In a previous post I wrote about the things I enjoy in Steven Erikson’s Malazan Book of the Fallen. While I continue to be entertained (just started reading House of Chains!), this post is going to be about the things I don’t enjoy. Probable spoilers up through Memories of Ice.
All The Characters Are The Same
Obviously, the title of this section his a bit hyperbolic, so let me explain. While Malazan has a huge number and variety of characters, they don’t all have an equivalent amount of depth to them. At times I feel like the characters are just names attached to a set of feats and interpersonal relationships, like they have personalities that are governed by the plot instead of the other way around. The individual Bridgeburners (the elite marine corps the story loosely follows) are good examples of what I mean in that they come off as defined more by their individual quirks (like one guy collects the toes of his enemies and another wears a hair-shirt) than by personality traits outside of “they’re weird”. The D&D vibe I mentioned in my first post comes through here - it’s like some characters were created for a tabletop one-shot. “I need a guy to play so uhh he’s a cleric and uhhh he uhhhh used to jump rope competitively ok good enough this is L’eric the Cleric everyone.”
A lot of characters tend to speak sort of in the same voice as well (aside from their regional speech characteristics, which are fun), sharing the same levels of snarky world-weariness. It’s like the complaint levelled at the Marvel movies that all their characters are the same flavor of sarcastic. This isn’t too distracting until you get to the occasionally way-too-flowery internal monologues of the younger characters: I’ll believe it when a military vet goes on a cynical monologue, but not so much from 16-year-old grew-up-in-a-fishing-town Apsalar.
There seems to be a meme in the fan community that Erikson is allergic to physical descriptions of his characters and that exacerbates these issues. To be fair, though, there are so many characters in these books that I suppose its understandable that at some point they start to feel samey. After all, one of the most fun aspects of Malazan is the sheer volume of competing political interests, and you can’t do that without a lot of characters, and it’s hard enough to flesh out one character let alone this many. There are a bunch of exceptions to my complaints too - Quick Ben for instance is a great character, and while I don’t really like Captain Paran, he’s probably the most complex perspective-character. But I get the impression that there are two tiers of character in the Malazan books, “main”, and “default”.
Something Erikson excels at is creating a verisimilitudinous setting for the reader to explore, and that includes a host of just-real-enough characters. As in real life, you’re never going to get to know the bulk of the people you meet on the street. But sometimes you are able to peek behind the curtain and see that it’s mostly actors on a high-budget set.
Where Am I What Is Happening
The Malazan books follow a character point-of-view centric structure. Each book will have certain designated characters from whose perspective the story is told (although its much more loosey-goosey than something like ASOIAF) and each chapter dedicates several pages to telling their chunk of the story. I really enjoy this sort of structure, but it sometimes causes some issues.
Mainly, there are so many plot threads that the frequent context switching can get confusing when the perspective characters are doing completely unrelated things 1,000s of miles apart. Erikson really likes doing these wide-angle establishing shots to describe the setting at the beginnings of sections, but when characters are travelling, which they often are, it gets hard to follow where you are and who you’re reading about. Sometimes you’ll just be reading scene-setting descriptions of a place you do not recognize for a whole page before a character is named and you are able to process where in the story you are. In the final chapter of Memories of Ice, for instance, there was a particularly intense section where the book switched back and forth between like four settings every two paragraphs, and while that did make things appropriately tense, it also took a ton of focus to keep straight who is doing what, where.
Additionally, some character-perspective sections seem to be there simply to check-in with a subplot to keep the reader up to date more than to actually advance the plot. Like it’s a TV show and we have to have at least one scene per episode chapter for each key character. It seems like sometimes these sections just come and go without moving the plot or doing any character development or anything, which isn’t the worst because they aren’t not entertaining, but it makes these already long books longer. Then again, maybe I just didn’t notice what they were doing narratively.
Sometimes It’s Just Super Gross
The Malazan Book of the Fallen is not a series for the faint of heart. There is some really grisly stuff in here. Particularly the treatment of Felisin in Deadhouse Gates, where you see this young girl just get horribly sexually abused and descend into depression and drug addiction. There’s also just everything the tenescowri are made to do in Memories of Ice (murder, rape, cannibalism, all at a massive scale). There’s also also the treatment of Toc the Younger, a character who, after making some just transparently terrible personal decisions, spends half the book being alternately mangled within an inch of his life and re-healed into this grotesque mockery of human anatomy. Oh! There’s also a fantasy apartment building that gets completely filled with human corpses, and then later starts to crack and ooze from the combined swelling and decay of all the corpses! Delicious!
It’s revolting, and that’s definitely the point. You are meant to by terrified and disgusted. Instantly, the stakes are raised to an extreme, you’re horrified, and when its over you feel the same sense of shock and loss as the surviving characters. I saw someone on Reddit put it like this: Erikson never lets you look away. And while I do think there’s value to that precept, this is also fantasy, and Erikson could have written about anything he wanted. It seems like often that thing is “incredibly gruesome and disgusting acts of violence”. He certainly spends more energy describing those sorts of scenes than he does referencing how any of his characters look.
If I were to hazard a guess as to what Steven Erikson personally enjoys in his fantasy, I would say first and foremost the anthropological aspect I talked about in my first Malazan post (he went to school for archaeology and anthropology, not sure how I neglected to mention that!). Second would be the opportunity for fictionalized violence and horror. While I’m not going to be putting these books down any time soon on account of this, they’re certainly an occasionally queasy read, and I would not recommend these books if occasional extreme depravity is something you can’t handle.