country. This was my favorite of them all.