Jesus was no zombie, God was no necromancer

Okay, I have no idea if anyone finds my MBotF liveblogging interesting, but this post is just using that as a starting point. So bear with me and I'll be in broader territory soon enough...

Right now in Toll the Hounds, there is a lot of to do over a newly created God called the Redeemer. A few books back, a human soldier basically took all the sins of one of the undead demihuman races upon himself, died in the process and was reborn as a good.

However, since this is a fantasy novel, filled with cruel, distant, vengeful, whimsical or semi-retired gods, some of the characters are wondering what sort of god takes all his followers' burdens upon himself without demanding anything of them.

This is a weird development, since the universe these characters exist in is unrelentingly pagan in outlook. A few people get a pleasant afterlife, but a lot of them (including some of our heroes) end up as ghosts, or chained to an endless rolling wagon pulled by the souls of the dead or utterly annihilated from existence (even in a metaphysical sense). Just like the tragedy of King Lear is worsened by the fact that, in pagan England, Lear and Cordelia won't even face a better fate in the afterlife, so much of the death and destruction in the Malazan Book of the Fallen becomes more powerful. 

This is also a strange step because when I think of sword and sorcery or epic fantasy, there is either no religion or a bunch of pagan religions that might superficially resemble modern day faiths (but only superficially).

I wonder how much of this is down to the influence of Tolkien. After all, despite his deeply held faith, he refused to inject Christianity into Lord of the Rings (or at least overtly). Contrast this to C.S. Lewis, his contemporary and sometimes friend, who has Santa Claus show up in Narnia to accompany Thundercats Jesus. [I'm sorry, I think Lewis is a enjoyable writer and I have fond memories of the Narnia Chronicles, but only a child would find Aslan a subtle stand-in for Jesus].

I'm also sure that some of this is fallout from the 80s, when anything that smacked of darkness and magic (heavy metal, Dungeons and Dragons) was accused of satanism. I doubt that it was only religious parents that felt this way (even some agnostic or mildly religious families probably thought Ozzy Osbourne and Gary Gygax were encouraging suicide or the occult) but you merely have to surf the RPG blogosphere for five minutes to hear stories about church ladies taking Keep on the Shadowfell away from high schoolers. And as for metal (or punk or anything that wasn't "She Loves You") ...just watch a couple Behind the Music segments on Ozzy or Judas Priest, or listen to Jello Biafra's monologues on the PMRC.

I think it's pretty apparent that people suffered scorn from other sources than adults (parents, church leaders, teachers) for their hobbies, but bullies or girlfriends or peers can't actively keep you from playing a game/reading/listening to music. I also think that this is why so many people involved in speculative fiction or RPGs or alternative/metal/punk are dismissive of religion in general. Their development as adults and fights for independence are tied up in what they see as a struggle against religion. There's nothing like over-bearing, un-Christianlike Christians for creating overbearing, contemptous atheists/agnostics (and vice versa, I'm sure). 

And frankly, I think it has hurt both sides, poisoning discussion, turning bright and creative people against their faiths, and depriving lonely and misunderstood people of a place that is supposed to be a shelter for the lonely and misunderstood. 

I know I didn't feel the sting of this so much, personally. I didn't get into RPGs until college and my parents were fine with me checking out whatever books I wanted from the adult section at the age of 10 (including Stranger in a Strange Land). I have had conversations about the music I listen to and (weirdly enough) the Simpsons, but they've usually worked out well. *

It probably also helped that I was Catholic and our church (i.e. St. Francis of Assisi in NC) was not obsessed with the Bible as a literal Word of God.  I get the impression that all the Evangelical churches that obsess about the Earth being created in six days forget the fact that the Bible is full of metaphors, allegories and parables. 

More later, probably...

*I still remember getting Nas' Hip Hop is Dead and Sweeney Todd: The Original Cast Recording when I was home for Christmas a year ago. I was listening to Nas in my old bedrom when my mother came in to ask me something. She immediately said something along the lines of, "I can't believe you like that". I put in Sweeney Todd and she was fine with that.  Once again, Nas album about rap moving beyond drugs, violence and acquisitiveness = no. Musical about cannibalism, murder, and rape that suggests the world as a charnel house untouched by God = yes. The medium is the message, I guess.

"Love has no honour": Liveblogging Toll the Hounds

Toll the Hounds by Steven Erikson, pages 46-317

Expect a post on religion in high fantasy and sword and sorcery in another couple of days. The past couple hundred pages have given a lot of interesting materials for those speculations. Perhaps also another post on the point in the venn diagram of literature where epic intersects with purpled prose and why that might be necessary.

However, for the moment, I do want to make a point about Erikson's push and pull (stealing his own terminology for fate) of characterization.  Towards the end of this chunk of TtH is a scene where Lady Challice Vidikas sits down to dinner with two of her husband's political allies, knowing that her husband expects her to carry on an affair with one of them.  Even worse, he sees this as merely one more political marker he can call in later. Most of Challice's thoughts prior to this have been of the coldness of her marriage and her very life. From her point of view, everyone in her circle seems contemptible. Previous books and other scenes in this one has reinforced this impression of the trio of young turks made up of her husband Gorlas Vidikas, Hanut Orr and Shardan Lim. Or rather, the reader sees the first two as dishonorable and manipulative and assumes Shardan is of a piece with them.

He still might be, in fact. But following Hanut Orr's exit in high dudgeon, Shardan Lim becomes disarmingly honest and romantic.  And every time Lady Challice confronts him on a contradiction in what he says, he admits the contradiction, leading to this post's title quote. He even offers to walk out and duel Hanut Orr for offending her, though he admits it will do nothing for her reputation.

In a book where most characters lie to either help themselves or protect those around them, such a moment of honesty wins over not only Challice but this reader. This ability to both see his own foolishness as he is swept away by it... suddenly this novel's Lepidus is suffused with tragedy and reluctantly I hope for his escape from the doom that is sure to come whether their plot succeeds or fails. Well played, Mr. Erikson. Well played.

All Toll the Hounds, all the time: Liveblogging MBotF

A few pages after I left off is a great example of Erikson's humor. Darujhistan's greatest alchemist reads a couple pages of an ancient mythological text, then complains to his companion, who served the text's subject, that this story is ridiculous and inconsistent.

"So what? Show me a written history that makes sense, and I will show you true fiction." (45).

What makes it even funnier is that the text he reads is in the style of a faux-classical epic.

"Surrender to the years of struggle that was life's own chorus": Live-blogging Toll the Hounds

Toll the Hounds by Steven Erikson, pages 1 to 35

So I think it's pretty obvious that I'm not going to get through the entire Malazan Book of the Fallen before Toll the Hounds comes out and I lack the restraint to hold off on TtH until I'm done with the seven previous books (at least two of which are not even here in Chicago with me). However, once I'm done with TtH, I probably will go back and reread again. 

Partly that's because Erikson is trying to wrap up the series (I think there might only be one more book after this), so this book echoes the first book in eerie ways. In general, Erikson has always been wicked (in a good way) about leaving characters alone. One book will see a set of characters off into the sunset with a happy ending...only to run into them out of the blue two books later falling to pieces. 

Call it the "nothing ever ends" philosophy of literature. Whereas other series seem to jump the shark when they bring back fan favorite characters that disappeared years ago, it usually happens because they're trotted out to face the exact same threat as before or a less impressive one.

To Erikson's credit, that's not an issue because of the variety of nested threats this series is filled with. Characters might fulfill their ultimate goal, but the world is still going to intrude in interesting way.  The new threats might be even worse because they threaten the equilibrium the character had established. Erikson doesn't do this to just drag characters down into the muck, the outcomes usually end up more complicated than that.

And of all the happy endings to come back and disrupt, Darujhistan has to be the ultimate one. For the last few books, we've seen a few glimpses of Krul's Bar and the Deadhouse as a refuge from the chaos elsewhere. I had a tendency to think of Darujhistan as safe from the problems sweeping the world of MBotF. However, just because they've solved problems in their neck of the woods doesn't mean new ones won't come up (how like real life!).

So after a thematically linked prologue that deals with dogs, especially the Hounds of Shadow, we're back in Darujhistan. And pretty quickly we see *SPOILER* a new assassination plot on the city's inhabitants (as in the early Darujhistan sequences in GotM!), a new cult that has sprung up around the "dead" Rallick Nom (who we know from GotM isn't dead at all), and the murder of a very jaded Murillo (one of the Daru heroes of GotM).

Probably the last is the most shocking since Murillo was one of the good guys and one of the winners in Gardens of the Moon. Now he's seducing alcoholic rich widows and realizing how purposeless his life is. And as this realization starts to register in his mind (as per the post title's quote), he gets killed immediately post-coitus by an over-zealous and clumsily drunk romantic rival.

The effectiveness of this sequence is helped by the way it contrasts with scenes of old, retired Malazan soldiers getting the drop on fresh, young professional assassins (cue PJ O'Rourke quote re: old age and guile versus youth and a bad haircut). It also helps that, in literature, we are trained to expect an epiphany to bring with it salvation and protection from the world's forces. The sufferer of the epiphany might suffer some more, but that new perspective allows them to survive whatever they face and maybe even rise above it.

Unfortunately, in MBotF and in the real world, those epiphanies frequently come too late, on the very edge of death. I'll leave it to someone else to append the moral to this.

"You have chosen...unoriginally": Liveblogging Malazan Book of the Fallen

Gardens of the Moon by Steven Erikson, pages 1 through 139

Towards the beginning of chapter 4, Ganoes Paran, one of the main POV characters and a noble-born officer involved in a conspiracy, has just been killed by a god's assassin and Death sends a representative to meet him. Of course, Death's servant is determined by the dead person's own preconceived ideas. Ganoes at first imagines him as a confusing mix of races and deaths before settling on a skeleton. Which provokes the title quote from Death's servant.

There was plenty in the book that, prior to this point, had signaled GotM as different from Tolkien-esque high fantasy. This was the first moment that I understood Erikson's annoyance with stereotype and interest in subverting cliche. As much as I enjoy George R.R. Martin's Song of Fire and Ice, Steven Erikson frequently goes him one better at throwing monkeywrenches in the machine of fantasy plotting. Where Martin gives a puzzling prophecy, Erikson will give us a puzzling prophecy, that has been garbled by centuries of use, put in the mouth of an unreliable narrator.

After all, in a later book, Erikson will give us a society that totally misunderstands its' own creation myth because of a major climate change. And it makes sense! In addition, it is only a secondary plot point. These kind of things are seeded throughout the books. Do I need to explain further the brilliance of this world-building?

In Gardens of the Moon (so far), we've got the Malazan Empire, under the control of Empress Laseen who deposed the former emperor and his right-hand assassin under nasty circumstances. Since then, she's been waging endless wars that help subdue the Empire's rivals and also dispose of some Imperials of dubious loyalty. Think of those Soviet penal regiments that charged across mine fields and you've got the idea. One of these regiments is the Bridgeburners, that's been deployed to a disastrous siege along with the remainders of the Imperial Mage Cadre.

Meanwhile, two newly Ascendant gods named Ammanas and Cotillion have recruited a young girl from a fishing village in their bid to reenact The Manchurian Candidate (it seems) and placed her with the Bridgeburners. But the Empress has an inkling of what's going on and dispatched Ganoes Paran to take care of them. Then he gets killed and things start getting interesting...

That is a very long plot synopsis for 140 pages of story. But the story isn't confusing, at least, not to the extent of Dhalgren or Ada. Or, in more popular genre terms, the Urth of the New Sun series. Erikson's prose is clear and well-chosen and he's good at giving you enough info to get through until he lets something drop and makes the opaque translucent.

Also, a lot of this is stuff he establishes by showing the reader. You see a surviving mage figure out that, hey, that deadly blast of magic came from behind us, you see the Ascendant gods recruit the fisher-girl for their mysterious purposes. Often, the reader is figuring out these puzzles along with a character being introduced to this part of the world or society.

And what a world it is! While the Malazan Empire might come off as slightly familiar, Erikson is great at creating and establishing societies and traditions that make sense without feeling like warmed-over retreads of this fantasy trope or that real-world society. I don't read these books and say, "clearly this society stands in for medieval France or War of the Roses-era England." No offense to Guy Gavriel Kay or George R.R. Martin, but this capacity for invention is much closer to Gene Wolfe than anything.

So, as to the actual material in front of us:

• The prologue does an efficient job of giving a taste of all the topics other characters will be discussing throughout the book (the Empire under the Emperor, Laseen's ambitions, the Bridgeburners' history pre- and post-coup, the fall of Dasseem Ultor), while not actually resolving them. The whole thing is told through the eyes of a young Ganoes Paran and Erikson is adept at the mix of naivete and keenness that a bright young teenager would bring to this strange encounter. Paran can tell the changes in Imperial bureaucracy and the strain in Laseen and the Bridgeburners' working relationship, but when he smells burning flesh in the air, he writes it off as an abattoir catching fire. Even though we know some incredibly vicious race riots are going on in that district.
• Having read all seven books in the series, it's fun to reread the first one and see all the throwaway references that turn out to be really important. When Paran goes home on leave, we meet his sister Tavore, who speaks disparagingly of his more sensitive sister Felisin. First time through, I thought this was just to establish Paran's unhappy family. Now, knowing what's coming, I can't help but see Tavore and Felisin's tragic last encounter in Tavore's brusque (but not purposefully cruel) description of her.
• On a slightly happier note, we meet our first Teblor (not Karsa Orlong, though) and hear characters wondering what the heck a Tiste Edur is and why they're so important? It'll take a while before we hear the answer, but when we do, oh boy...
• In terms of invention, Erikson only starts showing how original this world is, often given glancing descriptions of races and civilizations that sound familiar to a fantasy fan, and only later delving into what makes them strange. The Moranth provide an excellent example. At first, the reader might think they're just a bunch of humans with flying machines and great ammunition. Once Paran gets on one of those flying machines, however, we start wondering if they're some ridiculously high-tech society that holds its' secrets close or intelligent humanoid insects.
• And some of the other ideas in the book so far: a dying magician preserving his soul in a marionette doll, an immortal magician who travels around in his own flying moon, and teleportation pathways called Warrens that also channel supernatural energy and each have their own pantheon of gods! Some of these will get developed more than others, but the Warrens especially show Erikson's capacity for invention.
• As far as characterization goes, I forgot that Ganoes Paran starts off as kind of a prig. Partly, that's because Erikson is careful to show qualities that will serve him well once he matures. And partly its because of the situations that he ends up being a prig in. If the guy who assassinated my country's former government ended up being my official escort to my new job, I'd be rude to him too. And then, just as he seems to shape up for tough times ahead, Erikson kills him! George R.R. Martin's best quality has always been his pull-no-punches plotting, but Erikson ties with him. Though in this case, Paran ends up sticking around. Death might not have been such a bad thing by the end of this book.

So, what thoughts do you guys have on the Malazan Book of the Fallen?