Malazan Book of the Fallen

My first memory of books was being read The Hobbit by my father at bedtime.  I don't know how old I was, but it was right at the beginning of the memories I still retain.  My father was a master of reading to children, I think he actually relates better with children than with adults, I might do the same.  He would convey emotion, do voices for the different characters.  It was fantastic.  Later on he also did the same thing with The Lord of the Rings.  I'm assuming everyone knows about that book.

My father tells me that when he first read The Lord of the Rings, as a teenager in the fifties, that it was an obscure book that no-one had heard about.  He told me that he borrowed the only copy from the library, and it hadn't been read in some time.  It is hard to say whether that is true, but the popularity of the book took off in the mid-60's and has sold around 150 million copies, reported as the third best selling novel of all time.

The Lord of the Rings is quite rightly considered the beginning of a new genre, that being fantasy.  While it is largely ridiculous to say that any genre sprang into being without previous influences (even science fiction came from Shelley's Frankenstein, which must have been influenced in some manner by Icarus and his failed wings), the Lord of the Rings was the first long modern work in a fantasy world, with magic, a quest, alternate races and so on.  A genre that has been established and copied with extreme, even disconcerting, faithfulness.  Tolkien was influenced by multiple sources (mostly European folklore and the Catholic church), but most of the fantasy genre has been directly, and almost solely, by Tolkien.

The fantasy genre has exploded over the last two decades until every bookstore and library has a section of fantasy books that rivals that of mystery and science fiction, and is often larger than the literature or humor sections.  This is now a big business, with new books coming out at a steady rate.  I think a very large reason for this is the spread of role playing games, started in 1974 with Dungeons and Dragons.  With Dungeons and Dragons you could essentially play in the world of The Lord of the Rings (Middle Earth), creating your own stories.  Initially played mostly played by geeky teenagers (such as myself), those geeky teenagers never lost the pleasure of reading The Lord of the Rings and playing D&D, and new generations of geeky teenagers joined the fold.  These people wanted more than a handful of books and a game, and they wrote new books, refined the game, and in the last twenty years an enormous number of video games have followed the genre, exploding its popularity.

What is this genre?  It is remarkably consistent.  Take a rather average person in an invented world (stereotypically, but almost always) a teenage boy on a farm.  A dramatic event happens that tears him away from this mundane life, and he must embark on a quest to save the/his world.  Through his travels he gains a diverse group friends, and develops the hidden powers within himself.  Against all the odds he triumphs over evil.  I think it would be hard to over-emphasize how prevalent this plot was.  What changed were characters, situations, environment, but the plot was the same.  In fantasy's defense, this is the same plot in myths around the world.  It is essentially the root story, the tale handed down within a tribe around the camp fire.

This post is about a fantasy work, The Malazan Book of the Fallen.  It has taken me five full paragraphs to get to this point.  Why is that?  it is because the Malazan Book of the Fallen can only truly be explained within, and in contrast to, the genre of fantasy fiction.  It is without doubt extremely influenced by Tolkien and Dungeons and Dragons.  It is closer to the Bible than it is to James Joyce's Ulysses.  This is a work of fantasy fiction.  However, it is a work defined by it's contrast to the rest of the genre of fantasy.  This is a work that specifically takes the cliches of fantasy and writes against our expectations.

The work is vast, ten books of a thousand pages or more.  There are 3.3 million words in the series.  It is a single work larger than all of Tolkien's writing combined.  Remarkably it has been entirely written in less than twelve years, essentially the work of one man, Steven Erikson.  The scope of the work is mind-boggling.  While there is a core time (of less than ten years) the back story goes back an hundred thousand years or more.  While there is a core place (analogous to our physical world) this core includes continents, empires, deserts, seas, forests, cities, plains.  Surrounding this core place are different "planes" each with its own otherworldly characteristics and inhabitants.

The scale is vast but it is all interconnected.  There is essentially an overall plot that starts at the beginning and ends at the end.  It is astonishing that such a vast work is all part of a tapestry, almost nothing in the whole opus is irrelevant.  However, the plot is anything but the direct path of the genre.  There is not a protagonist, no hero.  The cast is enormous, perhaps hundreds of individual characters who play a role, but the book isn't really about any of them in particular.  Most of the characters are introduced as they are living their lives, with a real history and formed personality, rather than a caricature or a neophyte.  There is not a teenager who leaves to battle evil and is joined by the grizzled knight, a bluff guy with a beard, someone from faerie, a wizard, and a trusty companion.

The scale is also played out on multiple levels, from almost God, to Gods, to magic beings, to emperors and wizards, to generals, to officers, to tribal leaders, to soldiers, to priests, to beggars in the streets, to faded spirits.

Each book in the ten has multiple locations, characters, countries, tribes, religions, views, that actually conclude at a reasonable stopping place.  You could conceivably read each novel in itself with only a minimum of feeling baffled at the beginning and the end.  Steven Erikson worked as an anthropologist, and it shows.  Each culture is fully fledged, even more than a single culture in most fantasy worlds.  There are different views, religions, worldviews and histories depending on the culture.  These are also not simply Earth cultures removed to a different world, and yet their beliefs are rooted in geography, history, and technology.  This cultural richness reaches down to individual characters.  While the characters have individual personalities, those personalities are shaped by their culture, and yet these characters are not simply stereotypes of those cultures.  Your average character in this vast work is a more fully realized person than Frodo Baggins, the hero of the Lord of the Rings.

Perhaps the main contrast between these books and your fantasy staple is the lack of the pure hero, and the lack of the pure villain.  There are characters out to do pure good, but what is that pure good is extremely ambivalent.  There are characters who bring disaster through good intention.  There are dark, broken characters who either unintentionally do good, or bring good about through actions that damage themselves and the ones they love.  There is cowardice and fruitless self-sacrifice.  There are people of great evil, but they have a past that explains it.  It is explicitly intentional that almost none of the characters are simple.

The imagination of Steven Erikson is fecund beyond my capability to understand.  Consistently, day after day, hour after hour, he must have been imagining, thinking, examining, remembering, checking for error, for over a decade.  Simply in terms of the quantity of thought, this is an amazing feat.

So far this sounds like the best book ever written.  However, it is not unrelieved brilliance.  If you can read this book through the first time and not get lost a great amount of the time you are a genius.  I have actually been tempted to create a poster-sized flow chart of who is doing what and when.  The sheer number of characters, times, worlds, places, cultures and motivations makes this work nearly as challenging as Joyce's Ulysses.  This is not a book that you can casually read for fifteen minutes at night before bed a couple of times a week.  This takes commitment.  I generally read a stock fantasy novel in less than four hours.  I am halfway through this series a second time, and this time I have read the book almost daily for a month.  Unless you are a fast and voracious reader it could take you a year to read this, and to understand it fully it might take three passes through the whole thing.

The second thing about the book is that it is dark.  There are no easy answers, there is nothing achieved without sacrifice, very bad things happen to the innocent, and it is often fatalistic.  It is also rather pessimistic about the human spirit.  There is not very much of, if any, enlightened beauty in the whole thing.  Quite like Geaorge R.R. Martin's Game of Thrones.  This is a very modern direction for the genre, a movement from a rather child-like quality to a more adult sensibility.

There is also a large amount of philosophical discourse, even with many characters that it does not seem to suit.  While this philosophical discourse is at least relieved by its variation, there is a lot of it.  A substantial minority of the text is almost Shakespearean soliloquy, without really the need for it.

It also vastly influenced by Dungeons and Dragons.  For experienced players you can almost hear the dice rattling across the table, the character classes peak their heads through the curtains, and a very large amount of time is spent with people fighting each other in complex ways (although well described).  I have found myself at times thinking, "Wow, he must have a lot of hit points" or "he failed his saving throw."  On the other hand, this is consciously done, and with great affection.  There are in-jokes, subtle nods of the head etc. for those who can see them.  Basically, if you had no desire to read either The Lord of the Rings or The Odyssey, seen people play Dungeons and Dragons and decided they were morons, or cannot even understand playing a video game where you pretend to be someone, you will not get a third of the way through the first book.

Fortunately there is humor in the book, and more than one type.  However, there aren't many types, and the humor becomes more a part of the book later on in the series.  It will take you about 3,00 pages until humor becomes a consistent part of the writing.  This humor is also very much based in a small number of characters, and is dialogue-based.  The humor largely comes from an insight into the rather ridiculous workings of our minds, and the contrast between that and what we say, and even think we do.  Such humor has a touch of an edge to it.  Erikson has actually written some funny short stories, but they involve a serial killer and a necromancer as the main characters, so you can see where his sense of humor lies.

So, the Dade question.  Is this literature?  Well, it is very much about the human condition.  Whether we are flotsam on the river of fate or whether we control our destiny.  Even whether we can even control ourselves.  It considers the clash of cultures, and the inevitable destruction of some of them, and whether this is a tragedy, or a blessing, or something of both.  It examines good and evil, idealism and pragmatism, and differentiates between the two scales.  It talks about the seeming incapability of humanity to learn from its mistakes.  It talks about temptation and resignation.  It touches upon love.  However, I don't think many people would call this literature.  It doesn't have that indefinable feeling (I can't describe it but I know pornography when I see it) that we call literature.  Perhaps it is simply that it has the removal of humanity from the real world, and the primacy of plot over a self-conscious intent to examine and teach.  On the other hand perhaps all that is required for literature is age.  Dickens was pulp.

This novel is a phenomenon.  There is simply nothing else like it in terms of scale, depth, consistency and audacity.  It is ten times the length of the Lord of the Rings and yet each part of it is more complex, with greater character development, a richer history, and a more real setting.  It is well written (particularly in terms of dialogue) and never trite.  It is clearly great, and yet I can easily see why many, if not most, people would not, and should not, read it.

The final question is whether it is better than the foundation of the fantasy genre, The Lord of the Rings.  It is a far, far more sophisticated and adult book.  It is far, far less clear in terms of mythic plot, point, and moral compass.  If you read this first you would might well think The Lord of the Rings a rather quaint fairy tale.  If you read the Lord of the Rings before The Malazan Book of the Fallen you might well find this a dark, overly pragmatic, immoral, over-reaching.  The two books are different.  Different enough that they don't need to be compared.  Is Sam Spade or Miss Marple a better character?  It doesn't matter that they are both detectives, they are different enough to both be great.  I can tell you that between The Lord of the Rings and the Malazan Book of the Fallen, even while reading the latter, that I will read the second of them before the first.  If nothing else so that I can really understand everything that is going on.