Well done, I think? Not my speed, though. ( )

They could see the gate clearly. It was open. "There's got to be some perfectly simple explanation," someone said.
(Yes, Daxen told himself, I can think of one. But it can't be that, because there aren't any bodies. There's no smell. Two hundred thousand bodies, at least a week in the hot sun, there'd be a smell all right. But the only smell was jasmine, from the fields to the east where they grew it for the perfume trade. So it couldn't be that. The end of the world would never smell like jasmine.)

Parker is bleak, but never grimdark: his bleakness is real, but descriptive: it posits a possible better world, if we can make it through the bleak. You can only have hope if there's a reason to despair, and Parker gives us lots of reasons to despair. But there is hope, and humor, and humanity.

(He's also particularly on his game in this: sparkling prose, wonderful black humor, hilarious antiquities provenance jokes.) ( )

This is very Parker. Quite rambly. (Or are those odd little details of the meadery path actually all not just relevant but important?) Rife with coincidence, usual blackly funny. (Or is there a Sinister Hand behind it all?) Featuring a pair of it's-complicated-but-murderous brothers.

Originally delivered as serial fiction, the story is told in relay, the main character of one chunk passing the narrative baton to the next. Each section also peels back another layer of wrapping around what's really going on... or perhaps each section gives the puzzle-cube a turn so we're looking at a new face. Things Are Afoot. All the characters are fascinating and faceted and--of course, for Parker--highly capable.

I feel like I still have no idea what's really going on, but it was great fun to read, and I'm looking forward to more from the second and third volumes. ( )

She fidgeted with her glass. "But it all came to nothing anyway," she said. "There was a stalemate before the battle; there's the same stalemate now. Nothing's changed at all, except a lot of men were killed, and you got your promotion."
---

It's rare for me to rate a book with 4 or 5 stars and consciously choose to not read the sequel. The Two of Swords is a really good book, so I have to give it the 4 stars the book deserves. But it's also an unrelentingly dark and dismal book. However well a character is doing, soon enough their luck will turn and everything they have ever loved and cared about will crumble beneath their feet. Reading said crumbling again and again gets really depressing after a while.

The Two of Swords is about war. Specifically, a massive war between the Eastern and Western empires. Perhaps to give the conflict a more global feel, the book is divided into eight perspectives. Many fantasy novels employ multiple perspectives, but they usually switch back and forth between them. In The Two of Swords, when a character's perspective ends, it's over. The character may show up in a later character's section, but he won't ever become the narrator again. As a result, the book has the feeling of many stories stopping suddenly in the middle, without resolution.

Still, Parker is good at what he does. Despite the start-and-stop feel, The Two of Swords proceeds at a brisk pace. Parker wisely starts us off with an inoffensively familiar perspective: the talented farm boy whose superlative skills will be Important and set him apart from the others as one who is destined for greatness and renown. By the end of the book, Farm Boy is a distant memory as we try to juggle the different alliances, secret societies, and warring countries in our heads (a map, that old fantasy staple, would not be amiss here). The result is a bizarre patchwork quilt of a war and world that are refreshingly different and brilliantly developed. The Two of Swords is a really, really good book.

And I'm not reading the sequel.

The Two of Swords reminds me strongly of Joe Abercrombie's First Law series. Like Abercrombie, Parker isn't afraid to plunge his characters into the most despairing and desperate of situations and then let them and their loved ones die horribly. Like Abercrombie, Parker portrays war as a grim, often confusing mess of murder and mayhem in which many die for reasons no one, not even the generals, are entirely clear on. Many sections of The Two of Swords brought to mind Abercrombie's The Heroes. But what redeems Abercrombie is the humor of his books. Even at the worst of times, his books are always funny. The humor lightens the oppressive darkness and makes the reading experience entertaining without losing sight of the fact that a lot of awful things are happening on the page. The Two of Swords isn't without humor, but when things get grim, they get unbearably grim without any humor or lightness to alleviate the situation.

If you like dark books (and I mean dark; China Mieville is more cheerful), then The Two of Swords is a genuinely great book that's probably going to really interesting places in the sequel. But it's too dark for me. ( )

My next step with K.J. Parker should have been to continue the Engineer Trilogy, but it just so happened that I had time to kill on the evening I bought this book, and couldn’t resist starting it. In fact, Parker’s novels all seem to take place in the same world, so it didn’t even feel like straying. The Two of Swords has only confirmed my admiration for him as a writer. I’d go so far as to say I love his books. They’re knotty, cynical, pragmatic fantasy without a hint of magic, and the general flavour is what you might get if Machiavelli settled down to write an alternate-universe version of the Byzantine Empire. Stuffed full of double-bluffs and double-agents, this series takes us into the heart of a long-lasting war, spurred on by the personal enmity between the opposing generals – who also happen to be brothers. Two brothers; two armies; two empires; and one secret international fraternity, who may not be as neutral as they’ve always claimed to be…

For the full review, please see my blog:
https://theidlewoman.net/2018/04/24/the-two-of-swords-k-j-parker/ ( )