I finished Steven Erikson's Malazan Book of the Fallen series a while back and was recently reminded in chat that I never got to rambling about it here as I meant to. So let's get on with that.
Erikson is the most frustrating author I've read in years. He's capable of being a great writer, but often forgets this. He is addicted to glaring bad habits like few prominent writers I've encountered. However, there is some great material in this series and it is at the least worth checking out the first book or two to see if anything clicks. I was personally underwhelmed with the technical merits of his writing in the first couple books (see below) and as a result found the middle entries of the series more satisfying, but the introductory volumes are enough to get a sense of what he's about. Book two has some fairly brutal audience gutpunches, so if even the Chain of Dogs isn't getting to you, you probably don't need to continue.
Let's start with the cons, since I'm a negative kinda guy and that's easier for me. There'll be some spoilers herein, but if I don't bother to put something in small font, it's either information the books are very up-front about, or it concerns people and events that no sane person could like anyway.
-First couple books really do feel like journeyman work. Much of the approach to internal action in the first volume is to flat-out describe how someone feels. I find this approach dry and lazy. He gets much better about this in time, instead focusing on mental monologues to capture internal movement. As someone who spends a great deal of time engaged in rambling internal monologues, I find this a fine approach to characterization. But internal development was fairly lacking at first due to the way it was presented, and this made it tough for me to latch onto many of the initial characters.
-Rampant abuse of pointless apostrophes in names. This is kind of a personal pet peeve when it comes to fantasy writing. Names sometimes feel as much an awkward keyboard mash as you might find in the Star Wars EU. And there are a lot of names, as Erikson seems bent on outdoing Jordan/Martin for Loads and Loads of Characters madness.
-Bloat. This is really the main strike against him. It's a liability with any longrunning fantasy series, but I feel like a great deal of it could've been avoided here since, for once, this fantasy writer knew exactly where everything was going from the start (although that may have been the problem--we'll come back to this). The later in the series we get, the more editorial freedom he must have had, because the last books are chock full of unnecessary asides that ramble on and on without adding constructively to the plot or even focusing on characters worth caring about. Book eight is the embodiment of this problem and I feel certain he must have fired his editor before working on it.
-As an extension of the above, structure and focus. The Malazan books don't have a consistent, central POV. This is fine, really. Plenty of books jump around between perspectives, we're all used to it, and there's a certain amount of merit in doing so, especially in a setting this expansive. The problem is that Erikson rarely notices any barrier between what we need to see and what is superfluous. He has a bad habit of throwing in random asides from one-off characters we'll never see again, goons who we immediately realize are only there to get killed by the important character who's about to make an appearance, diving into sub-plots that don't add appreciatively to the overall narrative and only serve to hammer home themes long since made manifest many times over...
Why is this such a problem? Because the first two-hundred and fifty pages of book four are seen purely through the eyes of a single character, and it's a blazing spectacle of psychological damage that the series never quite reproduces. We see that this is what he can do when he sits down and focuses on a single thread, so we wonder, why doesn't he do it more often? Books eight and nine are particularly bad about their needless diversions. Book nine has about three hundred pages dedicated to a meandering army of uniformly unlikable barbarians who ultimately just get killed off--without impacting the plot in any way--by a character we've been waiting to see the entire book. Book eight is a needless diversion in its totality.
-Although I'm certain Erikson knew where the story as a whole was going from the get-go, there are plenty of events that seem to come out of nowhere in ways that are more headscratchingly random than they are shocking surprises. Reality is Unrealistic may aptly be cited here, yes, but we expect a certain amount of reliable, narrative flow in novels. Instead, sometimes things just crash the party and happen whether it is useful to the story or not. This is very much an Anyone Can Die series, which isn't always to the benefit of the overall narrative.
All of the above made it sometimes difficult for me to keep a handle on the material when it would surprise me by suddenly doing something praiseworthy. He does improve technically as a writer as time goes on--dialogue gets sharper, description more colorful and efficient. But there is an undisciplined feel to the work as a whole that never quite goes away.
...
The primary upside to all this is: A) worldbuilding; B) 'tis no man, 'tis a remorseless writing machine, pumping out a mammoth fantasy novel on almost a yearly basis (alongside spin-offs!) and actually finishing his epic in the predicted number of volumes, for which I give him a great deal of credit; C) there's a lot of great character work on display when he chooses to focus on the more intriguing characters around. This doesn't always turn out to be where you expect it be, either. Erikson isn't really a man concerned with shocking twists, although I suppose there are a few present in these books, but he can prove very good at subverting expectations. This world is full of contradictions, sometimes even with the author's obvious personal views (although he's not immune to the dreaded Author Tract), and a stronger construction for it.
This is the only series I can think of where The Empire is, if not quite heroic, then easily still the most admirable society in the world. By the time we encounter it it's rusting under the stewardship of an upstart empress with a Stalinesque paranoia and love of purges, and starting to crumble from political intrigue, but it's plain that it has (even if sometimes through violent methods) brought a level of peace, security, and prosperity to its subject holdings that few of them experienced while they remained bickering, provincial principalities. This isn't a point that's hammered home with force; we see outside cities and compare for ourselves. None of this is the standard tack for epic fantasy to take. The Malazan army is a curiously democratic organization wherein incompetent officers, or those appointed solely by virtue of noble birth (largely overlapping categories there) are generally ignored, circumvented, or occasionally disappeared; it was founded with the express purpose of being a meritocratic enterprise where race/gender/religion matter not and personal skill dictates one's success.
A large portion of our central characters hail from marine detachments of this organization. (Indeed, if there is one message to draw from these books, it is to never mess with a marine. Even if you're a god. Especially if you're a god.) They spend a great deal of time in the first half of the series at war, subduing recalcitrant city-states. Throughout this, one somehow never gets the impression that Erikson is making an effort to either glorify or demonize imperialism (although the latter does happen, in other circumstances...we'll come back to this); for most of the soldiers involved, it's their means of earning a living, and he's very straightforward about presenting it in that manner. In time, Erikson becomes exceptionally good at developing a sense of camaraderie between them, such that by the final volume I was more entertained by their collective bitching than by the central plot.
He has a nasty habit of taking something that on the surface we should wholly object to and somehow making it an object of sympathy. The first thing we learn about Karsa Orlong is that he hails from a backwater where intertribal murder, rape, and genocide are everyday events; the first thing we learn about Adjunct Tavore is that she sold her sister into slavery for political gain; the first thing we learn about Cotillion is that he's the patron god of assassins. Ultimately these prove to be some of the most humane and empathetic characters in the world (in varying proportions of such, and sometimes in perverse ways, but I don't think their intentions can be denied by the end). It takes a special kind of writer to do something like this. He is capable of producing brilliant character work when he sets his mind to it.
The presence of a deity in the cast may be noted in the above paragraph. Gods plainly exist in the world of Malaz, and regularly make direct interference in mortal affairs. They don't always call themselves gods, but there's a multitude of beings as good as such floating at the edges of the world and the sliding scale of individual power ramps up to some pretty extreme heights. Yet we spend at least as much time focusing on the daily travails of army grunts. So is it high fantasy or low fantasy? Erikson aims for both. Personally I feel he succeeds more at the latter. His worldview is much more suited to it. These books are frequently stories of graphic brutality, but I can't say Erikson ever seems to rejoice in the violence. Certainly plenty of characters internally lament how commonplace it is and how casually people accept it. I like that there are quieter ways of reinforcing this, however: there are a great many individuals of immense power loose in the world, but hardly anyone to whom I would attach the label of stereotypical Badass. Great power more often comes with a kind of stoic persistence. In the world of Malaz, braggarts die young.
If I had to make a gamble as to Erikson's personal outlook, it would be that of an old-fashioned secular humanist, observing great potential in humanity while regularly being disappointed with it but insisting on celebrating the small victories, and detached from organized belief structures. Indeed, he seems to find ideology self-congratulatory and inherently suspect (in the above regard we share headspace). There is a discussion midway through the series between a man and an eldritch being of extreme age, concerning the state of the world and whether there is such a thing as an ideal society. The latter entity concludes the conversation with (paraphrased): "Would it offend you terribly to hear that humans aren't the answer? Don't worry, though--no one else has been, either."
As book five is an extended deconstruction of an overseas empire with an active worship of material acquisition and practical enslavement of the indebted, it can also be safely assumed that Erikson is not greatly enamored of modern capitalist society. This is where Author Tract rears its ugly head: one of the central characters of this book is a financial genius who decides the system he lives in is too corrupt to be worth supporting any longer, and sets to engineering its economic collapse. He's the primary candidate for author mouthpiece, and this should really be a problem...and it would be if he weren't so goddamn hilarious. There is no character trope Erikson loves more than Obfuscating Stupidity, and it is played to perfection here as Tehol wanders about town in a blanket, sleeps on his roof, chases chickens, has witty/inane conversations with an elder god pretending to be his manservant, and generally carries on a lively Marx brothers act while merrily using the greed of financiers as a weapon against them behind the scenes. On principle, I find the active insertion of author politics of deleterious effect to a work of fiction, but it is difficult to object when the perpetrator is so thoroughly charming.
(The above is contrasted with an alien culture collapsing in on itself from ossification of ritual and tradition. The two nations eventually go to war, and I actually quite like how this played out, so to spoiler tags we go: The expansionist Empire of Lether engages in a war of acquisition against its less sophisticated neighbor, and ultimately succeeds...by losing and being conquered in return. In a move that demonstrates to me that Erikson knows his history better than many fantasy writers do, the occupying forces are subverted by being invited into the existing social system, Lether's new "masters" ultimately drowning in unaccustomed luxuries until they've become addled figureheads and life goes on as it was. This kind of development has happened more than once in real life and it pleases me to see it in a work of fantasy.
Erikson's an anthropologist by training, and it informs the whole of his work. Although his personal preferences are clear, he seems to actually understand how societies work and rarely shies away from the uglier details. There is an obvious sympathy for primitive tribal cultures that would make his professional background apparent just from how much time we spend with such people and the care and detail applied to the circumstances of their lives. However, it would be greatly inaccurate to assume any kind of juvenile, Avatar-like reverence for living close to nature. Although he possesses a clear skepticism about whether the material benefits of civilization sufficiently outweigh its more heinous innovations such as slavery, social stratification, economic inequality and gender subjugation, we get far more illustrations than we could actually want to see that primitive peoples are just as capable of casual brutality. Advocating a retreat form modernity as a cure for the modern world's ills does not occur; individual characters might seem to be of this opinion, but it's clear that anyone trying to do so is doomed.
I will give Erikson that much credit: he doesn't really play favorites, and no one is held up as embodying a perfect and ideal way of life. Human beings are made of flaws. Although the adversaries in the final volume are barely known to us beforehand, I suppose they ably represent the forces that Malaz's antagonists always had in some stock: dogmatic thinking, extremism, an emphasis on ideals or acquisitiveness over individual lives. These seem to be the real enemies.
I assume Erikson is also a geologist by inclination, both from the care demonstrated in descriptions of natural structures and from the way he uses this to demonstrate the history of the world. He has a very firm grasp of Deep Time that contributes greatly towards making this feel like lived-in world with an extensive life for which humanity is but a recent affectation.
The other primary element behind the world's construction is, I believe, also what led to the series's glaring structural flaws: it was developed as part of a game with co-creator Ian Esselmont (who has also written novels in the same world) during the eighties. Although thematically the series doesn't pursue the traditional heroic goals of P&P RPG, the trappings of such are everywhere apparent: multitude of strange races with ancient histories, extensive pantheon of grasping deities, alien dimensions a-plenty waiting just next door (we don't spend a great deal of time gallivanting through other worlds in these books, but they do exist), consistently-implemented magic system...So ultimately what we have here is a recreation of someone's killer gaming campaign. This doesn't inherently bother me, I suppose. But the net result is that Erikson had the plot of these books so thoroughly mapped in advance because, well, they'd already happened, and I theorize that ultimately most of the books' problems with plot and pacing are there because of this. Whether through stubbornness or lack of consideration that novel format might require significant changes in storytelling, I don't know, but I think most of the structural flaws can be traced to the fact that Erikson was essentially echoing what was, to him, an old story.
~
So yeah, it was an interesting read, sometimes even when it failed. I have some significant issues with the series, but I don't regret reading it or anything. Erikson would be a crackerjack writer if he could just clean up his plotting and ease back on the Author Voice.
Favorite character: pretty easily Tavore. Stoic lesbian general = oh my god can you guys spell Cid-bait?
Honorable mention to Karsa for wildly turning around expectations (from his introduction, I was sure I would hate him forever).
Most Improved Odor award: Ganoes, for starting out a really bland milquetoast and ending his run by bitchslapping gods left and right without losing humanity or humility. Damn, man.
Jean Grey award for revolving-door resurrection/butt monkey of the universe goes to Toc the Younger (did I mention Erikson has trouble letting important characters stay dead?)
Best book? I enjoyed the middle portion of the series most because the writing had picked up by then and the bloat hadn't yet overwhelmed. I'll say The Bonehunters because that's where the 14th army got together and they are the source of all fun in the latter half of the series. Worst book is easily Toll the Hounds, in which the only promising plot element turns out to be Zeromus, and the otherwise endearing Kruppe (the definition of "entertaining in small doses") is ruined by being given narration duties.
