To begin with I must warn you that this review contains SPOILERS. A lot of what I have to say relates a lot to the various twists, turns and often-confusing late-chapter events.
Prince of Thorns was a highly recommended Fantasy novel, written by Mark Lawrence. All I heard that it was a ‘dark’ fantasy, and the darkness was delivered. Within the first chapter, our main character, Jorg the fourteen-year-old, has already slaughtered a village and raped its women. He is not a hero, that is for sure, and I was initially interested to see how this irredeemable little prick would redeem himself or develop by the end of the novel.
Spoiler, he does not. If anything, he just gets cockier and more arrogant along with showing no sign of remorse for the absolutely terrible things he does. Jorg, in my opinion, is an entirely unlikeable character. I read other reviews, hoping that others see it my way, but instead I see ones that state he is layered and, while evil, he is either justified in his actions or just ‘fun’. I see a lot of comparison to Batman, aka something terrible happened in his past and now he is out for revenge, only this time instead of becoming a hero, Jorg becomes the Joker. However, Joker is not a fourteen-year-old boy with daddy issues. Villains, the ones we love, have so much more depth and complexity. Darth Vader we knew slaughtered children in Star Wars, but we saw his temptation and change to the dark side, then his eventual redemption. Even just looking at Darth Vader in New Hope, he chokes people and kills his former master, but we still enjoy his character as that isn’t all he does. He has other interactions besides wanting to kill everyone, there are hidden details like “Who was he before the mask?”. Jorg’s character goes as far as ‘sassy quip’ and ‘ooh my blade is so itchy *stabs innocent*’.
There is something about these cocky, arrogant main characters that people just fall in love with, that I despise. Yes, the genre is called fantasy and is meant to be unrealistic, but I always believed this to be the setting not how human characters react. A human boy, with no magic powers or anything, I am meant to believe is this six-foot tall, muscular, handsome individual with inhuman speed and strength and the sexual prowess to tire out a prostitute (this is directly stated in the novel, I’m not exaggerating). If he was perhaps a little older, then maybe I could believe it, but the way his thoughts are written (since the entire book is written from his POV) are far too mature for his age. Remove his violent tendencies and you get a flat character, with no other motivation or character qualities.
This is a similar trait to practically all the other characters in this book. It so heavily relies on Jorg that little time is spent on the rest of the cast, reducing them to one-dimensional bodies that you wouldn’t care if they lived or died (and with Jorg’s random murderous streak you can expect a lot to die). Perhaps if they were built up further I might be worried that they are around this murder-hobo of a boy, or perhaps have some kind of hero to counter our clear villain of a lead? The problem could lie there, for in most fiction the villain is not the main character. You don’t see what the villain is doing 24/7, so you can enjoy the interactions and moments you have more. There is no hero in Prince of Thorns, so you have both no-one to root for and no one to sympathise with.
The second gripe I have is the setting. This is where the real spoilers lie, although it is a twist you see coming quickly. It seems to be set in a Medieval style world, and I say ‘it seems’ because I really did not get a feel for the world at all. Fantasy relies so strongly on world-building, but I had no idea what kind of place this world was. Barely any description of the locations, the relative distance between continents, cities or towns and an overall expectation of the reader to know what this world is like. It felt in a way like reading some historical-fiction as names like Jesus, Plato, Nietzsche and Sun Tzu are thrown around. Initially, I thought the writer had just forgotten when some of these characters had been born, but then there is the big twist. This world is set in the far future, as there is an AI and nuclear weapons. In one chapter. And then never mentioned again. It feels so absolutely unnecessary to have this sudden sci-fi element that plays no part to the overall story. There are no ancient, ruined skyscrapers or leftover modern-day elements, it all just feels like a twist for the sake of a twist. Perhaps the later books explain this, but I for one will not be reading them.
I believe that reviews often need to have positives about what they are reviewing, something can’t all be as bleak as this novel’s setting. While there are not many, Mark Lawrence has quite an interesting style of writing, and can craft well structured sentences, paragraphs and sometimes lines of dialogue (when it is not “I pushed him off a cliff. He annoyed me. I’m so great.”). The way Jorg thinks and speaks, as mentioned before, would be much more believable and considered good if he was older, say over 18, as he comes out with quite philosophical quotes.
Overall, Prince of Thorns is not to my taste at all, with an overpowered, annoying, unlikable main character, an uninteresting and unexplored world and filled with flat, lifeless characters.
I would give it a “Would rather be stuck in a thorn bush”/ 10.