The Wisdom of Crowds
© 2021, Joe Abercrombie, Orbit Publications, 528pp
There’s a quote late in Joe Abercrombie’s Wisdom of Crowds that may be the intellectual and moral core of the entire book: “Take it far enough, freedom becomes chaos. The voice of the people… is just noise. It is the blather of the lunatics in the madhouse. It is the squeal of the pigs in the slaughterhouse. It is a choir of morons. Most of them don’t even know what they want, let alone how to get it. They need someone to tell them what to do.”
Based loosely on the French Revolution, Wisdom of Crowds is the final book in the Age of Madness trilogy, and is a stunning masterwork that blends horror and violence, as fully-formed and in as rich detail as any opus by Solzhenitsyn or Tolkien.
Abercrombie has always excelled at the madness of war, making him one of the great anti-war novelists of our time. In his latest, he shows the madness of peace.
At the end of The Trouble with Peace, the Union, led by King Orso, has just roundly defeated in insurrection by the Open Council, led by Leo dan Brock. Brock is severely injured in the fighting, losing a leg and the use of one arm. He is captured and sentenced to hang by Orso, but at the last minute he commutes the hanging out of deference to Brock’s wife Savine. Thus ends book two.
Orso has defeated the Open Council and stymied the North, but his victory is short-lived. An uprising by the Breakers and the Burners, populist workers’ movements, succeeds in overthrowing Orso, and at first it appears that some true reform may occur. The true source of inequity and repression in the Union, the vast bank of Valint and Balk, has been neutered. There is no sign of the secretive mage Bayaz, who owns the bank. Power originally coalesces around a weak idealist, Risenau. As chaos spreads under his ineffectual leadership, a Burner named Judge seizes power. Judge, vicious and utterly insane, turns the governing chamber into a horrific star chamber in which thousands of accused are found guilty, mostly of being accused, and sentenced to death. It combines the worst of the French Revolution and Stalinist Russia.
There is a painting by the French artist Michael Granger that captures the mood of Judge’s star chamber and shows the role of the madwoman in history.
Meanwhile in the North, Tricky Rikke has become the leader. However, her rule is crumbling as she makes dangerous enemies and alienates her friends, leaving her weakened and vulnerable to invasion and insurrection.
I once compared Abercrombie to Joseph Heller, whose uniquely vivid characters illuminated the utter madness of war. Now Abercrombie explores the madness of peace, with even more chilling results.
Wisdom of Crowds is a disturbing book, not because of its violence and injustice, but because of its accuracy. Anyone who has read history has seen this before. Just this past year America narrowly escaped the star chamber fervour of the revolutionary justice of a newly-hatched regime.
It may just be his best work.
The ending, while no cliffhanger, makes it clear that more books in this world are on their way. There are so many questions. Will Savine be another Judge, or a Risenau, or a Bayaz? And Bayaz is alive and planning. Planning quite a bit, in all likelihood. Is the Bloody Nine still alive and the incredibly potent force for chaos that he once was?
A friend noted that Abercrombie separates his trilogies with one or two stand-alone novels based in the same world and filling in the time that passes between the start of one trilogy and the next. It may be that those will answer some questions whilst leaving other for the next set.
It’s likely to be worth the wait, either way.