We got his words directly. The news was he finished the editing of The Crippled God and is at work on the 5th Bauchelain & Korbal Broach novella.

“finished edit on The Crippled God which means that’s the last time I will ever read the novel front to back. Feels like I can die tomorrow and be fine with that, and all the rest of the time allotted me is, like, free. Oh, and started the next B&KB novella yesterday. And ‘Excesses of Youth’ will star a new character inspired by someone most of you know… Did I ever mention my evil streak?”

The guy who rose some controversy this past August by criticizing George Martin’s series, wrote possibly the very best review ever of Gardens of the Moon. It’s quite enlightening and wonderfully focuses on important aspects of that novel that are often dismissed or overlooked (including myself).

Some quotes:

You see, as with most sword and sorcery stories, and especially given its kitchen sink approach to fantasy tropes, there’s a danger that Gardens of the Moon won’t quite pass the giggle test, what with its floating mountain, assassins and thieves guilds, and hulking fantasy stereotype Anomander Rake. Erikson defuses this by starting off grim. By present standards, Gardens of the Moon is not a really dark book, but its darkest moments are at the beginning to set the tone.

From this bleak beginning, Erikson moderates the tone and eventually introduces various elements that, considered in isolation, would seem pretty silly. But these are defused by the inertia of that serious beginning and the constantly down-to-earth attitude of the main characters.

Erikson is actually pressed for time. In traditional fantasy, diverse groups of characters band together to achieve some sort of goal. In Gardens of the Moon, everyone has their own thing going on, resulting in not just one plot, but over a dozen. Only strong unities of place and time keep the novel from feeling more like a short story collection.

Again turning to Lord of the Rings as a useful model, the timespan of that story caught almost every important event. Aragorn had been alive for over a hundred years when he meets Frodo, but little of what he was doing had much impact on the outcome of the story. The same is true for most of the other characters. Ask a character after the events of Lord of the Rings when the important time of their lives was and all would point to the War of the Ring. Gardens of the Moon is completely different. The older characters (and even some of the younger ones) have been active for years and this is just the latest situation they’ve had to confront.

Tolkien probably felt our world was about 6,000 years old and so was his Middle Earth. Erikson no doubt sees our world as much older, and this is likewise reflected in his fiction. The Malazan Empire is just the latest of a thousand civilizations, a tiny sliver of hundreds of thousands if not millions of years of history. And this being a fantasy, there are immortal characters who have seen a sizable fraction of that history. Unlike Tolkien, who maintained a generational distance from the events of myth (Elrond was present only for the events at the very end of the Silmarillion), the influential immortals of Erikson’s present were just as influential in past millennia. This results in a unique effect where the past can feel extremely distant in one scene and very immediate in the next, depending on who is present.

Now, having made such an extended comparison to Tolkien, I have to make clear that although Erikson’s world has a depth similar to Tolkien’s, he is a very different writer. He doesn’t share Tolkien’s gift for languages, nor does he lavish nearly so much attention on the landscapes. Erikson was a professional anthropologist, so the details he emphasizes are those of culture. When Tolkien described a hill topped with ruins, he spent most of his time on the hill, whereas Erikson lingers on the ruins. The result is that Erikson’s landscapes are not beautifully evoked, but they come off as being genuinely inhabited (whether now or in the past) in a way that Tolkien’s empty countryside does not.

Whereas Tolkien’s world was fundamentally Christian, Erikson’s is thoroughly pagan. His gods are capricious and quick to interfere in the affairs of mortals. There’s no sense that humanity has dominion over the earth…the opposite, in fact.

That disparity in power is perhaps the most old-fashioned element here. It’s easy to forget that for all the inequalities of wealth in our era, most people deny there is much difference between the average person and, for example, the American president. But to the ancients, there was an enormous gulf between the lowly peasant and Pharaoh, son of Ra.

However, mixed into this authentically ancient outlook is a very modern flavor. Unlike traditional Tolkien-influenced fantasy, the past is not considered better, nor is the present a slide down into a faded future. Oh, there were still powerful races and empires in previous eras who forged mighty artifacts and fought incredible battles, but while they are certainly due some respect, ultimately there is an assumption that modern magic is just as good as the old stuff, if not better. Even the Jaghut Tyrant, an ancient evil feared by all and the closest thing in the novel to a Dark Lord, is implied to be somewhat obsolete and rather out of his depth.

Even the Bridgeburners, who are indeed glorified as a legendary military unit and present some of the most interesting and sympathetic characters, turn out to be ambiguous at best, given they attempt to orchestrate murders and then prepare a terror attack on a civilian population. They are well-intentioned, but so are their enemies who live in Darujhistan. When they meet in the right circumstances, people from the two different sides even become fast friends. Yet the intentions of ordinary people cannot change their world, so the conflict continues, grinding up human lives in the vast gears of ambition and intrigue.

It’s Erikson’s achievement (and this is, in my opinion, a considerable achievement) that not only do we as readers immediately have the same reaction as Crokus but we have it for the same reason. Immersed in the Malazan world with its manifold deities and deep magic, there’s nothing implausible about the idea of beautiful gardens under an ocean on the moon tended by an elder god. No, the only thing that seems unbelievable about Apsalar’s description is its last image: “There won’t be any more wars, and empires, and no swords and shields.” An end to suffering and war? That’s just fantasy.

I was writing in a forum and trying to figure out if there’s a simple way to summarize how characterization works in the Malazan series. It’s one aspect that is also criticized and matter of debate and so I think it’s all about the reader and his personal reaction to a different style. For some it works, for others it doesn’t.

One problem is that for books that are part of a specific genre readers come with very specific expectations, and so it’s not easy to make them accept different canons and structures, they will judge a book by comparing it to other books in the genre that are considered absolute points of reference. The quality of a book is then relative to its performance on those canons. Malazan has an ever harder time because its differences start already with the style of the writing. So it depends entirely on whether or not this style works for a certain reader or if instead one gets “bounced back”.

“Characterization” is one of those aspects where “innovation” or change or originality of approach isn’t usually welcome. A classic kind of characterization works well and achieves a lot of important functions. Most successful books, even if much different, have similar approaches to characterization. They can do it better or worse, but usually they follow similar structures. This is instead one aspect that Erikson does in a completely different way (or in a way that represents a minority).

In the Malazan series things aren’t driven by characters, but by scenes. Often scenes are linked thematically, and different characters relate to the same theme in their own different way. In most other fantasy, putting in the same group Tolkien, Martin and Jordan to quote three of the most visible, characters are established before plot. In Tolkien we get to know the Hobbits well before the story and the journey picks up. There’s the whole birthday scene, but also lots of “infodumps” about the quirky habits of the Hobbit and all the different families. Characters and story are well contextualized before they are set in movement. Jordan follows the structure closely, sets up the countryside village, its inhabitants and what will become main characters. You have a nice bucolic scene set up, including fundamental characterization, before things start to happen. Things are again properly and carefully contextualized so that the reader acquires a certain familiarity with them before “changes” arrive. Martin, even if completely different from both Jordan and Tolkien, also starts by contextualizing. Bran’s first chapter is a well written introduction to the whole Stark family, and before the chapter closes the reader will be already familiar with all the most important traits and characters that define the Starks. Here the plot moves already as part of the contextualization, but it’s all again measured on the reader. Even with the following chapters characters are introduced in a way that lets the reader develop familiarity, and things only move after the reader got hold of them.

As I said, this is the aspect that most sets Erikson’s writing style apart from most of everything else. It’s not much that the first book starts in “medias res”, or in a point in time that is already quite complicate. That’s a detail. The real difference is that no characters are contextualized as a deliberate choice. In Erikson’s books no character is closely followed, no character is carefully presented before the plot gets moving. We get scenes. Characters are part of scenes and they get swapped depending on the scene. We get glimpses of characterization, because even when there’s direct introspection it’s always closely related to the theme in that scene. We see specific characterization and reactions. We get flashes. What we do not get is the fully disclosed character that the reader familiarizes with and knows so well to consider like a close friend. This never happen. All characters, even those who appear more often and that are minutely developed, keep obscure aspects about their lives and thoughts. There is no spotlight that clears all shadows and offers a special status of clarity. This is immediately evident from the beginning of Gardens of the Moon, where Paran, in the scene where he goes in Gerrom to find out what happened with the missing girl and her father, even with direct introspection we only get hints, glimpses and suspicions about what Paran is thinking. There is no omniscient light poured into a character.

All this is not the result of a lack of strong characterization, even compared to books praised for it, it’s just a matter of different style. Characters in the Malazan series develop in the longer term, the more those slices of characterization build up to something more cohesive. The facets we see have plenty of depths, character never develop predictably and Erikson’s habit is about breaking patterns and expectations. Malazan has plenty of originality and depth, but it is nuanced and only comes out on a emergent level. It’s not straightforward and clear, it takes effort from the reader to put together the pieces of characterization. As is the case with everything else that makes this series.

Agreeing or not on the merit of characterization in the Malazan series, I think it’s still obvious to say that characters only relate to the specific scene and nothing else, and that this is a constant for the whole series and all characters involved. There’s a neutrality of approach that in the end delivers something powerfully authentic. Which is as far as you can go in the matter of characterization.