A Malazan Meditation - (Quirks & Features)

This is a continuation of my 'meditation' on Steven Erikson's opus: The Malazan Book of the Fallen, which I view as an exercise in attaining reader catharsis. If you haven't already, for some context, please read my prior posts - a Prologue that explains what this is all about, and Part 1 - Elements. If you have already, read on...

Warning: This post contains spoilers for various books in the series, but I have tried to stay away from revealing specifics. Some tropes used, and the social/ philosophical dilemmas explored will however be revealed. That said, I don't think I reveal anything that will necessarily spoil your experience of reading the books; if anything it might enhance your appreciation for some of the elements... but that's just what I think.

If you're completely anti-spoiler, please stay away!

A Malazan Meditation (Part 2: Quirks and Features)

Where I try and point out what makes this series ‘special’ or what literary devices within it expand upon the primary theme. To highlight how this series is set apart from other SFF literature, I propose to compare it where appropriate with the writings of JRR Tolkein (the grand-daddy of fantasy literature) which have served as templates for much fantasy fiction in the last sixty or so years.

I'll start with the low-hanging fruit, the easy 'structural' features and then move into heavy territory...

Realistic Dialogue: No, contrary to what you may have heard, ominous characters do not sit around smoking pipes and drinking ale in pubs, just to warn Mr Underhill to be more discrete with that Ring the Grey Wizard asked him to carry! People - even fictional ones - have a back-story, and secrets. They jealously guard their privacy and are suspicious of any invasive questions. They will not blurt out their life story just because you asked.

Erikson therefore engages in realistic dialogue, and complicated motivations for his characters. This is rarer than you'd think, and of course makes exposition murkier, but is a delight to read.

This also gives true character depth to even those who don't have more than a few pages or lines to their name. Often conversations in the series take on the semblance of a chess game or a well composed melody, with enough philosophy (more on this later) and complexity thrown in for it to be a treat to read.

The best example of this is in the sixth book, where two characters who have experienced personal tragedy on a very public stage (and become celebrities for it) bump into each other and have a life-changing, cathartic conversation - without acknowledging that each recognized the other, and without discussing any specifics! Beautiful!

No Cliffhangers: Quite unlike most fantasy series, Erikson has stayed away from introducing cliff-hangers in any of the early books just to hook reader interest. He does end book 9 on a massive cliffhanger or three, but books nine and ten are really two parts of one big book, so this is understandable and forgiven.

This is much appreciated, especially by hardcore SFF fans who are used to waiting for years at a time before the next book in a series comes out and resolves the cliffhangers from the earlier one!

Mortality/ Failing or Failed Civilizations: When you allude to the history of a world several hundred thousand years long as backdrop to a story spanning only a few years, obviously many things in that world are reminders of glories ending in bitter defeat. So this tale refers to great edifices of civilization, irrecoverable. This is a tale of mistakes being repeated without learning from them, a tragic crawl from the raw (mythic) beginnings to the all too vividly broken present. From a broken leg that goes untended to a society based on a flawed economic model, at all scales Erikson exposes a mortality inherent to everything.

Any world, he seems to say, is (literally and metaphorically) an unending struggle between order and chaos, and the scale and complexity of things ultimately defeats any idea, any thought, any person, tribe, nation, or species - and yet they never see it coming until it is too late. Ultimately what matters are not the euphoric beginnings and despondent ends, but the bits that fill in the spaces between, where lives are lived.

You can tell that Erikson is avoiding portraying characters and nations and species as thinly veiled versions of real world analogues; although about half-way through the sequence, he does take an enormous swipe at a particular power of the modern world - he expressly denies this was his intent though.

No Pastoral Romance, No Medieval Nightmare: Erikson the trained/ practicing archaeologist is on fine display here, as he shows the perils of modern politico-economic systems, while at the same time not giving in to romanticism regarding agrarian or pre-agrarian/ pastoral societies, who are painted in as harsh (if not worse) a light as the more "modern" forms of civilization. He thus evades the trap Tolkein fell into, of depicting all that has come before as somehow more perfect/ ideal than what is now or is to come. Also unlike Tolkein (and several others, most notably George R R Martin and Robert Jordan), Erikson steers clear of portraying the world as Medieval European, instead making it more analogous to the pre-industrial colonial era.

Middle-Earth, as described in The Silmarillion, The Hobbit, and The Lord of the Rings is very much like the Biblical Earth in that it tells of the gradual and inevitable corruption of a world in an entropic process, with the promise of eventual apocalyptic salvation. Erikson and Esselmont on the other hand maintain that all eras cultures and peoples are essentially the same with little to choose between them; each is virtuous and evil in its own way. To me, that rings truer than pining for/ prescribing a way of life in reaction to the perceived misery of the present.

Given their penchant to show how (historically) civilizations reach a zenith and then collapse, they seem to make the point that the old is old because it was flawed. This is a refreshing thing to read in fantasy literature which perhaps being inherently escapist (in some ways) delights in depicting a distant, perfect past.

The Nature of Faith: This is a Homeric world, and so you have Gods and their Worshippers and all the nuances of their relationship on display. There are Elder Gods, 'elemental forces' from the mythic beginnings of the world, their 'offspring' literal and figurative, the younger Gods who inherited power in a sense, and then there are mortals en route to becoming gods in their own right (deemed 'Ascendants'). The process of becoming a god isn't ever described however, although it almost always seems to involve dying, or being subjected to extreme duress. There also seem to be a personal choice involved in whether an Ascendant becomes a god - and many refuse to make the leap.

Those that do, are jealous and greedy gods with agendas of their own, who for the most part don't think twice about using their worshipers to cynical ends... and yet they often find themselves at the other end of the stick as mortals in all their machinations often use their deities for their own selfish reasons.

Worship in the Malazan world follows very much in the pattern Neil Gaiman imagined in his landmark novel “American Gods” – it feeds power to the gods (via prayer or blood sacrifice) and simultaneously makes impossible demands of them.

Many a god struggles within this unbalanced system and Erikson explores many interesting variations on this theme – a forgotten god craving followers, a reluctant god running from his followers, a god revolted by the choices/ actions of his followers, gods worshipped only to keep them away because their followers hate and fear them, a god suffering because of his followers, a god held hostage by his priesthood, a just god in anguish over the injustice of his followers, a powerless god pulled down to the mortal realm… and so on. All in all, the overt and sub-textual commentary on the nature of religion and the bargain between a believer and his deity is amazing, as Erikson peels religion and it's many layers like an onion.

In many ways the saga is the tale of mortals rising up against the manipulative gods - most evident in the third and tenth books - and yet Erikson stays away from judging all religion and all gods as bad... once again, he is not judging as he describes, only exploring.

Power/ Convergence: With the many kinds of individuals and groups with myriad kinds of power, it is obvious that all these will clash in titanic battles. A repeatedly used plot device to facilitate this happening early and often is the principle of convergence: "power draws power" i.e. an unveiling of power will draw other, challenging powers into the fray. This bodes very well for SFF fan-boys who rightly expect massive "convergences" as they are called in-story and out, with all manner of sorcerers, demigods, gods, warriors, armies and whatnot coming together in several climaxes.

A 'convergence' ends nearly every book, serving as the climactic set-piece. Several smaller ones happen throughout the books, pretty much every time things being to get boring. The mechanism of convergence is almost mystical, and characters conveniently make cross-continental journeys on a whim. You can tell at times that Erikson is really straining to keep the plot and sprawling characters under control, contriving to get the right people in the right places at the right time so they can... er... converge.

This sometimes gets to ridiculous proportions - a character in the sixth book crosses an ocean between the sixth and seventh books to be at a convergence, and in the aftermath takes a magical portal to yet another continent, where he is witness to the climactic convergence in the eighth book. Unfortunately he is needed again in the tenth book on the continent he left via portal, to resolve a major plot-point that was open since the second book. So he conveniently does something right where he is - and the effects show up as a vision in the sky... This is a key element in the resolution of the final "convergence of convergences".

Yet for all the contrivance and the chest-beating and war mongering this convergence style may hint at, there are subtle shadings/ kinds of power in this world, and not all are martial or sorcerous. There are raw powers so uncontrollable even their wielder or source cannot harness them, and these are therefore easily defeated by more subtle and refined powers.

Characters built up to be uber-powers are defeated by mundane happenstance, while ordinary soldiers with no ominous build-up in-story display remarkable puissance. Erikson delights in defying expectations, most notably in the first book and then the seventh where a portentous clash is built up from the fourth book on between two powerful characters but then proves to be a red herring, resolved in a decidedly anti-climactic way.

Interestingly, this kind of build up also encourages/ leads to several "What would happen if X battles Y" discussions among fans, which are mostly beside the point because unlike a standard role playing game, this world doesn't entertain the notion of a "powered-up being" being infallible.

A very powerful moment in the series is in the last book where, in the middle of an action-packed sequence, an Elder God expounds on the meaning of power and settles on power as potential and presence – more a promise of action than the action itself (or its efficacy) – which takes your breath away. This is perhaps Erikson commenting tongue in cheek on those fan-boy discussions!

Magic as Mystery: Like any other work of epic fantasy worth its salt, this one has several ‘systems of magic’ being practiced by the characters, which justify the abysmal state of mundane technology prevalent. Again unlike Robert Jordan and Brandon Sanderson, Erikson keeps the systems of magic very vaguely defined – sometimes to a fault – and there are no ‘apprentice’ characters handy in whose shoes the reader can lift the cobwebs to understand the metaphysics of the world.

The forms of magic, their capability, their sources, and their inner workings are very opaque and don’t necessarily make sense even in-story. You can tell though that this is deliberate, and in that is a cause of much celebration and anguish in equal parts.

Still in hindsight, this decision on the part of the author leaves the series more open to discussion and personal interpretation, which I for one appreciate.

Divination, Prophecy, Fate: A favorite device of all fantasy authors is foreshadowing. A convenient Oracle or Prophet or three comes along, anoints someone as the One, or the Kwisatz haderach, or simply "this one is essential and must live", and lo! Readers salivate in anticipation.

Erikson does dabble in the fate business and there are very elaborate systems of divination that he describes... The most significant of these are a contemporary 'Deck of Dragons', successor to the now mostly obsolete 'Casting of the Tiles' where gods, ascendants, the 'Holds' or 'Houses' they belong to etc. are represented as cards or tiles and laid out in patterns that are interpreted by a reader. These cards/ tiles often represent characters in-story, and the Houses/ Holds they belong to are vaguely aligned with parts of the magical system... it is all very elaborate.

If all that sounds confusing, well, it is - perhaps intentionally. Erikson has an evil streak and takes delight in beating expectations. Often the prophecy you read in a book will either be a) meaningless babble to you until 5 books later or b) mis-lead you because it was misinterpreted or c) end up going nowhere (fate is defeated/ altered). This is very much a good thing though, because these (and other red herrings I mentioned earlier) give the story an unpredictability that is rare in SFF (although showing up more and more in more recent fiction).

The Timeline: The plot and its snarled details do run away from Erikson at times, such as with contrived convergences, and following on from this any questions regarding or an attempt to create a consistent Timeline for the world/ story are likely to be met with at best commiseration and at worst disdain on the fan forums. There are other inconsistencies as well that together with the timeline problems and various intentionally confusing/ obscure elements, serve to alienate casual readers of the series.

In two particularly egregious instances, one character changes genders between books (this has since been fixed in a reprint I think), and a child grows up from birth to ten years old between books three and eight when only about two to three years of in-story time has passed. There are instances of news traveling across continents in a pre-telephone era without explanation and the sequencing of certain events being in doubt, in that the effects precede the causes (specifically an enigmatic power makes an appearance in one author’s book when it is established that this power is imprisoned in a pit of despair in another’s).

However all this is forgivable – perhaps like the odd pebble in a really good sandwich – and more than balanced by the quality on all the other counts. Well for me, it is. I do know several people who consider this unforgivable and abandon the series when this becomes all too evident a few books in...

For the patient, there are things Erikson pulls off using all the contrivances and timeline quirks that make it worthwhile... for example, a particular ship is introduced and visited by several characters in the second book, in an ocean in a parallel dimension (if you will). Here we see the aftermath of an event that is described in flashback only the fourth book, and from the sixth book to the tenth, this ship then carries key characters across continents, and the events described in the fourth book become a key revelation in the seventh and impact the series plot.

The Philosophizing: As any fan or casual reader will tell you, these books are long. Doorstoppers, is I believe the technical term to describe them. While they contain lots of story and oodles of world-building, characters etc. as I have already described, one of their defining features is sometimes more frustrating to casual readers than even the inconsistencies and the Timeline. This is where characters express their world-view in explicit detail, or ponder about or expand on a particular dilemma or crisis for several pages... and they aren't even a major character! (In Erikson's defense - as if he needs one - it doesn't get quite as bad as the legendary speech Ayn Rand wrote in Atlas Shrugged, which is rather unreadable).

It does strain credibility however to believe that someone like a farmer or even a common soldier can have an appreciation for the finer philosophical points they end up making in their soliloquies. Erikson here does make the error of lending his own voice to the character - though without losing all the characters trappings - and it can be a slog to read some of the longer passages of this sort, even for die hard fans like me who are used to reading long books.

Don't let this dissuade you however - because it is these passages that stand out on a re-read, when one is not hungry for the next secret or plot point to be revealed. It is these passages that make the world richer, and for all its fantastic elements, more real to us.

Post-racial/ Post-gender Writing: One thing you couldn’t fault Erikson on is the unintentional display of any chauvinism and/ or racism. In fact, he purposely subverts many tropes not only of the genre, but also of literature and the Occidental mindset in general.

Thus, there are no blonde blue-eyed princes in this tale, as there are no pseudo British farm-boys a going to see the Queen. There are also no Hobbits or Ewoks in evidence, nor is there a Gandalf or an Obi-Wan in sight, Instead you have a ‘badass’ consciously titled The Lord of Darkness as one of the few characters in the series who is above reproach and is undeniably a “good guy”. That his skin is midnight black is incidental, as is the fact that he can turn at will into a honking’ huge dragon (who are not always benevolent or malignant necessarily).

Also incidental is the fact that another major character, a surpassing assassin who can take on a hundred other assassins and walk away relatively unscathed, leaving behind a sea of corpses, is a woman, with epicanthic folds about her eyes as do real world south-east Asians. Women serve in the army no different from men. There are matri-lineal as well as patrician societies. Some of the strongest, most powerful characters in the stories are women.

There are ebony humans and blue and white and brown, but no one race is 'evil' or stereotyped – and they intermix freely in-story, with no traces of prejudice attributable to their color.

Tribes and civilizations are described with full bodied virtues and flaws, and are seen to be fleeting in the longest terms, as I said earlier. I cannot tell you how much of a relief such a world is to someone who cannot help but notice the sub-text in Tolkein's "men of the west" vs. the corrupted "easterlings" or "elves vs orcs" or "Arwen pining for Aragorn" crap.

There are few cardboard cutout characters or species or races or nations in this tale, as we will see in the next part...