I continue to like much better the old cover style. This one would be actually very nice if they only entirely removed that pointless face. There’s a great cover hidden behind.
Original is on Bakker own blog.
Tag Archives: Books
The Way of Kings – (my) problems with prose
As I said I expected to have some problems with the prose and need to adjust to it. Hopefully enough so that I don’t focus on just nitpicking.
I was discussing especially that I dislike infodumps that are out the context of the PoV character and written solely to fill in the reader. Directly writer to reader without characters as filters.
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Here’s an example from the Prologue:
Extraneous info dumped by an omniscient narrator solely for the reader and unrelated to the PoV or context. Between one step and the other. Right in the middle of an action scene. It’s an obvious choice of style and the whole Prologue is written like that. Other things I have to digest are the insane number of compounded words, as already pointed out, and some redundancy of prose. Like:
Turn two pages:
Turn another page:
And it even ends with a rather weird and clunky – yet again seemingly off context – consideration:
I also noticed a repetition of expression:
Not just same description, but also a repetition of the structure of the sentence. I guess the redundancy helps the accessibility as the reader is expected to absorb various notions that are specific to this fantasy world. The same infodump style was used even for the description of the magic system, which produced some cinematic scenes. Feels quite like wuxia, or wire-fu. With the hero flying around like in those Chinese movies, only through the use of gravity manipulation rather than great leaping skills. A system that made me question a bit its “logic” since it’s unclear whether it works on area of effect or is somewhat selective. That said the action moves felt a bit formulaic and repetitive. The scene also ends because of what I consider very dumb choices that in the text were defined “clever”. EDIT: Worth updating. I’m now further into the book and for all the issues I had with the prologue it seems that I don’t have anything bad worth quoting for the rest. Either the writing suddenly “improved” or I got interested more in the flow of the story and less in nitpicking the style of prose. I haven’t noticed anything else that is odd and characters, albeit not exactly wildly original, are already claiming their space. I suspect this book reads very easily and quickly despite its bulk. |
The Way of Kings took a while…
…But the book has finally arrived yesterday after a 2-weeks trip around the world. Considering my reading pacing and that I’ll read the book while also being already engaged with the Prince of Nothing it means that I’ll be done not sooner than a couple of months, but I already have a bundle of comments, all not indispensable but enough to waste a post about them :)
I mean, it must be quite original commenting a book on its first 8 pages. I’ve read those 8 pages, and have plenty to say if I can fish all that feedback from my yesterday’s memory.
So, the book is pretty & precious. If I had received the ARC as I wished I would be pissed by now because it misses all the frills of the retail hardcover. Lots of work spent on the package. To begin with it has 4 full-color illustrations “enclosing” the book. Meaning that two comes right after the cover, and the other two at the very end. Very colorful and eye catching. The first two have, one symbols enclosed in spheres, arranged in a way very close to the Kabbalistic tree of life. In front of this one instead we have a world map of Roshar, pretty but undetailed, only showing the division in zones. The world has a vague squeezed spiral shape akin to a galaxy. The other pair of color illustrations are a mirror of the first two. Not simply copied but reworked. We have the same Kabbalistic tree but with different art/symbols and the same shape of map that may refer to a different time or plane.
Inside there is another 2-pages Roshar map, this time black & white and detailed with the usual stuff like mountains, rivers, major towns. Beside these, the index mentions 19 other illustrations, ranging from other maps to sketches of creatures and other contextual things. Chapters also have their own chapter icons, with variations probably depending on theme or character involved. The book ends with a 4-page “Ars Arcanum” appendix with some details, I think, on the magic system and the Kabbalistic tree.
This wraps up the extraneous content of the book. I wonder how they can make a mass market version of this, because there are 1000 pages in total and lots of text on a single page. It will probably need a 1300 pages book in the smaller format.
Anyway the book is so pretty that I had a problem soiling it. I treat my books well, my read copies are almost pristine but I don’t refrain to write all over the page with a pencil. I keep notes and such. This book makes a so nice package that I had to put more determination than usual to decide to write over it and underline stuff.
It is still a book, so all this stuff is completely superfluous, but it’s undeniable that it immensely improved the first impression. Publishers should probably pay attention because if done well this could “sell” the book to those who are doubtful and undecided.
The text: I already had a couple of pages online so I knew about certain things that I could find annoying. Namely the compounded and capitalized words. I had to underline them. In the first 6 pages we have: thunderclast, Surgebinders, Dustbringers, the Desolation, Shardblades, Oathpact, Radiants, Truthless, Shin, Parshendi, parshmen, musicspren, Stormlight, Alethi, flamespren, Shardbearer. All of these used without much context, so a reader is required to simply file them in memory as placeholders. Yet, other things come out quite easily. For example I was able to spot already a link between the prelude and the prologue despite it’s said 4500 years passed between them. The names of the characters of the prelude return as statues of the Ten Heralds. Not exactly requiring brilliant intuition since Kalak, Jezirien and Talenel become Kelek, Jezerezeh and Talenelat. But the point is that even while setting things on the stage at large, we already have manageable elements after an handful of pages, and you can start speculating possible relationships between the two moments and what they represent in the large scheme of things. So despite the huge setting is only starting to be laid out, the reader is already taken in and involved.
The impression I have, as a whole, is that Sanderson is chasing THE childhood dream. He had been a fan of the genre for a long time, and specifically with this series he wants to embrace just everything that he ever liked. Taking the chapter icons from the Wheel of Time, having a prologue, prelude, interludes, epilogue and endnote, a bunch of maps, the target of a 10 book series right from the start and already revealing that this series will plug into another, so even breaching that wall, writing a book close to 400k words and focusing a lot on worldbuilding to aim for immersion. I think he’s grabbing all these spurious elements and gathering them into a cohesive project. The aim is simply to place himself in the same position of his childhood myths. He wants that throne. His purpose is to write an accessible series that can reach a vast public, all-encompassing inside out. He wants to step in with something that is both “his” and yet genre defining. And in chasing that childhood dream he’s hoping to embody the childhood dreams of his readers. He dreams big in a way similar to the “nineteen” introduction on The Gunslinger by Stephen King.
Now it’s kind of obvious that all this is just “fluff”, as it is fluff all that extraneous material that comes with the book, but I think the important point is that this is obvious even to Sanderson. I think he is approaching that childhood dream knowing exactly how frivolous it is, and also knowing/believing he can complete it ideally with all the experience he achieved as an adult. And so he is “preserving” that dream by filling it with actual value. The child dream made ageless and for everyone. Not childish anymore in the same way children don’t look at their own dreams as a limited thing.
Before reading those 8 pages I had many doubts. I’ve never read anything he wrote so the fluff was all that was evident. The profusion of compounded words and a kind of infodump-y prose didn’t exactly dispel those doubts, but eight pages were enough to make me curious and more positive. He seems to have things to say and has a way of presenting and dress them that is interesting. So one could as well take this kind of structure and reverse it: IN SPITE of all the fluff that may indicate something exclusively targeted at hardcore fans and RPG players, there may be a cool book hidden inside. 1000 pages that are worth reading and that make a good journey instead of just a commercial grab of a genre.
A reminder to not judge a book by its cover. Even when it’s so pretty and colorful.
Steven Erikson on the Malazan series
Another wonderful gift from Steven Erikson. He wrote some comments for Tor ongoing reread about why new readers struggle reading his books, his style of writing, how to approach the series and some specific aspects of Gardens of the Moon.
I think there’s a rule that is true for all books and writers: we can only hope to understand and appreciate a fraction of what is offered. This is an even bigger problem with Erikson because the text is dense and one doesn’t even expect that every word and every scene is so strongly charged of meaning and metaphorical intention. If there’s a description we approach it as a description, and most of the layers and delicate complexities are lost. If instead one wants to dig, soon he’d find himself swallowed whole. Erikson has the range of the greatest writers.
It takes some modesty to admit of not having fully understood a book. It also takes a different point of view to realize we haven’t fully understood one. If we see nothing we are sure that there is nothing. But the truth, and it’s a truth valid for all writers, is that we may be closer or far, but we always understand a fraction. Bigger or smaller, still a fraction.
Two times I reread that book, so much I’ve treasured, and I feel like I could still only glide on the surface.
Hello all,
The great thing about having a cold is the privilege of sitting round for days doing nothing and not feeling guilty about it. Having read through the chapter commentary from the beginning, I’d like to take you all back more than a few pages, and talk about why these novels seem to thrive in the context of re-reads, and why first-time readers are often left feeling bewildered. I think the two are very much related.
It goes back to how I first started writing fiction. I was in a Master’s program in archaeology when I came second in a local short story contest in Winnipeg, a tale called ‘Wooden Trucks.’ On the weight of this one venture into writing I applied to attend a creative writing program at the University of Victoria. I recall being in a sweaty phone box in Belize, on the phone with my mother back in Winnipeg, as she opened the envelope telling me I’d got in. From that moment onward, my entire world changed.
The writing program at Uvic at that time was at its zenith. When I showed up it was as a wide-eyed neophyte with a secret love of genre fiction (one keeps these things secret if one wants to be taken seriously). What I learned, almost from day one, was that I knew nothing about anything; that my writing to that point had only ‘worked’ because I was instinctively consistent, with emphasis on the word ‘instinctively.’
Uvic taught me the craft of writing; it taught me to be mindful. The key though is this: it made me a short-story writer. Short stories are a particular beasts. In them, not a single word is superfluous. Everything carries extra weight, or at least that’s how I saw it.
Track forward a few years and scores of short stories later, and I begin writing novels, only to discover that my ‘muscle memory’ is now absolute — the obsessive adherence to multifunctional, multilayered writing (line by line, word by word) is not something I can relax — when novel writing in fact demands just that: an ease with wandering, with transitive passages, with a gentler hand taking hold of the reader, etc. Instead, novel-writing for me is the building of ever more elaborate structures, designed to carry ever more weight.
A long ramble to get to this: on one level details in making a setting carry the more obvious virtues — placing the characters somewhere, giving them things with which they can interact; in creating an atmosphere and a tone; and in painting a picture for the reader’s imagination. But other levels are possible. Setting as ‘animated environment’ can feed your sense of the characters in it; can foreshadow elements of plot; can reveal theme.
Take some opening scenes in Gardens as examples, and see how they relate to subsequent scenes for those select characters. Whiskeyjack and Fiddler on Mock’s Hold: high above a burning city, in a place of power. There’s smoke and the smell of carnage — they are above it but only moments from descending into it. But we don’t see that bit. They are on stonework, but it’s cracked, and their backs are to the sea. All of these details shapes the reader’s sense of them to some extent. When next we see them, they are on the ground, far away from Malaz City, surrounded in destruction and desolation. It’s a different place, but their descent began in the prologue, if you see what I mean. And even then, they were only a short time earlier under the ground itself.
If we look to Kruppe, things get a little more complicated. Kruppe and his city are the same things; just as his language and attitude (and mystery) reflect the exotic, byzantine confusion of Darujhistan, so too his half-mocking smile and spark in the eye invite you into the labyrinthine cityscape (and the literally over-the-top assassin/Crokus chase). Kruppe is both flashy but on close examination somewhat scuffed, stained. He has a cherubic face, but plenty hides behind that. And so on. His voice is the city’s voice, and it begins in a dream, as all great cities do.
Where is all this going? It goes here. Three storm clouds converging over Lake Azure, into which Whiskeyjack and co. are headed. A reader comments that I’m too smart to now say that there was deliberate portent in the detail of three clouds warring over the lake. Hmm. It’s been too many years since that for me to be more specific than this: I could have written ‘there was a storm over the lake,’ and left it at that. The foreshadow is obvious enough. But, if I’d written that description, I would have immediately seen the foreshadowing element — it’s almost too cinematic and verges on cliche. I could then have changed it to two storm clouds, but then, that wouldn’t have made sense; or rather, it would have been suggestive but inaccurately so. There are three forces converging on the city. Two storm clouds would have been lazy and misleading; careless.
Of course there are three storm-clouds. Of course this detail is relevant. It’s how short stories work.
Uh oh. This ain’t a short story though, is it? And therein lies the problem. I know what I’m up to; I know how I think and how I write. And to make matters worse, everything I put into a narrative is saying (pleading, begging) ‘you can trust me, honest.’ But I’m not taking the reader by the hand. I’ve invited them into a place, left them standing, looking round, wandering a bit but not far, not far at all. And every now and then I tap a shoulder, point, nod to over there, or here. And that’s it.
Re-readers will nod and smile. First-timers will blink, bewildered — and will decide to either trust me or not. I really want them to trust me, but I don’t know how to manage that… beyond making sure that everything fits, that everything has meaning.
A virtue or a flaw in my writing? Maybe both. You see, I already know that world, but the only details I show you are the important ones. There’s no filler. And that’s not fair.
And the structure is such a crazed, manic machine, an engineer’s nightmare, a spider’s acid trip, it’s really no wonder that readers will doubt, and on occasion give up on the effort, on the trust I so desperately ask for.
So, to all you new readers on this, I am ever amazed and slightly astonished to find you staying with me. I tell myself that what is happening is a kind of education process: read me this way, it’s the only way. Pay attention! You will be tested on all of this, I guarantee it. Stay with me and in turn I will promise you that it will be a blast.
And even better, then you’ll have all those re-reads, when things will really get wild.
Cheers for now
Steve
The Red Tree – Caitlín R. Kiernan (revised version)
Another attempt at polishing the review I’ve written. I usually adjust a few things after I post one but in this case I was less satisfied than usual because I gave too much importance to certain aspects and almost ignored others that I think are more important. The biggest problem was that I wrote my comments just an hour after finishing the book and I started to understand the book better while writing those comments, which caused them to be even more rambling than usual. So I’ll do some cut & paste and restructuring.
The framework first. “The Red Tree” is a supernatural, horror, psychological journey that borrows heavily from the long and solid tradition in the respective genres and whose best parallel in themes, atmosphere and development is Lovecraft. It is not conceived or delivered as an homage or imitation, it’s not a book existing in a “shadow” of something else, nor it is one that uses conventions to break out of their prison and open on a new, “modern” world. What it achieves is about recovering the deeper and most powerful elements of that tradition and reveal that they are not dusty, opaque and antique, but still alive today, relatively uncompromised. The book is structured in a way similar to Danielewski’s House of Leaves, with nested texts, stories within stories, and dreams that leak into reality. So it’s up to the reader to take an active role and second-guess and interpret/rebuild what is going on. The basic form is the diary so everything comes through an unreliable narrator and a fragmented narrative that can leave gaps of days and then only re-interpret and fictionalize what happened. Without another authoritative point of view the reader can only cling to the voice of the diary, trust it, and go through the most unnerving parts as in a first-person narration, making it quite effective. All this is at the same time simplified and complicated by a strong meta-narrative. If one gives a look online (and yes, you’re supposed to, I’ll explain why) would discover that Caitlín R. Kiernan has more than a few analogies with Sarah Crowe, the fictional writer of the book. Both are lesbian writers who had to deal with the death of their partner, both suffer from epileptic attacks that add another dimension of precariousness to the story. I don’t want to delve further because I feel like invading a personal space and the boundary between reality and fiction is best left blurred. Yet I think a reader should be aware of this layer as it offers a way to better understand the implications and the origin of the book. No book prescinds from its writer, and here this fact is particularly important.
The semi-autobiographical story is about this alter-ego fictional writer, Sarah Crowe, who is fleeing from her former life in Atlanta to rent an house in the countryside of Rhode Island. Without the motivation or the focus to start writing a long postponed novel, she begins instead keeping a diary mostly to describe some weird, unpleasant dreams that are haunting her. After exploring the basement of the house she discovers an incomplete manuscript next to an old typewriter. The manuscript is written by “Dr. Charles Harvey”, a name she’s never heard, so she “googles” it and finds out it belongs to a professor who “was on an extended sabbatical from the university, supposedly writing a book on the evolution and propagation of fakelore”. A professor with “an interest in urban legends and occultism” who lived in that house for three years, and died in the property by hanging himself. The title of his manuscript and research is the same that is shared between these three layers, “THE RED TREE”. Title respectively of Kiernan’s book, of Sarah Crowe fictional diary, and of Harvey’s unfinished manuscript. Soon the bits of legends Sarah reads seep into her reality and slowly build an estrangement from the “real” world. This red tree being a huge oak tree not too far from the house, becoming Harvey’s former and Sarah’s current obsession. One doesn’t even have to speculate the woman will likely share the previous tenant’s fatal destiny as that is already spoiled right in the introduction of the book. It’s a descent into madness when the solid reality under one’s feet starts to crack and give way. The “abscess” that opens and swallows, and that one’s too frightened to look into.
The ideal spook story would then end with a plausible rationalization that explains everything but with the supernatural element still very possible and not completely fended off. The reader left wondering if it was all true or not, and so the resulting haunting ambiguity. All this stays true to this book. While I was reading I kept waiting for some reversal of canons that would bring novelty and would justify the great praises the book received, but that didn’t come. Or it didn’t come from the direction I was expecting it. The story stays well within the canons, it’s not a “modern” interpretation in its structure. It doesn’t drop some classic conceits: it appropriates the canons. And that is where it hits. It’s about looking straight into the darkness and understanding it. The horrors of the book are always perceived and off the page, just out of the corner of the eye, never completely undeniable. The idea of movement, of sounds, of impossible perspectives. As a teenager I fed so much on the horror genre that nowadays it hardly has anything to offer. The “psychological” horror is a concept that I know quite well but it is how it is used to determine its power. Whether or not the “roots” feed on something true or just a weak conceit. The strength of this book is about knowing those roots and, instead of obfuscating, reveal the original darkness that can’t be defeated by modernity. That it’s still not even notched today. Whether it’s written by Lovecraft of Kiernan, the source is the same and ageless.
I try to avoid spoilers and I’ll say that by the end of the book I was busy trying to put together the pieces of the puzzles. Turning the last page doesn’t mean closing the lid. The book won’t be done with you and will continue to haunt. You’ll have to deal with contrasting interpretations and contradictions, with pieces that don’t fit or that you can’t place. Maybe, if you like me have a necessity to strictly define a space, feel frustration because the story defies control and because rationalization is here antidote to comprehension, as it would be in a dream. The book requires and forces a certain readjustment to be understood. But it is important to say that these details of the plot are just a surface. The desire to pin down even the smallest thing. The overall purpose, I think, would be clear. The real explanation is one that contains the different ones within, because at the core there’s the human soul, and the darkness within. What one does or doesn’t make of it. What you can’t push down and deny or forget.
Sarah’s isn’t alone in this journey, and of this I was thankful since it would have risked of making the story too oppressive and hostile. The wonderful strength of the writing is to be appreciated the most in the description of human relationships, and all the meaningful complexities that come out of them. Constance, a character sharing certain sensibilities with Sarah while also being almost her opposite, will soon join her in the house and the relationship building between them is maybe the best aspect of the book. A relationship devoid of idealization as Sarah’s character is cynic and caustic, often her attempts to reach Constance leading to both of them getting hurt and further apart in spite of necessity. Sarah and Constance won me before everything else and I was wondering how the book would proceed if I continued to be so weirdly biased toward the mundane while having very little interest for the supernatural aspect. I think that this effect was intended because it’s from those relationships that the meaningfulness of the story is entirely derived. Consequences. On the foreground stay these characters, their relationship, their truth. There’s some sex, written well for once, not too graphic and yet not embellished or mystified as it always happens. It should be better to say that there’s honesty, and that sex is part of that honesty, and, being that, it becomes extremely important. The language is modern and tight, the voice surprisingly authentic. There’s no use of classical language or rhetoric or fancy flourishes. It doesn’t read like a dusty old tome. This even affects the plot, while Sarah can be seen as the typical solitary character stranded in a mysterious house, she still has internet, looks up things she needs, goes back to the town and library various times, receives calls from her editor who asks if she’s well and is progressing with her book, travels on a car for a couple of days with Constance. There are no artificial boundaries to contain Sarah’s story, if not those entirely made by herself. I even interpreted this “freedom” of breaking through certain rules as a hint to the reader: explore, look things up online if you feel like missing something. The book can be as well enhanced by what’s outside. Do not worry to step out of the page. The darkness will be kind enough to follow you.
The supernatural aspect comes up with more strength toward the end of the book, obviously, but it does so in an unexpected way. It’s the mundane to become horror, and it’s one own feelings to open on the pit no one dares look into. The darkness is the human being. Or, to quote Bakker, the darkness comes AFTER:
It’s only after that we understand what has come before, then we understand nothing. Thus we shall define the soul as follows: that which precedes everything.
Superstition. Everywhere and in everything, Leweth had confused that which came after with that which came before, confused the effect for the cause. Men came after, so he placed them before and called them “gods” or “demons.” Words came after, so he placed them before and called them “scriptures” or “incantations.” Confined to the aftermath of events and blind to the causes that preceded him, he merely fastened upon the ruin itself, men and the acts of men, as the model of what came before.
But there’s obviously some ambiguity, embraced by alternative interpretations and whatever you decide it to be. The darkness comes “after”, produced and shaped by men. Belonging to them. As well its opposite, the darkness comes “before”, something inhuman, eternal, absolute. Universal. Ageless. Meaning that Sarah’s hallucinations were real and used her as a vehicle. But at this point the journey has already become so personal for the reader that even the last answer becomes entirely personal. The descent into madness is proportional to clarity and self-awareness. That’s another unconventional and unexpected aspect of the book. The “unreliable narrator” is a device presented in a self-aware way, used to give the text that ambiguity that keeps the disparate interpretations plausible at the same time. But toward the end this unreliable narrator becomes the only authoritative guide. One assumes that madness corresponds to a loss of contact with truth, but here the whole meta-narrative becomes clear in the mind of the character and she even seems to mock herself for it, and maybe it’s this to provide a way to escape madness by sacrificing an envelope to it.
It’s quite an awesome book that should be read even outside its genre. I enjoyed the characters and the style of writing so much that I would have loved it with or without the supernatural aspects. I love how painfully truthfully it is written. A kind of desperation that destroys any attempt for embellishment or rhetoric. Even WITHIN fiction:
I am usually at my most brutally forthright when making shit up. That’s the paradox of me. And having lied, it doesn’t mean that I was necessarily dishonest.
A book whose stronger aspect is, paradoxically, the demystification. And, maybe, literature as a form of therapy. One of the most emotionally involving and authentic novels I’ve read.
The Red Tree – Caitlín R. Kiernan
(the cover shown here IS NOT representative of content. Buy the book with your eyes closed, if you have to)
I don’t know what to write here. I was hoping the last 120 pages of the book would offer me a better direction for my comments but I’m even more troubled now that I finished the book. I also read a few things online about some suspects I had and, finding them true, I blame myself for having doubted of their relevance. So I have this whole new point of view and interpretation that should have been there from the beginning.
Let’s put down the framework first. “The Red Tree” is a kind of supernatural, horror, psychological journey that borrows heavily from the long and solid tradition and that recovers and updates what made Lovecraft “work”. Not an homage or imitation, but the revelation that what built those genres is still well alive and relatively uncompromised. It’s the first book I read of Caitlín R. Kiernan but I soon discovered I had also read some comics written by her so many years ago that I don’t remember anymore anything specific about them (The Dreaming). The book is structured in a way somewhat similar to Danielewski’s House of Leaves, probably far less convoluted and pretentious, but the aspect I think is more relevant is the game of mirrors. Trivializing a lot: a lesbian writer writes about a lesbian writer who writes a diary about herself. (and I should mention that I have a particular love for meta-narratives) Then at some point the mirror shatters and we have her discovering a short story about herself that she doesn’t remember to have written at all. As well more mirrors of herself and her dead lover coming from the past, and maybe the future.
But that’s misleading as the story is the one of this alter-ego fictional writer, Sarah Crowe, who flees from her former life and rents an house in the countryside. She begins to write her diary when she discovers in the basement of the big house the incomplete draft of a research written by the previous tenant (now dead), about a nearby oak on which converged a number of legends. The framework and execution, at this level, is made of the solid tradition I mentioned above. Soon the bits of legends Sarah reads seep into her reality and slowly build an estrangement from the “real” world. The researcher’s obsession becomes the Sarah’s own, and one doesn’t even have to speculate the woman will share the previous tenant’s fatal destiny as that is already spoiled right in the introduction. It’s a descent into madness when the solid reality under one’s feet starts to crack and give way. The “abscess” that opens and swallows, and that one’s too frightened to look into. The ideal spook story would then end with a plausible rationalization that explains everything, but with the supernatural element still very possible and not completely fended off, and the reader left wondering if it was all true or not, and so the resulting haunting ambiguity.
All this stays true to this book. While I was reading I kept waiting for some reversal of canons that would bring novelty and would justify the great praises the book received, but that didn’t come. It didn’t come from the way I was expecting it. The story stays well within the canons, it’s not a “modern” interpretation. It doesn’t drop some classic conceits: it appropriates the canons. And that is where it hits, but also the part that gave me some problems and so I’m not too confident to wrap up and be done with it. The problem being that I’m not sure I have interpreted it in the right way, or in a way that can be reasonably considered complete or accurate. Too many aspects that I can’t place correctly in the frame, and also the feeling I don’t have any hope to eventually figure it out. A bit frustrating.
The whole context is of the kind that puts me off balance. I prefer much more to have things stated bluntly, so that I can get to the nuanced aspects once I get the perimeter well defined. While I have a really hard time to start from the nuances and relate to a perimeter in-the-making that is never quite set and solid. You know, punching holes into certainty. Rationalization as the antidote to comprehension. These habits and mindsets of mine don’t really help here. Now excuse me the following utterly sexist and horrid sweeping generalization. It’s like I’m gaping into the mind of a woman, feeling slightly intrigued, slightly amused, then set the thing down and walk away shaking my head, thinking: “What a fucking mess”. But then I don’t think I’m a sexist and so I come away just feeling I’m missing a whole lot and don’t have what it takes to figure it out.
I should say that these “problems” are entirely my own and that I do not recognize in the novel itself. I just have to deal with writing an incomplete “review” and the feeling I can’t leave the thing behind in a satisfying way. Yet do not worry, because even if you share my own shortcomings there’s still plenty to appreciate. The book is really well written and gripping, a personal journey you will remember, and I think that even if I wasn’t able to formulate a final explanation (or one that isn’t so simplistic that I dismissed it right away), I was still able to grasp a core of meaning. The same core of meaning that builds the “worth” of this book.
The only beacon I had is self-fashioned and about the whole argument of “truthfulness” in literature that i discussed in the past. For most of the book I was trying to “get” it, but already from the first pages I noticed and appreciated the style of writing. I said the book stays well within the canons, but this doesn’t apply to the writing style. There’s no use of classical language or rhetoric or fancy flourishes. It doesn’t read like a dusty old tome. The language is modern and tight, the voice surprisingly authentic. It’s the writing to surface and shine instead of the story, and I was captured by the mundane long before I started developing interest in the supernatural aspects. Sarah’s character won me before everything else and I was wondering how the book would proceed if I continued to be so weirdly biased toward the mundane. I thought it was my own problem since as a teenager I fed so much on the horror genre that nowadays it hardly has anything to offer, but now I think that this effect was somewhat intended. The supernatural aspect comes up with more strength toward the end of the book, obviously, but it does so in an unexpected way. It’s the mundane to become horror, and it’s one own feelings to open on the pit no one dares look into. The darkness is the human being. Or, to quote Bakker, the darkness comes before, and AFTER:
It’s only after that we understand what has come before, then we understand nothing. Thus we shall define the soul as follows: that which precedes everything.
Superstition. Everywhere and in everything, Leweth had confused that which came after with that which came before, confused the effect for the cause. Men came after, so he placed them before and called them “gods” or “demons.” Words came after, so he placed them before and called them “scriptures” or “incantations.” Confined to the aftermath of events and blind to the causes that preceded him, he merely fastened upon the ruin itself, men and the acts of men, as the model of what came before.
I still clearly haven’t reconciled with this, as I am sure that the book reinforces this idea that the darkness comes after (so a man or woman create and shape it), as well its opposite, that the darkness comes before and that what was discovered was indeed out of time and true. Inhuman, absolute. That those hallucinations were real. And I’m even more fucked if I think my whole interpretation (the darkness that comes after) is only due to me reading Bakker, and so completely uprooted from what “The Red Tree” wanted to show. What a mess, indeed. A few hours ago on twitter I sent a comment to Caitlín Kiernan since she tweeted she didn’t want her works to be classified as “urban fantasy” so I suggested Mark Charan Newton fancy definition of “Rural Fantasy”. She replied directly and seriously to what was intended as just a transitory joke, but after finishing the book this offered, and confirmed, the different perspective. She wants it called “dark fantasy”. And that darkness is maybe entirely within, and not outside.
In any case, there are elements of the plot I can’t place at all (like the seven paintings and corresponding messages, I couldn’t make anything out of them) and so the proof that even if I may have gotten something framed correctly the whole picture is still far away…
I should also mention that the descent into madness is also proportional to clarity and self-awareness. That’s maybe the most unconventional and unexpected aspect of the book. The “unreliable narrator” is a device presented in a self-aware way, used to give the text that ambiguity that keeps the disparate interpretations plausible at the same time. But toward the end this unreliable narrator becomes the only authoritative guide. One assumes that madness corresponds to a loss of contact with truth, but here the whole meta-narrative becomes clear in the mind of the character and she even seems to mock herself for it, and maybe it’s this to provide a way to escape madness by sacrificing an envelope to it.
I consider it quite an awesome book. In spite of these themes surfacing, I still personally enjoyed the characters so much that I would have loved it even if it removed all the supernatural parts and layers. I mean, I was loving that character with or without the darker side exposed. I was loving the unforgiving way Sarah saw herself, the nihilistic aspects. Her relationship and how painfully truthfully it is written. A kind of desperation that destroys any attempt for embellishment or rhetoric. Even WITHIN fiction:
I am usually at my most brutally forthright when making shit up. That’s the paradox of me. And having lied, it doesn’t mean that I was necessarily dishonest.
A book whose stronger aspect is, paradoxically, the demystification. And, maybe, literature as a form of therapy. One of the most emotionally involving and authentic novels I’ve read.
Prince of Nothing maps
I hunted around for good copies of the maps printed in the “Prince of Nothing” trilogy, same as I did for Malazan.
The US edition of the book is rather badly done, the map is printed on two pages and the central part is missing. So here are the two maps in the best resolution I could find. These are better even than the official ones Bakker provided on his site (which I think is now offline).
Literature as a consolatory device
I took the occasion of a forum discussion to delve in some ideas I was brooding for some time. It’s again the ideal link between all the books I’ve read lately, with “Infinite Jest” as the central pillar.
The discussion about characters is the excuse to examine literature and its position in the grand scheme of things.
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the soldiers are just random mouthpieces for the author, who’ll switch attitude (I cannot speak of personalities: they don’t actually have personalities) with every scene. It’s not really hard to be more powerful than that :)
Take Gardens of the Moon. On my first read I could hardly match a Bridgeburner name with the corresponding character, if I did the description of the personality of that character would still be rather limited.
I’m following Tor re-read of the same book now. With the struggle to memorize names and context out of the way I’m discovering a whole new layer in characterization that was almost entirely missing on my first read. Dialogue that was before just between anonymous masks is now consistent with the character and unexpectedly rich in nuances. I feel like I’m reading a wholly different book. Not just consistent but filled to the brim with cross-references that required the insight I didn’t have before. Things to glide over or just producing a big question mark to then move on with the reading. The last two pages I’ve read about Rallick Nom gave an introspection and depth to the character that I didn’t remember was there, written really well. The tension of Kalam and Quick Ben when they are found by Sorry, and the realization that what they thought was correct, and that it meant they would be dead. Or when they leave for their mission, knowingly reciting a number of delusions as to exorcise them. Then the scene with Whiskeyjack waiting for them with the rest of the squad, a scene where every line adds something to the characterization and true friendship of the whole squad, the dialogue between them, and then the arrival of Quick Ben who cringes in front of WJ, and WJ losing his patience. An undeniable feel that these characters have been together for a really long time, and not just since the beginning of the written page. Characters that come out of the page, with natural dialogue between them and drawn from they are, and not directed to the reader.
That scene is as great as any Black Company scene written by Glen Cook, and it’s from a book that is far from the best Erikson delivered when it comes to characterization.
The confusion and inconsistency isn’t of the characters, it is of the reader. The books pretend a reader to memorize and familiarize way more than it is possible, way more than what it is reasonable to ask, and that’s why re-reads are so revelatory in this series about both characters and plot. The confusion of the reader is undeniable because the series represents the far opposite of “accessibility”. It’s actually a big flaw the series has. It is inimical, too dense and unwieldy. But the characterization is there in that ink and it is consistent. It requires more patience than usual because you only get quick glimpses at a great number of characters, and they only become “real” characters with an adequate amount of pages and time, time that is definitely not easily available among readers who are already having an hard time getting through a so dense book and digesting Erikson parsimonious writing style.
Erikson’s characterization can be compared to an impressionist painter who only delicately dabs and sketches. It will take time to familiarize and recognize a character for what it actually is, and to appreciate the panting that at a first glance appeared as just a confusion of random colors. The forms are in the painting, but it takes time to make the eye used to them and recognize them for their value.
This opposed to a traditional type of characterization (neither better nor worse, just different) where you stay in the mind of a character for the long haul. Full-on introspection that begins giving you the context of where and how that person is living, what he feels, what he loves, his fears, his desires. A thoroughly rationalized character. That makes a reader familiarize and understand it. Identify himself and so “caring” for the personal story and feel emotional attachment and empathy.
The heritage of “modern” fantasy was not in delivering characters that are “gray”. But in forcing the reader into their PoV. We often have warring factions, but we zoom into both of them, taking both sides. All of the recent fantasy with gray characters could be turned into solid black and white by just removing the corresponding PoVs. Without motivations and alternative observation points, every story becomes polarized.
The thing Erikson successfully or unsuccessfully tries to realize with his characterization is about starting to show that “stories” exist with the characters, but also in spite of them. The real world chews characters and spits them out, is disdainful of personal stories. A book can usually follow the life of a character through an ideal arc, whose premises define its conclusion. But that’s the nice trick and deceit that traditional literature does to the real world. The illusion that there is “sense” and “meaning”. Beginnings and ends. Justice. Retribution. Payoff. We create “meaning” out of a meaningless, unjust world. Lives are cut short and no one actually dies only once he solved his issues. Flaws, imperfection, lack of meaning and especially the lack of understanding of others are the things that are always true. Humanity is about the damnation of the deceit of seeing “meaning” where there is none. It’s a tragedy, and the Malazan series is written as a tragedy. It’s not “fantasy”, it’s a 1:1 copy of this world, a reflection on a only slightly misshapen mirror.
To grieve is a gift best shared. As a song is shared.
Deep in the caves, the drums beat. Glorious echo to the herds whose thundering hoofs celebrate what it is to be alive, to run as one, to roll in life’s rhythm. This is how, in the cadence of our voice, we serve nature’s greatest need.
Facing nature, we are the balance.
Ever the balance to chaos.
“in the cadence of our voice” means a written page. Language. Or what only separates humanity from the rest of life forms. (I am a man. I stand apart from these things.) Nature is the chaos from where we desperately scrape meaning.
With that lacerating truth in mind, Erikson realizes characters whose story (and characterization) is shred and tattered. Suspicion and opaqueness are traits that are true in our world. And if a foe suddenly turns into a possible ally it’s not “inconsistency”, it’s understanding. Full-on introspection doesn’t work like that even for ourselves. (Foster Wallace attempts “true” full-on introspection with the result that it generates a tremendous annihilating whirlpool that either sucks you in or hurls you away) We don’t have the privilege of a personal writer who overlooks what we do every day and inscribes meaning and finality into our lives. We are opaque and uncertain even to ourselves, even less to one that merely observes. Meaning is not “found” outside, it is created within. The story of the Malazan series is unmindful of characters, it’s up to the characters to find their path, only to see it end abruptly. And up to the reader to decide what to do with them.
The only journey that lay ahead of him was a short one, and he must walk it alone.
He was blind, but in this no more blind than anyone else. Death’s precipice, whether first
glimpsed from afar or discovered with the next step, was ever a surprise. A promise of
the sudden cessation of questions, yet there were no answers waiting beyond. Cessation
would have to be enough. And so it must be for every mortal. Even as we hunger for
resolution. Or, even more delusional: redemption.Now, after all this time, he was able to realize that every path eventually, inevitably
dwindled into a single line of footsteps. There, leading to the very edge. Then… gone.
And so, he faced only what every mortal faced. The solitude of death, and oblivion’s final
gift that was indifference.
The Malazan series is not consolatory, it is about compassion and reconciliation.
The beauty that stilled
I couldn’t wait anymore to start reading R. Scott Bakker so I’ve taken The Darkness That Comes Before from the shelf even if I still have to finish The Red Tree, and before Sanderson’s Way of Kings flies over here. After being engaged deeply with Erikson, Bakker’s themes appear as a natural extension of what I’ve learned to appreciate. There’s some sort of dialogue between these books and I’m intrigued by what will come out.
What comes before determines what comes after. Dûnyain monks spent their lives immersed in the study of this principle, illuminating the intangible mesh of cause and effect that determined every happenstance, and minimizing all that was wild and unpredictable. Because of this, events always unfolded with granitic certainty in Ishuäl. More often than not, one knew the skittering course a leaf would take through the terrace groves. More often than not, one knew what another would say before he spoke. To grasp what came before was to know what would come after. And to know what would come after was the beauty that stilled, the hallowed communion of intellect and circumstance – the gift of the Logos.
See how this excerpt, from the prologue of Bakker’s book, will tie nicely with my next post.