Revenge is a dish...

Best Served Cold by Joe Abercrombie


My rating: 5 of 5 stars

Joe Abercrombie... the dedication at the start of this novel says it all:

For Grace

One day you will read this

And be slightly worried

In his First Law Trilogy there was at most two decent people, everyone else was treacherous, deceitful, sadistic, egomaniacal and/or tragically deluded. As a friend of mine commented,"The most likable person in it was a torturer."

As the title would indicate, this is a story about ice-cream.

It is very similar in format to Kill Bill, although bloodier, with more psychopaths, far more collateral damage, a blacker morality and a less predictable series of events.

As usual for Mr Abercrombie, it is a fantasy without a hero in sight. It features likable side characters from his first books, who are fortunate enough to be fleshed out into generally even more despicable individuals, and some new lovable sociopaths.

It has copious amounts of dark humour and bad-ass fight scenes.

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A Shakespearian or Greek tragedy has a protagonist in it that is a great person albeit it with a single and most likely fatal flaw. I think we need a technical term for the type of stuff this man puts out since it tends to be the complete opposite. I vote for anti-tragedy.

Watson, I deduce that he was right handed because....

I am rather hung-up on symmetry.

At some point in my misspent teenage age years, I noticed there was a not insignificant difference between the distance from my left shoulder to the centre of my collar bone and my right shoulder to the centre of my collar bone. I concluded that this could be remedied by sleeping on my right-side, which I spent the next few months trying.

I realised I was not alone in my lop-sidedness, as I watched people pass me by in the streets.* Almost everyone had an asymmetry in their upper-bodies. Typically, right handed people had a lower and broader right shoulder than left shoulder. Strangely, the left-handed people that I knew of were more symmetrical. I ascribed this to it being a righty's world.**

In college, I practiced writing and using the broadsword**** with my left hand. After a few montshs, my right hand gave up its impatient twitching while my left struggled through the alphabet over and over again.

I have come to terms with the unlikelihood of the left being as steady and consistent as the right in writing. It is legible and, when I really concentrate, passable :)

After I got bored of practising writing left handed [taking care to tip-toe through the double entendre minefield that is talking about using one's hands for anything]. I started writing letters with my right and left hand at the same time. At first the same letters and then different letters. The tricksiest of the pesky pairs to do were "s" and "t", as I recall, because in most other cases the two strokes could be coordinated smoothly [oo-er Vicker!], but keeping the line of the "t" straight while doing the curve of the "s" proved, as I said already, tricksy indeed.

The event that precipitated my fascination in handedness, as usual, was watching a TV show. I was watching Law and Order: Criminal Intent.

D'Onofrio's character was being Holmesian as usual. He had just deduced that a person was pushed down a stairs because their gums were worn down more on their right than their left, meaning they were right handed* and they were on the left side of the stairs, which is not the typical side for righties. Being practically minded, I zeroed in on the weak link in his chain of deductive reasoning.

The teeth brushing.

I gave a figurative, OK I may have actually said it at the time,"F*ck you" to D'Onofrio and started brushing my teeth with my left hand that night. Lets see him solve my murder now!*****

4 years on... I can brush my teeth equally well with both hands, as a result working with tweezers, tooth picks and other small objects [easy, gov'ner] comfortably enough that it takes me a few moments to realise that I have switched to left hand out of convenience of angle.

My latest little hobby on this note is tying my shoes single handedly, and then tying both shoes simultaneously. I can do the first part OK


*Walking in the streets of Dublin, as man, you are more likely to be passed out by lone women and couples [where the women drags her man ahead, of course] than other men. Try it out for yourself!

**In the book Right Hand, Left Hand by Chris McManus he said that the proportion of lefties (ciotóg in Irish, known as cunny handed in Scotland at some stage) to righties is about 3:17, generally less for third world countries.***

*** As an interesting aside, my chemical engineering class had an remarkably high number of left handed people in it, nearly 33% as I recall. With a group of n=45 that can be considered statistically significant, what it signifies, I dinnae know.

****I am getting ready for this day:
Character A:"I admit it, you are better than me"
Character B: "Then why are you smiling?"

*****Assuming I have an "accident" involving juxtaposition of various commonalities associated with a using a particular side for something or other: decapitation with a left handed cleaver ["judging by his teeth this could have been suicide"]; strangulation with a left handed knot ["judging by his teeth this could have been suicide"]; falling from a height where there was only left-handed access ["judging by his teeth over here, some of his gums here and here, this could have been suicide"].