Book Review | Prince of Thorns- Mark Lawrence

Prince of Thorns

Author- Mark Lawrence

Paperback (Advance Reading Copy)

Page Count: 384 pages

Publisher: Harper Voyager

Release Date: August 4, 2011

ISBN-10: 0007423292

ISBN-13: 978-0007423293

Prince of Thorns is, on the surface, a remarkably twisted little book. As one of the most talked about debut novels to release this year- which I took as a pinch of salt, in the interest of not getting my hopes up after having them dashed by Orullian’s The Unremembered- it is aggressively being called “the British answer to George R.R. Martin’s A Game of Thrones“. It makes sense; many new fans are flocking to the books of ASOIAF in the wake of HBO’s fantastic television adaptation, and Harper Voyager is right to do so in hopes of getting this debut out into the wild to attract these new readers. Yet Prince of Thorns is different from GoT; starting out as a writing exercise, as a homage to Burgess’ A Clockwork Orange, it isn’t as sprawling. It’s more focused, alternating between the key moments, past and present, of one Jorg Ancrath. Jorg is a prince who thirsts for revenge against Count Renar, after his mother and brother are killed one stormy night by his men on the traveler’s road, his own body hidden by a bush of thorny briar, the “pain of a hundred hooks burning in every limb” (p. 25) as he watches, mortified. At a great cost to his life, he is saved by the hook-briar, and found by his father’s men, brought back and nursed into health. His obsession with revenge, and the shaping what he comes to be (which is, for lack of a better term, evil) is described in meticulous and imaginative prose, something that impresses especially when you realize that this is a first novel from Brit newcomer Mark Lawrence. Take, for example, the paragraph below:

“For the longest time I studied revenge to the exclusion of all else. I built my first torture chamber in the dark vaults of imagination. Lying on bloody sheets in the Healing Hall I discovered doors within my mind that I’d not found before, doors that even a child of nine knows should not be opened. Doors that never close again.

I threw them wide.”

(p. 25)

You will be disgusted, appalled, and sickened by Jorg. He is, for lack of a better term, unspeakably evil. You will be shocked at his actions, actions that are brutally for a grown adult, much more for a boy. This is what has my hackles raised the most, the biggest factor in how well it will be received commercially; this stuff is not for the faint of living, and while a lot of his atrocities are alluded to rather than stated explicitly, some readers will be put off by what he does. The certain polarizing aspect is that he is one of the most extreme characters I know, even to that of Bakker and Abercrombie- which in some levels, all share similar qualities-  and does some shit that some readers might be put off by. I hope that his evilness doesn’t overshadow the sketched worldbuilding and overall skill of the book, because it is skilled indeed. A lot of it is laced with a wry black humour, reminiscent to that of Abercrombie, but where Abercrombie humour feels shallow to certain people in his books that might not be funny in the first place, Jorg’s humour feels like it fits to who he is. He’s Artemis Fowl with a mean streak. He’s the exorcist boy with a sword, the mastermind with a bloodied dagger, the joker with mailed gloves. He doesn’t even try to excuse his crimes. Instead he tries to explain why he does them, which is why he is so fascinating as an character, even if he is a coldhearted bastard. This novel has a voice, which is more than can be said for most budding new writers.

His coldness and determination to see goals through is wrapped by a knife hot intellect that is brought out by beautiful writing, writing that you can tell has been revised and sharpened to force readers to understand Jorg’s broken mind. At times it’s beautiful, and at times it’s incredibly vicious and sudden, but it also hurts it some, simply because a fourteen year old doesn’t talk/act/think this way. In much the same way that the ASOIAF has some imperfections with its character’s ages, so too does Prince of Thorns.

“‘ Good to be back eh, Jorg?’ Makin pulled up beside me. He leaned forward in his stirrups and drank in the air. ‘Smells of home.’

And it did. The scent of warm earth took me back, back to times when the world was small, and safe.

‘I hate this place, ‘ I said. He looked shocked at that, and Makin was never an easy man to shock. ‘It’s a poison that men take willingly, knowing it will make them weak.’”

(p. 101)

” We wrap up our violent and mysterious world in a pretence of understanding. We paper over the voids in our comprehension with science or religion, and make believe that order has been imposed. And, for the most of it, the fiction works. We skim across surfaces, heedless of the depths below. Dragonflies flitting over a lake, miles deep, pursuing erratic paths to pointless ends. Until that moment when something from the cold unknown reaches up to take us.

The biggest lies we save for ourselves. We play a game in which we are gods, in which we make choices, and the current follows in our wake. We pretend a separation from the wild. Pretend that a man’s control runs deep, that civilization is more than a veneer, that reason will be our companion in dark places.

I learned these lessons in my tenth year, although little of them stayed with me.”

(p. 305)

In transparent ways, it lines up the story for a few precious plot twists, plot twists that maybe weren’t delivered quite as effectively because of how quick the book moves along, a short book at only 384 pages. The author has mentioned before that reading between the lines dishes up a deeper subtext; the world itself is, oddly enough, set in the far future, with references to Plutarch, Sun Tzu, and Nietzsche. Men have now been reduced to handling simpler weapons of pointed iron and steel, and the world that Jorg is in is a post-nuclear wasteland, built ambiguously. When it dawned on me where and what it was actually set in, Prince of Thorns just became that much more memorable. The book offers some very obvious overtones on the human condition, or as the author hopes, the occasional glimpse of it in this “violent enthusiastic fantasy”. Jorg Ancrath progresses from being an amoral and vile killer to an amoral and vile killer that you understand more at the end than from the start. He doesn’t try to make up an apology. What he does is brutal, cruel, and wrong, but to him it is necessary. It is what he does to stay ahead of “the game”, the moving of chess pieces by greater powers that you keep in touch with all through the span of the book. You start to realize where power truly is, in the mages, the puppeteers, the people behind the scenes, Jorg Ancrath is one of the few that cannot be controlled. For when you play with him, it’s like playing with fire. You’re bound to get burned.

Prince of Thorns is not in any marginal aspect like A Game of Thrones. Where Martin’s saga of kings and queens spans leagues and centuries and hundreds of characters, Prince of Thorns is squeezed and bottlenecked into one horrifying and remarkable mind of a killer prince. It moves at a swift pace, and readers, though probably disturbed, will have to keep pressing on to the final satisfying page. It isn’t like A Game of Thrones, but it’s almost just as good.