You know, it's funny how the tail end of a book can make you change your mind on the quality of the rest of it.
Okay, so, this book is good, but it's not the same "good" as I might use with other books. The Blade Itself belongs in the upper tier of fantasy novels. It's "good" in the sense that, when compared to really great books, it doesn't deserve to be called "really great"--it deserves to be called "good." When compared to "good" books, however, it clearly outshines them.
Obviously I need a wider breadth of adjectives, because when I say "good" how can you know whether I mean "good for an average book" or "good for a great book"?
Anyway, it was a nice change from the kind of fantasy I tend to read, as it's heavily plot-based, not character-based. That's not to say the characters weren't strong; they're very well crafted and Abercrombie is good at making you change your mind about whether you like them several times over. It's just that every so often they do something that is blatantly in the service of the plot, not something the character would naturally do. This is, in part, because of one aspect of the characters Abercrombie does have trouble with--change. Several times, when any given character changes in some important way, it's sudden (over the course of a chapter, maybe) and a few times it feels terribly contrived. The whole thing ends up feeling like the characters are lacking their own free will and just do what some omnipotent manipulator has them do... which, you know, it would be pretty cool if it turns out in later books that that's the case, but somehow I think said manipulator is Abercrombie himself and he's just not hiding his fingerprints all that well.
So it's plot-based, and the plot... is, for most of the book, too slow. Some interesting things happen at the start, and then there's this long period where there's the hint of interesting things soon but it takes entirely too long for those interesting things to arrive. Once they do, it's great stuff to the end, but the middle could really have used some tightening.
Fight scenes! The fight scenes are one of Abercrombie's major selling points. Well, one of the ones people use on his behalf, anyway. Everywhere you look, when people recommend the trilogy, they almost always mention how good the fight scenes are. I found them to be... adequate. It's actually somewhat impressive I'm willing to give them that much, 'cause there are a few early on that really annoyed me. One flat-out broke my willing suspension of disbelief, and another had me utterly unable to visualize the action. The rest of them, though, worked fine--nothing much special about them, but I had no complaints, so: adequate.
There's not much else to say, I think. Despite my not-so-glowing words above, I did really enjoy the last, oh, hundred pages or so. And now you might be wondering--if that's the best I can come up with, how exactly is this book in the "upper tier" of fantasy novels? Well... it really is a very well-written book. Even with all my problems with it, I can easily see that. And so I say it's good. No more, no less.
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