Prince of Thorns

"So Prince of Thorns is completely different from The Worm Ouroboros . It’s doing something different from every other book that I want to talk about. It’s very flippant, very dark humour. It famously opens with a band of what Lawrence calls road brothers, basically a band of particularly unpleasant vicious bandits, who have destroyed an entirely peaceful village and are butchering everyone. And on the first page, it starts with something along the lines of ‘Queues were forming in front of the more attractive young women.’ It’s absolutely just, what would you do if you could… It’s a bit Ayn Rand , or A Clockwork Orange , the fantasy version. The main character Jorg is very much like Alex from A Clockwork Orange . Jorg is thirteen. He’s very physically precocious, so he’s not your normal thirteen year old – he’s six-foot-something and incredibly good with the sword. He’s bright, he’s witty, he’s always got a zippy one liner; and he has absolutely no morals. As we get into the books, we begin to see that he is actually very damaged. And he’s now doing the most revolting appalling things for the lols, because he can. He’s rampaging through what you begin to discover is in fact post-apocalypse Europe, which has gone back to the Middle Ages in the weird way that post-apocalypse fantasies often do – somehow, about 200 years after the apocalypse the few remaining people will be for some reason living like Monty Python and the Holy Grail . They’ve gone back to having witches and magic and wizards and swords and castles. But in the final book, Emperor of Thorns , you begin to realise that when he refers to Empire, he’s actually talking about the European Union . It’s this bizarre mash up of the Holy Roman Empire and the European Union, occupying the same geographical space. At one point we go to Strasbourg, and we begin to realise that what we’re actually going to is the remains of European Union parliament building. So there’s layers in it that you begin to unpick about what’s going on. This book is very important in grimdark, it’s always one of the texts that gets talked about. If people haven’t read much grimdark, Mark Lawrence and Joe Abercrombie are always the two people who are mentioned. And it’s a really enjoyable book. For me, it means a lot… I had very bad perinatal depression with my first child, and I was feeling that I should only read books about being a good parent and child rearing – my whole life should be dedicated towards making my baby’s life as good as possible. I’d never do anything that wasn’t totally focused on her. And then one day in the library, I saw the cover of Prince of Thorns – and if a book is called something like ‘Prince of Something’, and it has a picture of a young man with a sword… Yes, yes . I just couldn’t resist taking it out of the library and reading it. And you can imagine, I was sitting reading it with my baby next to me, having read nothing but books on how to nurture your baby, as if somehow even reading this would come through in breastmilk or something – and now this book begins with queues forming before the more attractive women in the village. And it was genuinely quite a liberating moment for me. There’s a famous scene in it, a really horrible scene, when we have flashbacks to when Jorg is a bit younger. He adopted a stray dog and then his father kills the dog in front of him. Bizarrely that’s always consistently talked of as the most upsetting chapter in the whole book… And I had this moment: I said, “Okay, it will probably be alright, as long as I never butcher a pet in front of her.” Yes! It was liberating: there I was, so anxious about the tiniest little things. It’s a moment of fantasising about what it’d be like to be a really, really awful person. And then you can get back in a much better state of mind. I think that’s a reason a lot of people read grimdark. I’m a member of a Facebook group called Grimdark Writers and Readers, and what’s really noticeable is that everyone is very, very supportive and caring. A lot of the people in the group have had mental health issues and struggles, but people are incredibly supportive and always pull together to help each other. I ran a charity book auction for Save the Children, particularly for the children of Israel and Gaza, and it was the Grimdark people who really came together, and were just throwing money at me. People reading and writing books that go into some really dark, unpleasant stuff — it seems to be nice people that do that. It’s the people who don’t ever cry laughing about it all that are the people you need to watch out for, I think. Yes, yes! A certain person has just launched her book Ten Years to Save the West … I mean, that’s the title , which in itself… the implications of that! Imagine being the kind of person who simply says, “Oh, I know how to save world, follow me.”"