House of Chains - The Malazan Book of the Fallen
Two days ago I finished Steven Erikson's House of Chains, a novel I started reading in mid-September. That's a rather long time for me to spend reading a novel. I attribute this delay largely to the fact that during the school year I have to read somewhere between one and three novels every single week, but that hasn't always stopped me from inhaling giant fantasy tomes over the course of a weekend. Reading this series doesn't exactly work like that.
House of Chains is the fourth installment in Erikson's magnum opus, The Malazan Book of the Fallen. It's a ten-novel series that possesses one of the rarest qualities of any series that I'm currently reading; it's actually complete. An important note on my personal background: When I was eight I started The Wheel of Time, when I was eleven I started A Song of Ice and Fire, and at age seventeen I gave up on seeing either of those series finish. This ushered in a dark period in which I mostly gave up reading fantasy, only returning to the genre when I picked up Mistborn. I'm currently only waiting for the conclusion of five epic fantasy serieses; two of them have a semi-solid end date, but one of those is scheduled to conclude fifteen years from now. As may be obvious, a full, finished, epic fantasy series with a modern sensibility has a lot of commendable qualities as far as I'm concerned.
All that being said, it's taken me a very long time to make headway in the Malazan series. Erikson doesn't pull any punches; he's a smart guy and he expects the same from his readers. It's not a good idea to go into Gardens of the Moon, his first novel, expecting any of the viewpoint characters to sit around reciting all the fundamental truths of the universe to themselves. While other fantasy authors were holding my hand, Erikson was staring at it with obvious distaste. I was never told a single thing about the setting that wasn't immediately applicable, and half of the facts I've determined I had to assemble for myself. Even beyond that reticence, this world is a hard place. It's harsh, deadly, and full of pretty unlikeable people. There aren't neatly packaged characters with which to sympathize (as far as I can tell the protagonist of the series is the entire Malazan Armed Forces), and I've always thought that the first half of the first book is best summarized as follows: "Almost entirely unlikeable characters are betrayed by entirely unlikeable characters for reasons the author refuses to explain."
I'm aware that I've just provided an overabundance of caveat, and at this point I think it's reasonable to expect me to explain how the hell I've managed to get through five books of this series. Here's how I'd summarize the rest of Gardens of the Moon: "Unlikeable characters become likeable, meet other likeable characters, then form a super-team to combat a giant troll from back in time. The giant troll also fights five dragons at once. BGM: Bitching guitar solo."
I'd call that a pretty good payoff. It's typical of Malazan: anyone who can get through the complicated schemes, the webs of betrayals, and the prolonged troop movements and navel-gazing despair will be rewarded with scenes of incredible, awesome nonsense.
That's not the only great thing about Malazan, though. As the series goes on Erikson starts to start playing around with some of the underlying assumptions of the genre, a tendency that's especially obvious in House of Chains. This novel does something very different from the first three; it presents the reader with a protagonist. That character is Karsa Orlong, and he dominates an overwhelming percentage of the pages. His emotional journey is at least as important as the course of the war. In fact, the first 263 pages, the entirety of the first "Book," are from his perspective. While I can't quote hard numbers, I'd be surprised if anything less important than a dimension exploding warranted as many as 50 consecutive pages in one viewpoint in the previous novels.
Karsa Orlong is an archetypal Barbarian. He comes from an underdeveloped civilization (they make swords out of wood), he follows a simple set of tenets, he embarks on a crusade against the encroaching forces of civilization (the Malazans, as always. They love civilizing and encroachment.), and he yells blood-curdling battle cries as he devastates enemy positions. He cares about exactly two things: strength and the glory that can be won thereby. In short, he's the stuff that entire pulpy franchises are made of. Hundreds of thousands of pages have lovingly described muscles that rippled just like this. What the Hell is such a stereotypical bruiser doing in a series that I've been claiming is about subtle political machinations and the effect they have on the common man? Karsa Orlong and the Teblor culture he comes from give Erikson the chance to attack some of the underlying assumptions that most fantasy readers unthinkingly buy into.
The first, and the one that reminds me that Erikson is an anthropologist, archaeologist, and nerd, is cultural relativism. Fantasy throws such outlandish cultures and peculiar practices into my face that, in most cases, I find myself readily accepting whatever weird nonsense the authors want to pass off as normal. Yeah, there are going to be alien cultures, but readers who routinely accept that Elves make complicated civilizations that live in treehouses, eat moonlight and magical bread made of dreams, and would probably be perfectly justified in filling harmless hikers with arrows are expected to withhold judgment on new cultures. The Teblor challenge that acceptance. Like many fantasy barbarians, their primary political unit is the warband. Strong young warriors go forth, slaughter as many people as they can, rape the wives and daughters of the dead, tie ears to their belts as trophies. Faced with violence like that most series' take one of two routes: leave the barbarians alone or start chanting a depressingly hyperviolent mantra, fully committed to gory mindlessness. "Blood for the blood god," that sort of stuff. Erikson isn't content to leave it there; the violence has arisen in order to make sure that only strong warriors succeed at breeding. The widespread rape makes sure the strongest (Karsa) sire as many children as possible. The raiding makes sure that those children are spread as far apart as possible. So, strong barbarian culture? More like a culture of disgusting eugenicist-rapists?
The second reading tendency that Erikson wants to undermine is one that, until he challenged it, I hadn't considered could possibly be a problem; In most fantasy, strength is a virtue. Strong, powerful characters make for exciting storytelling, and therefore I've been trained to like them. That's just not true in Malazan. Some people are strong, some people are weak, and either way that has nothing to do with how good a person they are, or how sympathetically they're portrayed. If you put aside the people who have godlike amounts of power, there's almost no one in this series who can pose a threat to Karsa Orlong. He's seven feet tall, heals quickly, breaks stones with his fists, can jump over walls, and goes toe-to-toe with the guy who wanders around accidentally destroying entire civilizations. He's also one of the least sympathetic viewpoints in the series. It would take a pretty stubborn reader to go through House of Chains without realizing that strength doesn't make you a good person. It gives you the ability to tyrannize the weak, to enforce your will against most anyone else, and to destroy basically whatever you want. If you're sympathetic you may also use your abilities to correct injustices and shield those who are weaker than you, but we shouldn't expect that to be the inevitable goal of the strong. The people who I really admire in Malazan are those who are weak and remain weak, but through force of spirit, ingenuity, or sometimes even kindness manage to change the world around them for the better.
So that's what I'd say makes this series different, what makes it worth reading. In a universe with dozens of Gods, with emperors and warlords who make continents tremble before them, these books choose to focus on the little people. Erikson writes about the common soldiers, the political pawns, the independent agents caught up in events beyond their comprehension. These are the characters he cares about, and the ones whose struggles against the tides of history he wants to record. It's very sweet, very sad, and entirely worth reading.
Of course, the real reason I love reading this series is getting to summarize it for all my friends. I start by telling them that at the beginning of the novel Erikson boldly attacks the inherent cultural relativism of the speculative fiction genre by forcing readers to confront a primative culture of rape and violence and admit to themselves that this culture is evil. I tell them that the main character from that culture is a challenge to our tendency to equate strength with virtue and that they will be awed by him but will never like him. Then I tell them that at the end of the novel that barbarian suplexes an enormous dog to death.
And this doesn't feel inconsistent at all.
Yours,
C.
House of Chains is the fourth installment in Erikson's magnum opus, The Malazan Book of the Fallen. It's a ten-novel series that possesses one of the rarest qualities of any series that I'm currently reading; it's actually complete. An important note on my personal background: When I was eight I started The Wheel of Time, when I was eleven I started A Song of Ice and Fire, and at age seventeen I gave up on seeing either of those series finish. This ushered in a dark period in which I mostly gave up reading fantasy, only returning to the genre when I picked up Mistborn. I'm currently only waiting for the conclusion of five epic fantasy serieses; two of them have a semi-solid end date, but one of those is scheduled to conclude fifteen years from now. As may be obvious, a full, finished, epic fantasy series with a modern sensibility has a lot of commendable qualities as far as I'm concerned.
All that being said, it's taken me a very long time to make headway in the Malazan series. Erikson doesn't pull any punches; he's a smart guy and he expects the same from his readers. It's not a good idea to go into Gardens of the Moon, his first novel, expecting any of the viewpoint characters to sit around reciting all the fundamental truths of the universe to themselves. While other fantasy authors were holding my hand, Erikson was staring at it with obvious distaste. I was never told a single thing about the setting that wasn't immediately applicable, and half of the facts I've determined I had to assemble for myself. Even beyond that reticence, this world is a hard place. It's harsh, deadly, and full of pretty unlikeable people. There aren't neatly packaged characters with which to sympathize (as far as I can tell the protagonist of the series is the entire Malazan Armed Forces), and I've always thought that the first half of the first book is best summarized as follows: "Almost entirely unlikeable characters are betrayed by entirely unlikeable characters for reasons the author refuses to explain."
I'm aware that I've just provided an overabundance of caveat, and at this point I think it's reasonable to expect me to explain how the hell I've managed to get through five books of this series. Here's how I'd summarize the rest of Gardens of the Moon: "Unlikeable characters become likeable, meet other likeable characters, then form a super-team to combat a giant troll from back in time. The giant troll also fights five dragons at once. BGM: Bitching guitar solo."
I'd call that a pretty good payoff. It's typical of Malazan: anyone who can get through the complicated schemes, the webs of betrayals, and the prolonged troop movements and navel-gazing despair will be rewarded with scenes of incredible, awesome nonsense.
That's not the only great thing about Malazan, though. As the series goes on Erikson starts to start playing around with some of the underlying assumptions of the genre, a tendency that's especially obvious in House of Chains. This novel does something very different from the first three; it presents the reader with a protagonist. That character is Karsa Orlong, and he dominates an overwhelming percentage of the pages. His emotional journey is at least as important as the course of the war. In fact, the first 263 pages, the entirety of the first "Book," are from his perspective. While I can't quote hard numbers, I'd be surprised if anything less important than a dimension exploding warranted as many as 50 consecutive pages in one viewpoint in the previous novels.
Karsa Orlong is an archetypal Barbarian. He comes from an underdeveloped civilization (they make swords out of wood), he follows a simple set of tenets, he embarks on a crusade against the encroaching forces of civilization (the Malazans, as always. They love civilizing and encroachment.), and he yells blood-curdling battle cries as he devastates enemy positions. He cares about exactly two things: strength and the glory that can be won thereby. In short, he's the stuff that entire pulpy franchises are made of. Hundreds of thousands of pages have lovingly described muscles that rippled just like this. What the Hell is such a stereotypical bruiser doing in a series that I've been claiming is about subtle political machinations and the effect they have on the common man? Karsa Orlong and the Teblor culture he comes from give Erikson the chance to attack some of the underlying assumptions that most fantasy readers unthinkingly buy into.
The first, and the one that reminds me that Erikson is an anthropologist, archaeologist, and nerd, is cultural relativism. Fantasy throws such outlandish cultures and peculiar practices into my face that, in most cases, I find myself readily accepting whatever weird nonsense the authors want to pass off as normal. Yeah, there are going to be alien cultures, but readers who routinely accept that Elves make complicated civilizations that live in treehouses, eat moonlight and magical bread made of dreams, and would probably be perfectly justified in filling harmless hikers with arrows are expected to withhold judgment on new cultures. The Teblor challenge that acceptance. Like many fantasy barbarians, their primary political unit is the warband. Strong young warriors go forth, slaughter as many people as they can, rape the wives and daughters of the dead, tie ears to their belts as trophies. Faced with violence like that most series' take one of two routes: leave the barbarians alone or start chanting a depressingly hyperviolent mantra, fully committed to gory mindlessness. "Blood for the blood god," that sort of stuff. Erikson isn't content to leave it there; the violence has arisen in order to make sure that only strong warriors succeed at breeding. The widespread rape makes sure the strongest (Karsa) sire as many children as possible. The raiding makes sure that those children are spread as far apart as possible. So, strong barbarian culture? More like a culture of disgusting eugenicist-rapists?
The second reading tendency that Erikson wants to undermine is one that, until he challenged it, I hadn't considered could possibly be a problem; In most fantasy, strength is a virtue. Strong, powerful characters make for exciting storytelling, and therefore I've been trained to like them. That's just not true in Malazan. Some people are strong, some people are weak, and either way that has nothing to do with how good a person they are, or how sympathetically they're portrayed. If you put aside the people who have godlike amounts of power, there's almost no one in this series who can pose a threat to Karsa Orlong. He's seven feet tall, heals quickly, breaks stones with his fists, can jump over walls, and goes toe-to-toe with the guy who wanders around accidentally destroying entire civilizations. He's also one of the least sympathetic viewpoints in the series. It would take a pretty stubborn reader to go through House of Chains without realizing that strength doesn't make you a good person. It gives you the ability to tyrannize the weak, to enforce your will against most anyone else, and to destroy basically whatever you want. If you're sympathetic you may also use your abilities to correct injustices and shield those who are weaker than you, but we shouldn't expect that to be the inevitable goal of the strong. The people who I really admire in Malazan are those who are weak and remain weak, but through force of spirit, ingenuity, or sometimes even kindness manage to change the world around them for the better.
So that's what I'd say makes this series different, what makes it worth reading. In a universe with dozens of Gods, with emperors and warlords who make continents tremble before them, these books choose to focus on the little people. Erikson writes about the common soldiers, the political pawns, the independent agents caught up in events beyond their comprehension. These are the characters he cares about, and the ones whose struggles against the tides of history he wants to record. It's very sweet, very sad, and entirely worth reading.
Of course, the real reason I love reading this series is getting to summarize it for all my friends. I start by telling them that at the beginning of the novel Erikson boldly attacks the inherent cultural relativism of the speculative fiction genre by forcing readers to confront a primative culture of rape and violence and admit to themselves that this culture is evil. I tell them that the main character from that culture is a challenge to our tendency to equate strength with virtue and that they will be awed by him but will never like him. Then I tell them that at the end of the novel that barbarian suplexes an enormous dog to death.
And this doesn't feel inconsistent at all.
Yours,
C.