65 pages • 2-hour read
The Devils
A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Themes
Content Warning: This section of the guide includes discussion of racism, religious discrimination, graphic violence, illness, and death.
The Struggle for Redemption
Abercrombie’s exploration of sin and redemption in The Devils moves beyond traditional theological interpretations into personal, political, and psychological terrain, exploring how deeply personal and collective guilt can coexist with the often contradictory desire for atonement. However, The Devils offers no easy absolution, no divine forgiveness, and no simple moral victories. As Jakob notes, “There is no right door […] They all lead to hell” (174). Abercrombie’s characters are not heroes striving to overcome sin; they are survivors, outcasts, and failures, each grappling with their darkness in a world where redemption is not promised. Some, like Vigga and Sunny, struggle to forgive themselves. Others, like Jakob and Diaz, wrestle with the dissonance between faith and action. In Abercrombie’s world, redemption, if it comes, is not grace from above, but grace between people—sinners cling to each other and try to do something right.
Critically, the characters are all sinners in one way or another, evincing Abercrombie’s interest in exploring moral ambiguity through his characters. Jakob of Thorn epitomizes Abercrombie’s examination of sin as a byproduct of righteous intent. As a former grandmaster of the Iron Order, he has lived a life saturated with holy war, executing what he once believed were necessary acts of violence in the name of faith and order. In the cursed house in Venice, he sees an illusory battlefield filled with an amalgamation of past enemies: “He wasn’t sure who they were fighting anymore […] a century and more of enemies, flowing together like paints on a madman’s palette” (178). Over time, Jakob’s sins have ceased to be distinct, instead fusing into a pervasive sense of damnation. When asked if evil men can become good, he replies, “Maybe one day” (530), and his attempts to guide and protect Alex, to do something “good,” suggest a reach for redemption.
While Jakob’s sins are a result of his choices, Vigga’s were forced upon her. She is a symbolic embodiment of violence, bloodlust, and chaos, forced to carry the literal and figurative scars of her supposed transgressions. In her memory of the event, Abercrombie writes that “Vigga cried. Not because of the pain. But because she knew there was no way back” (176). The irrevocability of her branding is society’s declaration that redemption is not available to certain sinners, yet Vigga continues to struggle forward. She tries to be “good,” but it’s not enough, and she spirals after Baptiste’s tragic death: “The wolf had killed her, but it was Vigga’s nails that her blood was still crusted under” (533). The Church doesn’t help with this issue, as Zizka views the devils as wholly beyond saving. When Balthazar offers to serve the Church willingly at the end of the novel, she rebuffs him, saying, “For the crimes you have committed […] there can be no atonement aside from your death” (537). Society and the Church deny Vigga redemption despite the involuntary nature of her sins and her sincere desire for redemption.
With Brother Diaz, however, Abercrombie provides a counterpoint to this perspective. Near the end of the novel, he and Alex muse over whether the devils are beyond redemption or not, with Diaz concluding, “We can pray for their redemption […] Perhaps while we’re praying for our own" (541). When Alex wonders, “They’re not beyond it, then?”, he replies, “I don’t believe so. Even if they do” (541). The Devils is not a redemptive fantasy in the traditional sense. No one is absolved, and few are rewarded. Instead, Abercrombie presents redemption as complex, partial, and uncertain, yet always potentially possible through repeated attempts to do the right thing.
The Fallibility of Religious Institutions
From the earliest pages of The Devils, the Church is presented less as a holy institution than a politically-driven machine. It cloaks its ambitions in spiritual rhetoric, but the emptiness of these gestures is apparent. The hierarchy of the Church is not above conscripting criminals to achieve divine aims, and the marriage of sanctity and violence shows the Church’s hypocrisy. It is not morality that motivates them, but power disguised as piety. This critique of institutionalized religion and its vulnerability to corruption, political manipulation, self-deception, and cruelty is a core component of the novel. The fallibility of religious institutions in The Devils is also the source of much of the story’s conflict and the characters’ pain. The novel raises questions about whether divine structures can withstand human flaws and what remains of faith when the institutions that once carried it have decayed.
Jakob of Thorn, given his past in the Church’s crusades, becomes a lens through which Abercrombie explores this brand of corruption. When he reflects on the Church’s involvement in warfare, he does so not as a devoted servant but as a reluctant veteran of its schemes. The Church may speak of salvation, but its hand is firmly in the machinery of war. He reflects on Iron Order knights marching into battle, reciting prayers until they become meaningless, “prayers on their lips, the ‘Our Saviour’ endlessly repeated till it lost all meaning” (350). The recitation becomes liturgical camouflage for killing, draining sacred words of sincerity. He experiences spiritual exhaustion, his faith eroded by literal centuries of violence justified by religion, but is unable to let go entirely. As he confesses to Sunny in Chapter 60, “Maybe I was hoping…that [God] still believed in me” (437). Despite his overall disillusionment, he remains trapped by the hope that his suffering and service still mean something.
The critique of Church-sanctified violence continues with the war between Count Radosav and Countess Jovanka. The two armies are each backed by a different branch of the Church, but political interests primarily drive their involvement in the conflict. The supposed righteousness of their cause is belied by the war crimes committed in its name. The towns sacked, the innocents burned, and the violence justified as holy war speak volumes about the Church’s complicity in the very sins it claims to condemn.
Brother Diaz, meanwhile, embodies the conflict between individual faith and institutional corruption. Early in the story, he clings to the belief that they are on a righteous mission, but his faith is gradually shaken. As Diaz reflects on Balthazar’s forbidden magic, he realizes the Church itself sanctions “weapons of the enemy” when convenient (163). It looks the other way when those weapons advance their goals, even as it publicly condemns their use. Diaz also points out how the treatment of the so-called devils also reveals the Church’s desire to dominate and contain rather than redeem. When he argues that Vigga doesn’t deserve vilification and should be pitied instead, Zizka retorts, “She deserves neither. No more than the dogs who guard the Celestial Palace” (534). The inability to offer meaningful rehabilitation contradicts the spiritual values of mercy and forgiveness. Instead of guiding lost souls to salvation, the Church dehumanizes them into tools or liabilities.
By the end of the novel, Abercrombie makes clear that the Church is not a source of salvation but a failing institution built on contradictions. It is obsessed with power, willing to embrace cruelty, and indifferent to the suffering it causes. Abercrombie does not argue that faith itself is evil; characters like Diaz retain genuine belief. Instead, he indicts the institution that claims to carry faith while betraying it at every turn. The Devils suggests instead that when the holy is handled by the corrupt, even the most sacred mission can become a monstrous farce.
The Evolution of Found Family
In The Devils, Joe Abercrombie explores the concept of found family through a flawed group of characters bound not by affection or shared beliefs but by mutual suffering. Every major character in The Devils is, in one way or another, an outcast. Whether exiled by society, cursed by birth, or isolated by their own choices, the characters are united not by friendship or shared ideals, but by necessity and mutual exclusion. Jakob of Thorn, a knight-turned-revenant, is a broken man, bearing the weight of centuries of war, guilt, and failure. Vigga, a werewolf marked as dangerous by her own people, carries literal scars of ostracization. Even Balthazar, the self-absorbed magician who scorns his companions, has a buried longing for connection, albeit twisted into forms of domination or disdain. Frigo’s comment to Sunny that “[n]o one’s really happy where they are, Sunny. And everyone’s lonely” captures the aching loneliness that haunts each character (191). It is loneliness that draws them together, even as they deny their need for connection, and Abercrombie follows the group’s shift from a collection of disparate personalities to a family that supports and protects one another.
Initially, the characters exhibit mutual suspicion, resentment, and resignation rather than camaraderie. Early chapters show mutual suspicion, backbiting, and resignation to forced proximity. However, survival has a way of forging bonds, and Abercrombie shows how shared suffering and risk knit these broken people together. He uses conflict and friction not as signs of fragmentation but as evidence of deepening intimacy. The group’s endless sniping, sarcastic jabs, and open mockery come to mirror the behavior of long-familiar siblings, and the verbal combat creates the friction that bonds them, paradoxically cementing their connection. As the misfit band of characters pursues a hopeless-seeming mission across Europe, their shared suffering, mutual disdain, and reluctant loyalty begin to forge a familial bond.
However, their relationships aren’t solely defined by conflict; Abercrombie also portrays their bonds by capturing small, tender moments amid the harshness of their journey. Jakob doesn’t give Alex a speech on courage or morality. Instead, he offers a practical lesson in survival, shaped by bitter experience. There is no pretense of heroism, only the brutal care of a guardian who understands the world’s cruelty. Similarly, Baron Rikard’s lesson on regal posture for Alex, though superficially theatrical, is an act of kindness aimed at bolstering her sense of self-worth. Alex’s supposed lineage is overshadowed by the influence of this disparate group of outcasts, and their shared struggles and imperfect loyalty shape her growth. Abercrombie never suggests that these relationships are idyllic or straightforward. They endure not because they are ideal but because the characters make an effort. The group members insult, deceive, and endanger one another, but they remain together, bound by something more profound than mere convenience or affection. Persistence, not perfection, defines their bond.
A sense of messiness, pain, and absurdity characterizes the depiction of found family in The Devils. Through shared ordeals, reluctant reliance, and mutual survival, these characters build something akin to love in a world indifferent to their existence. Yet the family formed here is not perfect, nor is it permanent. Love does not always triumph. Jakob’s embrace fails to erase Sunny’s grief over having to leave Alex. Baptiste’s attempts to reach out to Vigga are not enough to stop the wolf from killing her. Abercrombie creates a portrait of an imperfect but authentic family, portraying a form of kinship that is not inherited but chosen, despite its fragility.
Unlock every key theme and why it matters
Get in-depth breakdowns of the book’s main ideas and how they connect and evolve.
- Explore how themes develop throughout the text
- Connect themes to characters, events, and symbols
- Support essays and discussions with thematic evidence