This series is a lot of work. I stuck with it through the end because I don’t believe in not finishing a book once I start, even if it is 10 books in one. But I hated the process with a vengeance. I usually enjoy large series and have read Wheel of Time or Sword of Truth in about three months each. This series, which is shorter than WoT, took me an entire six months because I really had to force myself to even read a couple of pages. It is really hard to feel anything for the characters, if you don’t read regularly and all in one go you will lose track of all of the different characters and time frames going on and it is incredibly dark. For most of the books, I found the first three quarters tough going and then enjoyed the ending when some plot lines usually cleared up. I also enjoyed the end of the entire series which I thought was well done. But I cannot for the life of me understand all the raving reviews for these books. ( )

Ok. Here goes. (EDIT: and goes. 3/1 Edit: and goes. 3/4 EDIT: and goes.)

I cannot decide if this "book" (aka, the entire series, but I purchased as a single Kindle "book") deserves 2 stars or 3 stars... or -12 or 17. And it is clear (if you're reading this, you probably have seen the multitude of 5-star ratings and reviews) that *a lot* of people love this series. And they love it... *a lot.*

So.

Yeah.

¬_¬

The first thing you need to know is that this is epic. EPIC. If someone was like, "I need to know what 'Epic' means, and I thought reading, like, the Mahabharata would help, but after tearing through that in, like, one afternoon, I thought, 'Hmmmmm, I still don't get it,' can you help me?" then you would give them this and then they would know.

And the thing about super-duper-epically-Epics is that you have to (1) be super ambitious and (2) really know where you want to go with it and (3) write at the pinnacle of "your craft" and (4) not wallow in fucking pathos 499.379 days out of 500. And TCMBotF is probably (1). (3/1 EDIT: Maybe (2). People tell me (3).)

The other thing about TCMBotF is that Erikson is definitely trying to tell you things. He's got messages. Sometimes this seems clear (e.g., "neoliberal capitalism is bad" seems like a pretty evident message in particularly one a couple more book). Sometimes it seems less clear, but probably benefits from that complication (e.g. "Empires are terrible... but maybe not always, absolutely... and even if they are terrible, that doesn't mean what came before them was good... in fact, there's a good chance that was terrible, too. So maybe empires can be good, sort of, sometimes. Perhaps, sometimes, even necessary.")

Sometimes... WTF? It's all just drowning in pathos, pathos, PATHOS.

And for a book that has Messages, it *extremely* often falls into the Fantasy/SF/Action Movie trap of the bad guys being really, irredeemably bad. Like, this guy isn't just a cold pragmatist. He's bad. But not just bad, he's a pedophile. But not just a pedophile, he's into torturing kids and then (it is intimated) letting them go so they can live their lives... BROKEN and IN PAIN. Mwahahahahaa!

And books 8, 9, and 10 are especially heavy in the sense of Suffering! The Suffering! The Sacrifice! The Pathos! The repeated multi-page italicized narrative monologues! (Though the kiddy torture is more book 2, but I think at that point I was still powering through with high expectations of a pay-off.)

I mean, if you like verbose pathos... no, that's not it. If you read Moby Dick and thought, "Needs more talk about whales and whaling and stuff," but then you thought, "Whales are lame, what this should be about is pathos," and then you finished that book and thought, "But, wait, that's it? Where's the suffering?" then this is for you.

And by the end of it... bleh. For the series ending, why did I read books 1 through maybe 5 or 6? They have almost no relevance. For all the impact they (don't) have on the ending, they could have just been summed up. But, nope, you read 5,000 or 6,000 or maybe 7,000 pages for what amounts to backstory to the big reveal... PATHOS! Redemption, kinda... but then PATHOS!

So, yeah. Overall, I left this feeling really disappointed. I "liked" it, sort of, but almost in spite of itself. I clung, desperately, to the parts I liked. I liked the crazy-ambitious world-building. I liked the attempt at complicating some "typical" narratives (even the smashing of neoliberal capitalism gets a few wrinkles thrown in, if only very sparsely.)

I didn't like the meandering path the whole thing takes (I get that it was written as separate books, and maybe was never intended to have an overarching single narrative, but...) and probably would have preferred the final books to be "just one more installment" rather than an attempt to draw some kind of grand meaning from it all. I didn't like that the characters were so "one-dimensional" (there are maybe three characters in this whole series, even though there are approximately 1000 names) and I get the sense that some of that was actually on purpose. (3/1 EDIT: and I will note that I have heard/read a number of people discuss how rich the characters are, but I really disagree. 250 pages spent telling you how conflicted someone is isn't rich. That's just 250 pages telling you *one &$#@! thing.*)

Did I mention pathos? And the verbosity? The pathological verbotical verbotiousness pathosiousness of it all? And wallowing. I said wallowing somewhere, right?

Sigh.

3/1 EDIT: a couple of weeks later, bumping from 2 stars to 3 stars. For all its *multiple* issues, for my utter distaste for grimdark/*pathos*, for the many pages of wasted text (no, I promise you, every word was not significant, Malazan fans)... it's just a freaking towering accomplishment. Uggh.

Additional 3/1 EDIT: I also think some of my distaste for the books is just distaste for some of the content/messaging/POVs. E.g. a recurring thread is that, perhaps paraphrasing too much, "Civilization is built on a lot of artificiality and unfairness and even brutality." Or, if you want it in quip form, "Civilization is uncivilized." So, yeah, there is a kind of deep truth to that. But there is also a kind of "this is the thing your high friend from sophomore year would constantly talk about and you kind of rolled your eyes even then." And, as with everything Malazan, it's like (making a number up) 500 pages of that. Which is ~5% of the book/series. So maybe it shouldn't count too much... But.

3/4 EDIT: Seriously considering bumping back down to 2-stars. I continue to stew on how I feel about this series, and I hesitate to rate 2-stars because (1) how grand in scope and ambition it really is and (2) the fact that it is causing me to stew this much. I'm back to thinking 2-stars because I realize how much I dislike some things. First off, grimdark is not my thing. Apparently. Second, and I think separately if still relatedly, the POV/worldview/philosophy/etc. that *could* be described as "all is broken" or "all is fallen" or maybe just "it's all shit"... ehh, I think that is fundamentally attractive to a whole segment of people (swaths of progressives, swaths of young people, swaths of "old white men," etc.) but it just clashes with my... well, everything; my POV/worldview/philosophy/etc. And you know, I guess, at the end, redemption, sort of... I guess? Maybe? Third, I think the worldbuilding here is both a great accomplishment... and the thing that ate everything else. Would you like to sit down and read a 10-volume history of the planet Earth, from the rise of Hominids through the multiple present conflicts in the world, skimming over everything, but then diving into a handful of individuals with inside-their-head level detail stretching to hundreds of pages? If yes, then this is (kind of?) for you. If you register some doubts as to whether such a thing could hang together without becoming "just one damn thing after another," diving from one story to another while not ever really telling a story, overall... yeah, then you anticipate the feeling I have now.

And the thing is, I've now spent multiple days thinking about this, I've even watched a couple of YouTube videos where people discuss, including an interview with Erikson... and... This is just a flop, for me. There. I think I've finally digested it (for today.) 2-stars. ( )

Gardens of the Moon

You're on point if one might say this feels like you're beginning to read in the middle of a long series, like starting on page 500 of a several-thousand-pages book. However, I think the complexity is sometimes overestimated. Yes, there are many characters and several different plots, but the only difficulty is not getting lost with the names and changes of location. The real difficulty is the author hiding information from the reader on purpose, for example only hinting at how the magic works, etc. This actually can spur the curiosity of the reader as happened in my case, expecting further explanation of the background in the following novels. On the other hand, one of the main plots of the novel, the dagger-and-cloak adventures in Darujhistan, dragged in my opinion, and since it takes a large portion of the novel I got quite bored at the end. Furthermore, one of the reason I started reading the series was because I knew that Erikson was an anthropologist, so I expected a Tolkien-like level of world-building, but only found a reworking of fantasy clichés with hardly anything really new (and even some character ripped from other fantasy series, like Anomander Rake). My predominant thought wasn't so much that it was confusing, though it has a certain economy of description that makes its huge grandiose scenes hard for me to visualize. The biggest issue I had was just that the plot didn't feel cohesive or satisfying. Critical stuff gets introduced late and out of nowhere, as if it's being written by someone who got excited about some new idea and just shoehorned it in without going back to insert proper foreshadowing. The entire finale felt like a huge mess that aggressively violated Brandon Sanderson's First Law ("An author's ability to solve conflict with magic is directly proportional to how well the reader understands said magic.").

Deadhouse Gates

This, read separately, I would consider it a 4 star book of military fantasy (If I had to guess after reading this, I would have said that Erikson is a military historian instead of an anthropologist). However, at the end it began to dawn on me that Erikson wasn't intending to explain the background at any point and was just going to keep on throwing unexplained elements at us. Also, it started to bother me how materialistic and lacking in fascination (from my point of view) is all the magic and religion/gods (when gods appear in this series, at least in the three novels I have read, they do it in my opinion in the most underwhelming of ways).

Memories of Ice

This book did it for me about getting disillusioned with the series after the bump up of “Deadhouse Gates”. Curiously, the moral ambiguity is thrown out the window with this one, since here one of the sides in the war that is presented as clearly evil. Anyway, this novel just confirmed (for me) the problems of the first two and the fact that there wouldn't be any great change of gear in the series: what we saw in the first books was what we are going to probably get in the rest of the series (I say this because more than once fans of the series have told me not to bother continuing if I didn't like this book). After finishing it, I wasn't invested at all in the characters, and the world described, while very large (although for me it's not entirely clear how "continents" is not simply a transposition of "countries" in other fantasy worlds) lacked any fascination from my point of view. I just couldn't see any reason to continue reading, which probably would mean another jump to another continent and another different adventure anyway. I just don't see the point of following the story further when I haven't found anything truly original or gripping in this series. And if this is going to happen after 3000 pages, well, maybe the author should have found a way to introduce it earlier.

I think one of Erickson's major flaws as a writer is that he doesn't understand that exposition is a spectrum, not some kind of Manichean dichotomy of not introducing or explaining anything at all and infodumping everything to death: You can introduce characters and concepts elegantly by letting readers encounter them in a way that they understand enough of them to get by without bigger problems – that is pretty much what Gene Wolfe does in “Book of the New Sun”. To me, Erikson’s lack of proper exposition made everything feel paper thin and uninteresting.

After “Memories of Ice” it’s all a blur…

Book Review Malazan SF = Speculative Fiction ( )

A major commitment by the author, especially in this day and age where delivering half a book series has become the norm. My grip of the plot started to fail in Reapers Gale (7), I probably only understood what about half of Toll the Hounds (8) was referring to, and about the same for Dust of Dreams (9). Just too many characters to keep track of, plus the use of impersonal pronouns at the start of new sections didn't help. Thanks to an active online fan community I was able to get back on track. ( )

Erikson actually created a very vivid and interesting world with different races/species, gods,magic, huge epic battles, and a lot of history. However Erikson is a very inconsistent storyteller. On one hand there was never any central narrative drive to the series. Although the ending shows something that might have been an ultimate goal, we never even receive any vague hints regarding it as the series progresses. Nor was this really a character driven narrative because of the too many POV's, inconsistent characterisation and the plot. Most of the time the motivations of the characters are not really apparent at all. A lot of the character's inner monologues are actually the author's philosophical musings that don't give us any insight into the character or His/Her motivations.

While Erikson dealt with many interesting historical, sociological, and anthropological themes, they don't really make up for the deficiencies elsewhere in the plot and storytelling. The first book seems completely disconnected from the rest of the series. Its as if the author suddenly changed his mind and decided to take the story in a completely different direction. The series on the whole was a mixed bag for me. It was good in parts with some well crafted characters, but on the whole i feel like it could have been much better. ( )