“The Devils” by Joe Abercrombie

My chief reaction to reading this book was, “Wow, Joe Abercrombie has grown up.”

(context: I read and enjoyed the First Law books up through Red Country. Never read the Age of Madness or Shattered Sea trilogies)

My one-sentence description of this book (first in a new series) would be “Joe Abercrombie’s take on the League of Extraordinary Gentlemen.” The book begins with Brother Diaz, a monk from a Spanish monastery, summoned to the Holy City to meet the Pope. Her Holiness, it turns out, is too busy for such matters (and a 10 year old girl besides), so he actually meets with a senior Cardinal. She tells him he’s been appointed vicar of the Thirteenth Chapel in the Celestial Palace. But wait, says Brother Diaz: aren’t there only twelve chapels, reflecting the Twelve Virtues?

And thus we meet the Chapel of Holy Expediency. The Church might be of God, but it’s also of the world, and sometimes certain compromises have to be made to accomplish God’s will. Brother Diaz’s charges are a bunch of condemned enemies of God, bound to serve His Church when the situation requires. They include a vampire, a werewolf, a necromancer, an elf (the elves having driven back several Crusades against them in the centuries since they seized the Holy Land), a general purpose rogue, and a knight cursed with immortality.

While Brother Diaz is meeting his congregation, we readers are meeting Alex. A Holy City street urchin and a thief (but not a particularly good one), she is rescued from some thugs by a passing nobleman who recognizes something in the shape of her face, and in the birthmark under her ear. Alex, it turns out, is none other than Princess Alexia Pyrogennetos, long-lost daughter of the beloved Empress Irene, rightful heir to the Serpent Throne of Troy, capital of the Empire of the East, Europe’s unconquerable bulwark against the elven hordes. But she’s got to get there first. Her usurping sorceress aunt might be dead, but she left four sons behind who will all no doubt be very eager to meet their cousin. Which means she needs an escort. And that’s where the Chapel of Holy Expediency comes in.

This has everything I would expect from Abercrombie. A fast pace, exciting twists and turns, graphic violence. Lots of humor which is very much not going to be to everyone’s taste, but is to mine, so I was laughing out loud all through this - something not many books are able to get me to do.

So, referring back to the beginning of this review, why did I say that Abercrombie has “grown up”? The First Law books were relentlessly nihilistic. Nothing mattered, everyone was a shitty person doing shitty things for shitty reasons, any personal growth that happened was inevitably followed by a return to shitty, shitty form. I liked the First Law books a good bit, particularly the standalones, but they were also, in a sense, predictable. Abercrombie’s version of Chekov’s Gun might well have been “if in act one you have a puppy, by the last act it must get kicked.” This doesn’t apply to The Devils. It’s still a grimdark book, with grimdark sensibilities, but it also recognizes that not everything, everywhere, is shitty all the time. People try to do good things because they’re the right thing, and sometimes they succeed. People strive and grow, and sometimes they come out better for it. Less edgy, but more realistic and ultimately much more satisfying.

My only real complaint about this book is the worldbuilding. It needed to pick a lane. Either take (to steal a phrase from Guy Gavriel Kay) “a quarter turn to the fantastic” and have things be fantasy but clearly recognizable in their real world inspirations, or make it an alt-history where things are mostly the same but with identifiable differences. This alternated between the two, and it took me a long time as a reader to find my footing.

But that’s a relatively minor complaint. I had decided after Red Country that I was done with Abercrombie, not because he wasn’t good, but because there’s a lot of books out there and I felt I’d mostly read what he had to say. I’m revisiting that, and very curious to see what’s coming next for the Chapel of Holy Expediency.