The Reading Canary: a Reminder

Series of novels - especially in fantasy and SF, but distressingly frequently on other genres as well - have a nasty tendency to turn sour partway through. The Reading Canary is your guide to precisely how far into a particular sequence you should read, and which side-passages you should explore, before the noxious gases become too much and you should turn back.

Little Stevie, What's Got Into You?

I never intended to do a full Reading Canary review of Steven Erikson's Malazan Book of the Fallen, simply because I read the first five books long before Ferretbrain started and I didn't want to have to re-read them to refresh my memory. However, my experience reading (or rather, attempting to read) the sixth book in the series has led to the realisation that Erikson has utterly lost the plot. I therefore consider it my duty to alert readers to the fact that the books have jumped the shark, fallen down a hole, and drowned in the sewer. The whole point of the Reading Canary is to let me say "Go ye this far, but no further!", after all.

For those of you who are new to the series, a quick summary: the Malazan Book of the Fallen is a series of ten novels, of which 7 have been published so far. The stated intent is to make them tell an overarching story, but to have each book stand on its own sufficiently that new readers don't have to read them in order, and don't have to read the entire thing at all. In the case of Gardens of the Moon, Deadhouse Gates, Memories of Ice, and Midnight Tides, this has been the case, although the fourth book in the series - House of Chains - relies a little too much on Deadhouse Gates for my liking. Erikson clearly is a fan of worldbuilding, and he does a lot of it - he intends to put out an Encyclopedia Malaz once he's finished the series - but to give him his due in previous books in the series he's combined that with interesting characterisation, a wry (somewhat Pratchett-influenced) sense of humour, and rollercoaster plots.

Not so in The Bonehunters.

900 Pages of Worldbuilding Masturbation

The Bonehunters is about 900 pages long. I read about 600 before I gave up, but flipping to the end and reading internet summaries I find that the problems in the first 600 pages persist in the last 900. Here is my summary of the experience:

Talking talking talking talking talking talking talking talking talking talking talking talking talking talking talking oh look something just happened oh wait it's just more talking talking talking talking talking talking talking talking talking talking hey these characters might die that's interesting no wait they got out at least the escape sequence is going to be good oh wait it's more talking talking talking talking talking talking talking talking talking talking talking sudden ambush hooray now something's actually happened oh wait barely anyone actually died talking talking talking talking talking talking talking talking talking talking talking talking TALKING TALKING SO MUCH TALKING SHUT UP SHUT UP SHUT UP SHUT UP SHUT UP SHUT UP SHUT UP.

I'd like to leave it at that, but I suppose I should go into more detail. The Malazan books follow the "multiple viewpoints" technique that have allowed various fantasy authors to fluff up their novels to ludicrously inflated sizes in order to get more money out of their fans. Furthermore, each one tends to contain multiple plot strands, each relating to different sets of characters. To give him credit, Erikson usually carefully picks the characters he chooses to focus on, and usually doesn't overload the novels, throwing in just enough plot strands to make the novels seem intricate and deep while not making them horribly confusing and boring.

Not so The Bonehunters. Erikson has, at my count, around 5 or 6 plotlines running in parallel at any particular time in the book. Each plotline has a heap of characters associated with it. In one or two of those plotlines, only a couple of characters are viewpoint characters, but most of them have heaps of the buggers. Each time Erikson turns his attention to a plotline, he feels compelled to give us an update on every single viewpoint character associated with it, no matter how uninteresting or irrelevant they are. Then he cuts away to another plotline to stop us getting bored - but the upshot of that is that he hasn't actually had time to have anything happen in the first plotline, because he's used up so many pages summarising the thoughts of the various viewpoint characters.

Adding to my distress is the fact that all of these plotlines are actually very similar: they tend to involve people going on long journeys from point A to point B through a bunch of different indistinguishable wastelands, and having long-winded conversations as they do so. Very long-winded conversations. Frequently repeating information that we, the reader, already know - often from earlier novels in the series, but after the first thousand times a fact has been repeated I want to shake Erikson and yell "Snap out of it, Steve! That's more than enough exposition for the people who've not read the earlier books! The plot, Steven! THE PLOT!" It does not help that some characters are hi-lar-ious comic relief with endearingly irritating modes of speech. I'd estimate that of the 600 pages I read of this lovingly polished turd, 500 were conversation.

And of course, this mode of storytelling, hopping between viewpoint characters and plotlines like mad, means that when significant things do happen they often feel rushed - the dying remains of Erikson's sense of pacing won't let him spend long enough describing major events in the story, because he needs to switch to covering the latest conversation between Corporal Bottom-Burp and Captain Hoojiewoojie or whatever. The epic siege which the book is supposedly about if the back cover blurb is to be believed is covered in 80 pages, most of which consist of long conversations between a whole bunch of viewpoint characters as they slowly crawl underground out of the blasted remains of the city (providing an underground alternative to the "long conversations during tedious journeys through indistinguishable wastelands" model the book usually adheres to). Captain Ganeos Paran's epic facing-down of the Goddess of Plague in her own temple is dealt with even more quickly, possibly because he doesn't get into a conversation with her.

There's more to find fault with in these conversations: when they are not being utterly repetitive, they become platforms for Erikson to say not-very-insightful things about Life. Specifically, Erikson likes to tell us that civilisation, culture, the arts, science and religion are all bad and wrong, and we should live like primitives in unity with nature - or, even better, just lie down and die, because life persists by killing and we should accept that nothing we ever do will ever mean anything and so let's all swallow a bullet. (Er, you first Steve.) In particular, in this book we see precisely how much Erikson really, really hates Christianity. In his view, any religion which promises a better existence after death is inherently evil, a lie propagated by a Crippled God who can't give his worshippers anything worthwhile in life. Steven, it's OK! You're a grown-up now. You can get over your parents making you got to church when you were 13.

Oh, and occasionally he'll talk about the upcoming war amongst the gods and how kickass it will be. That's very nice, Steven. How about letting that war happen at some point?

When things do happen, they're either irrelevant, immediately undermined, made ridiculous through the comic relief, or are clearly setting something up for the last four books in the series. For example:

• A group of five characters are ambushed by some nasties and it appears that all of them have died; in fact, four of the five survive unscathed thanks to healing magic, demonic might, or simply not being hacked to pieces after all. Only one of them appears to be dead, but because the others survived I can't seriously believe he won't show up again (there's also lots of ghosts popping up in the series, so he might even show up in ethereal form); and because Erikson pulls this dumb trick, it makes it impossible for me to take any other death in this book (or the entire series) seriously. (The survivor who didn't get hacked up, incidentally, gets kidnapped and offered control of the mad messianic cult she was running away from. She accepts, for no good reason.)
• Apsalar the formerly god-possessed uber-assassin chick gets two ghostly companions who, late in the book, turn out to be the spirits of two dead dragons. Dragons hitherto have been presented as awesomely powerful and inherently important entities - in other words, things to be taken seriously. The dead dragons have been comic relief up to now. Not only is the revelation that they are dragons incongruous - they've not been behaving like dragons at all - but it also makes dragons as a whole in Erikson's setting ridiculous, because now we associate them with a pair of clowns last seen possessing cute little dinosaur skeletons.
• Ganoes Paran becomes High Fist of the Malazan Army, pretty much by default. It's incredibly anticlimactic, and it's clear that he's going to do something awesome with that power in a later book, and I don't see any reason why it had to happen "on camera".

There was no need to write 600 pages of setup for any of these things to happen - or for any other event in this book. Erikson could simply have skipped about a year of time and picked up the story later, revealing the important events of The Bonehunters in little flashbacks or sudden surprises. Instead, however, he has fallen to the Robert Jordan sickness of narrating in redundant detail every tiny thing that happens. His worldbuilding and characterisation have always been the most loudly praised elements of his books, and he seems to now be concentrating them to the exclusion of everything else, including plot; even those who give this one positive reviews point out that it's a lot of setup and no resolution. The Bonehunters is a pocket of noxious gas right in the middle of the Malazan Book of the Fallen, and it killed the Reading Canary stone dead - I'm going to have to go and get another one. According to Malazan fans whose opinions I trust the seventh book in the series, Reaper's Gale, is more of the same. People who really, really like hanging out with Erikson's characters and learning more about his lovingly-crafted setting will probably keep reading regardless, but I like to get my setting tourism kick out of RPGs (in pencil-and-paper and computerised forms). Erikson has made me lean ever closer to the opinion that if an author prioritises worldbuilding above storytelling, he should just publish a setting encyclopedia and leave it at that.

For what it's worth, though, the first few Malazan books are great fun, especially Deadhouse Gates and Memories of Ice. Enjoy, but don't expect the whole series to maintain the same high standard.