Reads like a movie, quick, fast paced. The main character is funny, despicable and interesting. It's something completely different from the bland, plot-driven characters that are pretty easy to use as protagonists in fantasy and always end up being a comfortable avatar for the reader. Jalan is no proxy. He is a young, craven fop, and is paired with Snorri, 30-something viking warrior family man. They are a power couple of a different kind from Fahfrd and Grey Mouser, even if they partake of the same archetype, and they might be the kind of people you would never like to hang out with in real life.
Some people object that the main character is whiny. So he is. He never, ever "navel gazes", though. He's a survivor, and besides Lawrence is really good at keeping a plot going, and his trademark is being very funny while writing about grim, horrible things. Funny-whiny is pretty rare on this side of Terry Pratchett, and thus I cherish it.
The setting is, frankly, there as a backdrop for the characters. It's a post-apocalyptic Earth that turned medieval and re-traced its step to something that feels like early 16th century Europe with pretty large Dark Ages inclusions, and people kind of re-evolving to their regional selves for the most part. Yes, it's silly, but it works all right. It's the kind of setting I usually despise, because I really can't get how you should get middle ages without gunpowder, but with pants (they had the former. They didn't have the latter), or why rapiers, longswords and Dane axes should share any part of Europe that is not a D&D rulebook. But here in "Prince of Fools", it's not really laziness, it's just being familiar and simply making up stuff to fit the story - which if done well is exactly the type of telling that is riveting from start to finish. What you won't do, never ever EVER, is obsess on small worldbuilding details - this is no Malazan or WoT.
The big bad is of the necromantic sort. It's a zombie decade it seems, and Lawrence plays lustily with what you expect to see about undead and then after lulling you into complecency he startles you with some clever little unexpected horror you might find in a Dark Souls level.
There it is, the word I was searching to describe Prince of Fools: clever. It oozes cleverness.
As for the bad, there's only one: I didn't really appreciate too much the Ancrath nostalgia tour that happens about mid-book. It went a tad too far on the premise that it's funny to see a scene from another point of view, and it's a scene from "Prince of Thorns". Of course, I'm yet to read the rest of "The Red Queen's War", so Jalan and Snorri meeting all those different characters from a different book might be some foreshadowing or preparation for other stuff - which is just the thing that might save that couple of chapters, that in my tastes felt off.
Originally posted on Goodreads on March, 12, 2017
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