Scene #6: Corporal Tunny and the Thing with the Different Point-of-View and Exposition and Stuff

"Tunny."
"Uh?" He opened one eye and the sun stabbed him directly in the brains. 

....

Tunny sighed. "You carry the hammock." 

Now that we've been introduced to the three main characters:

• Curnden Craw: Competent, Respected, Chilled
• Prince Calder: Conniving, Vengeful, Smart-Ass
• Bremer de Gorst: Whiny, Glory-Seeking, Bad-Ass 

Abercrombie decides to fill in some gaps a bit by introducing two minor POV characters; the first is Corporal Tunny, 

"a veteran of the Starikland Rebellion, the Gurkish War, the last Northern War, the Siege of Adua, this current unpleasantness and a quantity of peacetime soldiering that would have bored a keener mind to death." 

The second character, Beck, has a nice little character arc; Tunny, on the other hand, seems here mostly to amuse and get us a sense of what life is like among the grunts on the Union side of the war.

Scene Question: Will Tunny be able to dodge doing work? 
Answer to Scene Question: Hell no. What are you, stupid?

Abercrombie took care to make Tunny quite distinct from any of our main characters. He's a smart-ass, sure, but he's also a slacker and a bit of a coward (or, as he'd probably put it, realist) -- as he says, 

"wars are hard enough work without people fighting in the middle of 'em."

Basically, the Tunny chapter gives us exposition about things like the chain of command (after we see Bremer deliver his message to the General, we hear Tunny's opinion on how shit will be rolling downhill, which will culminate thusly:)

"Within a minute or two, First Sargeant Forest will arrive to position his bared buttocks above my undeserving head."

Generally, with Tunny we're getting the dirt on the gritty details of war. We're not getting that from Craw so much -- he's got a small band of Named Men, after all, you're not going to see much bellyaching there. And not from Calder, who isn't on the front lines. As far as Bremer goes ... well, we did get a good chunk of exposition in the Bremer chapter, so: crap.

Still, as I recall, we'll be getting a bit less of it from Bremer in the future, as he develops his own little arc, and even then, in his chapter we learned more about what was going on at the upper echelons and not what life was like in the trenches. 

Not much else to say except that Tunny has an enormously entertaining voice, and if you're going to throw exposition at the reader (and you kind of have to in a war novel), a character like Tunny is a good way to do it. He's chatty, he's got strong opinions, and he's quite knowledgeable. Unlike two of our three main characters, he doesn't have any incredibly strong desires (Craw, to me, is less driven), but Tunny has taken a firm stance against dying, and will be sharing with his newbie troops exactly the best way to non-fight fight a war. 


Next Time: Our completely-different-in-almost-every-conceivable-way other minor character, Beck.