The Hundred Thousand Kingdoms begins with an interesting combination of character and setting. Yeine Darr is the hereditary chief of a small, unimportant kingdom who is summoned to the court of the Arameri, the hegemonic rulers of the world. For many centuries the Arameri have lived decadently in their palatial tower of Sky, ruthlessly destroying anyone who goes against their “suggestions” but otherwise enforcing a general peace. Yeine’s mother was heir to the Arameri throne but abandoned her birthright to marry Yeine’s father. Both of Yeine’s parents died in her childhood, but unexpectedly Yeine’s status as a potential heir to the throne is reinstated, putting her in deadly competition with two of her cousins. She has only a few weeks to learn to navigate the traitorous court politics of Sky, find out the real reason her mother left, and understand why Yeine has been recalled. But complicating all this are the captive gods.

The reason the Arameri have dominated the world for millennia is their control of the Enefadah, four gods who were on the wrong end of an ancient power struggle in the pantheon and sentenced by the triumphant Itempas, god of order and daytime, with an unbreakable compulsion to obey any order given to them by the Arameri. The Enefadah are a compelling creation: powerful enough to destroy the world but bound to obey mortals, they hate their imprisonment and especially despise their Arameri jailers. If an Arameri ever gives them a command vague enough they can interpret it as something the Arameri doesn’t want (especially the Arameri’s painful death) they seize the opportunity, making them a double-edged weapon.

Yeine ends up falling in love with one of these captive gods, Nahadoth. As the cthonic god of darkness and along with Itempas one of the three supreme gods, Nahadoth falls pretty cleanly into the romantic stereotype of the older, theoretically more powerful, alluringly dangerous, but in important ways helpless male. I can’t say I read a lot of romantic fiction but the use of this trope in Twilight has made it feel overused even to me. At any rate, you can take that or leave it, but apart from that emotional story there’s plenty more interesting material in The Hundred Thousand Kingdoms. Yeine spends most of her time trying to figure out the truth behind the story’s four formative events: the war in heaven that resulted in Nahadoth and the other Enafadah being imprisoned, the circumstances surrounding her mother’s departure from the Arameri before Yeine was born, the eventual deaths of Yeine’s parents, and finally the nature of the ceremony by which power will soon be transferred to whoever is designated the heir. The answers to these questions more than pay off the setup, making what could have been a problematic ending still feel quite satisfying. Yeine ends up being a good deal more passive than I prefer protagonists to be and the ending relies a little too much on previously unmentioned metaphysics, but all in all The Hundred Thousand Kingdoms is a very strong novel that I wouldn’t hesitate to recommend.

What I don’t recommend is doing what I did and reading the entire trilogy all at once. It’s not that the two books that follow are bad. I’ve heard some people say the second book, The Broken Kingdoms, is even better than the first. Personally I would put it a notch or two below, and the third book, The Kingdom of Gods, is somewhat less effective than the second. But I think I would have liked both better if I’d read them as they came out, that is to say, with months separating the experience of each book, because Jemisin has done something a little unusual with this trilogy. Although each story advances the setting both chronologically and conceptually, all three are variations on the same theme in an unusually thorough sense. Each novel is centered around a mortal / god romance. In each case, the mortal is young while the god is many thousands of years old, but there’s something special about the mortal that draws the god in that is connected in some way with the mortal’s lineage. The god is always male, always very dangerous, always paradoxically vulnerable, always inhibited, and for most of each novel there is considerable question about how much he really feels for the mortal until the end, when of course love is fully affirmed. Although each book threatens its narrator with death in very different ways, all three resolve this side of the plot via metaphysical innovation.

I’ve had to describe the similarities carefully of course, because certainly there are differences. Yeine and the second book’s narrator, Oree Shoth, are very different people, and in the third book, the god is the narrator while the mortal side of the equation is two people, a twin brother and sister. It’s also the case that various problems that affect two of the books are not shared by a third. Where the first book has a strong intrigue plot with a number of well-drawn antagonists (and one, Scimina, who is not so well-drawn but at least acts out of a very understandable desire for power), the latter two each have cackling villains bent on destroying the world. In the second book, Oree Shoth spends a good deal of time with Shiny, but in the first and the third, love at almost the first sight sparks a romance that is portrayed as a profound relationship despite the lovers never spending very much time in each other’s company (understandable on the part of the young mortals but considerably less so for the immortals).

These similarities and near-similarities make each book of the trilogy feel very much like a variation on a single theme rather than independent stories, at least when read all at once the way I did. It’s a comprehensive elaboration on mortal-god relationships in the setting, I suppose, but I can’t help but feel this sum is rather less than the sum of its parts. One issue is that I became less interested in the gods and the metaphysics within which they operate the more I learned about them. As with most fantasy gods, these are portrayed as similar to humans in thoughts and emotions but possessing supernatural powers, but while we are told most people worship them, somehow this seemingly important element of religious life is never depicted. The three central gods of day, night, and twilight are associated with and responsible for natural phenomena like their polytheistic antecedents as well as limited in certain ways by a mysterious metadivine realm, but they are also half-heartedly said to be transcendent like a monotheist God, working together to create the entire universe, which here is depicted as the mind-bogglingly large universe of modern astronomy, not the cosy Earth-centered universe of the ancients. There are throwaway references to other stars and planets, but everything important in the emotional lives of the gods is centered around the human world, as if the entire rest of the universe is devoid of life or even interest. Below them, the countless lesser “godlings” have no connection whatsoever with the natural world but seem to be associated, at random, with various concepts. There’s a godling of wisdom, a godling of war, and so forth. Not only does their aspect drive their interest, but it provides them with antitheses that can harm or even kill them. This seems all right at first, like when the godling of obligation is weakened by even the suggestion that he would break his word, but it ends up feeling arbitrary, particularly with Sieh, the godling whose nature is explored the deepest. Sieh, we are told, is the godling of childhood, but this is interpreted rather more expansively than, say, the godling of hunger. Sieh prefers and even gains strength from acting like a child: playing silly games like tag and engaging in juvenile tricks. The problem is that not only is Sieh the oldest of the godlings, he often acts like it, discussing important issues with adult humans and other godlings. He also desires and frequently has sex. Yet in the third book it turns out the idea of being a father causes him pain. I suppose you or I could come up with a tortured explanation as to why this would be, but surely it makes just as much sense that he would have no interest in sex and want to avoid it?

These concerns weren’t an issue reading The Hundred Thousand Kingdoms, where I was pulled along by the fluid first-person narration, the fairly unique feel of the gods’ captivity, and the questions and revelations about the past. The Broken Kingdoms carried on those first two virtues, but in place of the first book’s revelations it featured a narrative where almost every reader spends almost the entire book knowing considerably more about what’s going on than any of the main characters. That’s not bad, I guess, but it’s definitely less satisfying. The Kingdom of Gods didn’t have anything to do with captivity, the narration was undermined by an unlikeable and, worse, unconvincing main character, and the increasingly unconvincing metaphysics of god(ling)hood were front and center. The trilogy’s name is a reference to the fact that the four mortal characters destinies are shaped by what they inherit from their parents, but as the titles of the two sequels suggest, as the trilogy proceeds the emphasis of the story is increasingly on the gods, culminating in a conclusion that relegates its mortal protagonists and their concerns to the sideline. For those readers who remain interested in the mechanics of godhood right up to the end, I think the conclusion might prove stirring, but to me it fell flat almost to the point of being actively depressing.

The grain of salt I’ll toss on to all this is that I think both of the latter books shared some virtues with the first book, particularly the quality of writing and the setting, that I took for granted having just read The Hundred Thousand Kingdoms. While I am somewhat lukewarm on the trilogy as a whole, I definitely recommend the first book. If you like it as much as I did (and most people seem to have liked it even more) then you’ll be reading the next book no matter what I say, but my advice is to consider reading a couple unrelated books in between.

It has been said that all epic fantasy can’t help but be in some sort of dialogue with Tolkien, but since the practice of making shallow copies of his work finally went out of style in the mid-1990s, it’s rare for a story to cleave as closely to Tolkien’s model as Jacqueline Carey’s two book series The Sundering does. The backstory is full of equivalences to The Silmarillion, with Shapers instead of Valar, Soumanie instead of silmarils, dragons instead of balrogs, ellyon instead of elves, and fjelltroll instead of orcs. The actual story told in the two novels is likewise similar to that of Lord of the Rings, with easily discerned analogues for Frodo, Gandalf, Aragorn, Elrond, Legolas, and so forth. That’s not to say the story is exactly the same. In this story, for example, the Gandalf-analogue recruits a fellowship in order to retrieve the Water of Life and use it to extinguish marrow-fire that protects Godslayer, the only weapon capable of harming Satoris. But as in Lord of the Rings, the fellowship is eventually broken, the Frodo and Sam analogues must journey on alone into the enemy’s land, and their surviving companions go on to take a hand in the general war.

Carey clearly expects her readers to have read at least Lord of the Rings, and the point of all these close correspondences is to subvert them. The story is mostly told from the point of view of Satoris’ followers, particularly the Ringwraith analogues Tanaros, Vorax, and Ushahin, though lesser members of Satoris’ army also get a fair amount of time. Even though the world has been told Satoris is the dark lord, the equivalent of Sauron and Morgoth, it turns out he’s…just misunderstood. He doesn’t want to enslave the world, he just wants to be left alone, but the Ellyon and humans are being manipulated by the Gandalf-analogue into starting a pointless war with him.

Well, is your mind blown? The answer to that question, I think, depends on how much fantasy published in the last twenty years you’ve read. There’s no question that Lord of the Rings involves lots of relatively unimportant people accepting without question a narrative given to them by powerful elites, then fighting, risking their lives, and sometimes dying to realize the ambitions of these elites. The relationship characters have to authority in Lord of the Rings should absolutely challenged, and The Sundering does so with gusto. My only question is whether, in light of everything else that’s been going on in the fantasy genre, this was really necessary. Lord of the Rings was published in 1955, and dozens if not hundreds of stories have since re-examined its assumptions. Just to mention a few examples, the Thomas Covenant novels went after the concept of the destined hero, Glen Cook’s Black Company series considered the moral complicity of those fighting on the side of evil, and many books, most recently those of Joe Abercrombie, have rejected the good/evil dichotomy entirely. But those examples I just mentioned position their stories much farther away from Tolkien’s work and do a much better job standing on their own while still making their points about the assumptions of epic fantasy.

That said, the two novels that make up The Sundering were published in 2004 and 2005, so we can guess they were probably written while the Lord of the Rings movies were coming out and Tolkien’s story was being brought to the vast cinematic audience, most of whom haven’t read and won’t ever read genre fantasy. I’m not sure how many of those people are likely to read The Sundering, but it’s also true that Jacqueline Carey’s popular Kushiel series has earned her a following that may read more from other sections of the fantasy genre. Your mileage may vary, but for me at least, just subverting Tolkien tropes isn’t enough to impress me any more.

Unfortunately, the extremely close relationship The Sundering has with Tolkien often works against it. Whenever The Sundering introduces characters, concepts, and places that have clear Tolkien equivalents, it’s hard to resist comparing Carey’s prose to that of Tolkien. People who find Tolkien long-winded and dull may not have a problem here, for Carey doesn’t share his fascination with landscapes and tends to focus much more on the interior feelings of characters (but then again, they may still, for Carey does follow Tolkien in employing an elevated and archaic grammar, and unlike Frodo and Sam her protagonists aren’t positioned to mediate between the reader and the secondary world). Whatever you think of his style, however, Tolkien loved the world he had created, and that came through in his writing. Carey has taken someone else’s setting and filed off the serial numbers, so it’s only natural she should be more interested in the points of divergence, but the result is that she tends to tell just enough about a setting or a minor character to allow the reader to figure out the Tolkien analogue, then she moves on. The result is a world that feels like a pale shadow of the Middle-earth it constantly evokes. It doesn’t help that shifting the perspective to the other side has relegated the many fleshed out characters of Lord of the Rings to bit player status, causing their characterization to inevitably suffer in comparison to the original.

The characters who get the most time are those who are most independent of Tolkien, namely the servants of Satoris and the vaguely Arwen-equivalent Cerelinde. If there’s a main character, it’s Tanaros, who while distantly connected to the Witch-King of Angmar has a much more fleshed out and interesting backstory. Centuries ago he was the childhood friend and chief lieutenant of the human king, but when he found out his beloved wife had slept with the king, he killed them both in a rage. Fleeing justice, he was granted immortality by Satoris in return for training the fjelltroll army and leading it into battle. More than even Satoris himself, Tanaros has a villainous past to go along with his reputation as an evil servant of the dark lord, but Carey paints him in sympathetic tones as a deeply conflicted person who still feels guilty about what he did, but who has learned to love Satoris and believe in his cause.

Tanaros and the others who fight for Satoris are well-drawn characters, but they are part of a story that becomes progressively less interesting. In Carey’s world, the “good guys” aren’t bad, per se, just manipulated and gullible, while the “bad guys” are flawed but honorable. Through the first book, Banewreaker, that and some fairly large plot departures from the Lord of the Rings template make for a reasonably good story. But as the story goes on, it tracks closer and closer with the standard epic fantasy plot. Having encouraging us to sympathize with the bad guys, she lets the reader feel their frustration as the protagonists see their various strategies to stop the ringbearer-analogue and disarm the prophecy all come to nothing. Much of the tragedy of the ending stems from its predictability, but the fact remains…the ending is extremely predictable. Toward the end of Godslayer, Satoris even announces he has essentially lost interest and takes steps to get the story over with as fast as possible. If even the leader of one side of an epic fantasy war can’t stay interested, it’s no surprise if some readers feel the same way.

This plodding predictability is built into the metaphysics that Carey has constructed to replace the dualism of Tolkien. Satoris is not the evil demon everyone thinks he is, but he’s not a saint either. He occasionally does genuinely evil things, usually because he’s been driven into a rage. It seems that Uru-Alat, the one God who created the world (or perhaps is the world) and birthed the seven Shapers, didn’t just create the universe, he created an overarching story and assigned roles in that story. Satoris feels he has been assigned the role of villain and forced to play that role against his wishes. This theme plays out in all the major characters of the book, who are forced by circumstances to take on the good or evil roles of the epic fantasy story regardless of their personal desires. This theme is, finally, something that strikes me as completely unique to The Sundering, but it means that the sort of surprising ending modern readers expect would undermine the nature of the world as it has been constructed. Worse, however, this whole “forced to be a villain” business seems to me like a more problematic world view than the one she’s attacking.

Lord of the Rings doesn’t have a whole lot to say about fate beyond some vague allusions to providence, but destiny is at the center of The Silmarillion. In its mythological opening section, The Silmarillion explains that the angelic servants of Eru, the one God, sang the world into existence according to Eru’s theme. This divine music doesn’t just create the world, it creates time, and contains the entire sweep of history and the lives of every person who ever lived. Melkor, the Satan-analogue (for The Silmarillion is built off Christianity almost to the same degree The Sundering is built off The Silmarillion) wants to sing music of his own creation, music that is in discord with Eru’s theme. In response Eru changes his theme so that it incorporates and builds off Melkor’s discord, and says that though Melkor meant to twist the music into something of his own control, he has merely been a tool by which Eru has enhanced the music and made it even greater than it would have been otherwise.

The point of this summary is that Tolkien was using his fantasy setting to construct an argument about the Problem of Evil. If a good God is supreme in the world, how can evil exist? Tolkien’s courageous answer, developed throughout The Silmarillion, is that the world is a better place with evil in it. This isn’t a review of The Silmarillion so I’ll leave for another day the question of how persuasive Tolkien is on this point, but what are we to make of Carey’s metaphysics? There’s no such thing as evil, she seems to say, just people whose circumstances have forced them to play antagonist to self-appointed good guys. In The Sundering, Uru-Alat seems to be like Eru in that he has laid out the story of history, but he didn’t get his characters quite right and has been forced to jam square pegs into round holes.

I have two major problems here. The first is that The Sundering seems to say there’s no such thing as evil. Personally, I think there are people, albeit not many, who can usefully be called evil. I suppose Hitler is the canonical example. I know some people reject this, and while I’m not convinced, I understand where they’re coming from. Maybe seemingly evil people are just warped by their circumstances. But the Problem of Evil isn’t just about human behavior, it’s about the world. What are we to make of natural disasters, disease, and all the other pointless suffering in the world? If there’s no God, that’s not an issue, but once you posit an Eru or an Uru-Alat they become responsible for these things. I suppose that Carey never says that Uru-Alat is good, but there are subtle aspects of the narrative that make Uru-Alat and his plan seem good in a way that Haomane and Satoris aren’t.

The other problem is Carey’s idea that her bad guys are forced into doing bad by their circumstances, and even by the expectations of those around them. This is a seductive idea and she does a good job encouraging the reader to sympathize when characters like Satoris and Tanaros do bad things after being painted into a corner. But at the end of the day, those things are still bad. Discovering the adultery between his wife and the king deeply angered Tanaros, for example, but that doesn’t excuse murdering them. For his part, Satoris frequently complains about how he never wanted a war, but that doesn’t stop him from fighting a long and bloody war when it is “forced” on him.

This issue is best demonstrated when the “good guys” gather armies and attack Lilias, a sorceress who uses a silmaril-equivalent to unnaturally lengthen her life and mind-control people into serving her. Carey puts all her considerable skill as an author into making Lilias sympathetic and succeeds. But Lilias, more than any other “evil” character in The Sundering, is actually, you know, evil. Like Satoris, she didn’t want a war and hoped to be left to her own devices, but her own devices consist of using magic to brainwash people into serving her. That’s it. That, and giving herself eternal youth and beauty, was all she ever did with her considerable magic power, though it had many other possible uses. The active evil of twisting the wills of other people and the passive evil of not using her power to better ends make her a genuine villain, but the worst comes when the armies of humans and ellyon come to end her reign and she sends her brainwashed servants to fight against overwhelming odds. At first, she thinks she can win thanks to an arrangement she has made with Satoris, and honestly tells her defenders that they only have to hold out for a few days to win. Soon, however, she learns that due to a catastrophe elsewhere, Satoris’ forces won’t be able to come to her aid, and the fight really is hopeless. Her response? She lies about the situation to those fighting for her and lets the pointless fight continue until just about everyone who served her is dead. She, of course, is captured alive.

Why, she is asked later by her captors, did she not surrender when she learned that Satoris could not save her? She had genuine affection for her servants, so why allow them to needlessly die? She doesn’t give a straight answer. Before the armies reach her, she rejects the idea of running away on the grounds that this is her home, and if she can’t continue living there the (horrifying) way she has been, she doesn’t want to continue living. But after the armies fight, it seems she allows the slaughter to continue just because she feels like she’s a victim of unprovoked aggression and she wants to hurt her attackers as much as possible. Lilias is so contemptible when the facts are dispassionately considered it is difficult to describe just how sympathetically the narrative actually views her. Although questions about her behavior are briefly raised, her status as a victim is never given the strong challenge it deserves.

What is Jacqueline Carey trying to say with characters like Lilias, Taranos, and Satoris? It’s not clear from the text, but my best guess is she’s saying that reasonable people sometimes do things they later realize were bad, but if they acknowledge their crime and submit to the justice of others, they are accepting guilt not just for their true crimes, but also for all the false allegations that have been slanderously applied to them. As bad as Lilias is, she’s not as evil as she is said to be, and with Tanaros and especially Satoris the discrepancy is even wider. Giving in to the “good guys” means accepting their false narrative. It also means implicitly endorsing them as good guys, but they aren’t perfect either, the argument seems to run. They’ve committed their own crimes, so not only would surrendering accept too much guilt, it would help them to whitewash their own actions.

I can accept that this sort of thinking exists in the real world, but the text seems to go farther and actually endorse it. The author, English majors will remind us, is different from the text, so perhaps Carey herself thinks otherwise. She might have been trying to get the reader to understand how evil people aren’t evil in their own minds, but if so, she leaves a lot of work for the reader to do. As far as the text is concerned, these characters really aren’t evil at all. They’ve done some bad things, but they feel guilty about them, so if anything that means they’re better people than those on the side of “good” who aren’t self-aware enough to realize they also have done some bad things in their day.

The determination of Lilias and later Satoris to fight on against overwhelming odds is another theme The Sundering has adapted from Tolkien and taken in problematic directions. In The Silmarillion, the Elves keep fighting against Morgoth even though they know they can’t win. Because Morgoth is a genuinely destructive force to which there can be no possible surrender, the Elves’ fight mirrors the real human struggle against death. We can’t actually defeat death, but there’s very good reasons not to surrender either. This idea is present in The Sundering but in a very strange form. Though they don’t realize it, the good guys in the story are serving the cause of death. Each Shaper has a “gift” they can give to the mortal races. Haomane’s, for example, was “thought”, given to humans and ellyon but not to fjelltrolls. Satoris’ gift was sexual pleasure and fertility. He gave his gift to humans, but Haomane didn’t allow him to give it to ellyon, and as a result humans reproduce and become ever more numerous while the ellyon diminish in numbers. To prevent the ellyon from being crowded out, Haomane demands that Satoris revoke his gift from humans. Satoris refuses, and this is the cause of the original falling out. After the sundering, Haomane’s Gandalf-analogue (not so subtly named Malthus) incites humans into massive wars against Satoris that seem genuinely intended to defeat him, but the carnage also pares back the excess human population. When another race, the Were, actually do surrender to Malthus, they are allowed to live but are forbidden to reproduce, apparently dooming them to extinction.

There is a case to be made, then, that the “bad guys” really are fighting against death in some way and that therefore they are correct to not surrender. But no one actually makes this case, not Satoris, Tanaros, or Lilias. Whenever the question of why keep fighting comes up, the answer always seems to be pride and spite. In any case, valorizing the fight against population control is an odd stance for a modern story to take. The real Malthus was wrong about his predictions of famine, but no one disagrees with his general observation that population can’t increase indefinitely. I say no one, but The Sundering seems to say that if Haomane had just allowed the ellyon to have Satoris’ gift, everything would have been fine. It also hints that the prophesied marriage of a human and ellyon will be a mechanism for finally allowing the ellyon access to Satoris’ power, and implies that this was probably Uru-Alat’s plan all along.

Once again, this all made more sense in Tolkien’s original. There, the conceit was that Middle-earth was in our past, and so we could take it for granted that nothing would halt the decline of the Elves, since there self-evidently aren’t many Elves, if any, left in our time. What the future holds for The Sundering‘s world is anyone’s guess. Malthusian collapse as ellyon and humans populations (or a single hybrid of both) grow without bound, or else the fantasy equivalent of demographic transition, I suppose.

I like thought-provoking stories even if I disagree with a position they seem to be arguing for, but I’m afraid I can’t recommend The Sundering. The story is too predictable, the world is too derivative, and the ideas those two weaknesses were intended to serve just aren’t coherent enough to justify them. I’m glad Carey took time away from her Kushiel books to try something different, but for me this one is in the category of interesting failure.

Unfortunately, on the most recent reread I liked it less. Oh, it’s a good book all right, but great? The writing seemed creaky in places, especially near the beginning, and the seams in the story were more obvious to me, giving the novel a texture like premodern writings assembled from divergent sources. Dianora’s story is a tragedy that owes a great deal to Hamlet (though it hides it well enough I didn’t notice until just now) whereas Devin and his happy-go-lucky musician revolutionaries are upbeat and optimistic despite dangerous setbacks and bloody battles. The Ember Nights and Castle Borso segments feel like they are from still a third and perhaps fourth source.

But while I don’t like Tigana as much as I used to, I find it more interesting than ever. It’s a useful book for thinking about the fantasy genre in general because it stands with one foot in the Tolkienian tradition and one foot in the modern world (and occupies a similar position in Kay’s career, between the Tolkien/Lewis derivative Finovar Tapestry and his almost completely mundane historical fantasies).

Prince Alessan certainly feels like an old-fashioned character. Much like Tolkien’s Aragorn, he’s a hero who risks his life for the common good. Not only is he intended to be a role model for readers, within the story he’s a role model for the regular-guy-turned-hero protagonist Devin. This is old-fashioned because in what I would call a modern fantasy novel, characters like this are not allowed to succeed. His closest analogue in A Song of Ice and Fire is Eddard Stark, whose sense of honor and even mercy lead to disaster both for him personally and his entire nation. In Joe Abercrombie’s First Law trilogy the equivalent character is the wizard Bayaz, for whom virtue is a cloak for his ruthlessly self-interested motives. In Tigana, no one comes out and says that Alessan is a good person because he’s noble (they don’t even say that as the Prince’s heir he’s the only legitimate ruler of Tigana) but all the characters from the nobility are good and honorable (Alessan, Sandre, and Brandin) whereas the true villain of the novel is a rich man trying to buy his way to power (Alberico).

That much was common in the epic fantasy of the 80s and 90s, but Tigana is also old-fashioned in its strong emphasis on nationalism. The setting is based on medieval Italy and the story is centered on the effort to unite the disparate provinces of the Palm into a single nation that can rule itself rather than be dominated by foreigners. An analysis of the degree to which the modern English-speaking world is post-nationalist is out of the scope of this essay, but I would argue that for all the patriotic symbolism and rhetoric that remain in politics, nationalism is on the way out and has been since World War II. Yet Tigana, published in 1994, is unashamedly a cheerleader for national pride.

But Tigana is also at least in part a modern fantasy novel, and as such it is not at all unaware of the critiques of nationalism. Epic fantasy outside the “gritty realism” brand of Martin and Abercrombie is frequently accused, and often justly, of being counter-revolutionary, where the revolution being referred to is that of France. Whatever the results of the French Revolution specifically, few would argue the revolutionaries weren’t on the right side of history in the debate about the divine right of kings, so the unconscious monarchism of stereotypical epic fantasy tends to inspire ridicule. Anyone who writes such a novel, the thinking goes, is either hopelessly ignorant of the real conditions of life in the middle ages, or else they haven’t thought about it at all and are mindlessly following the tropes of Tolkienian fantasy. The nationalism of Tigana isn’t quite so retrograde, but on the other hand there can be no doubt that within the novel nationalism is consciously espoused, challenged, and defended.

It is a measure of how committed Tigana is to questioning its own nationalist premise that the characters do not agree about the central conflict of the novel. The saintly Prince Alessan is the last Prince of Tigana, which has been under foreign occupation for many years. At the beginning of the novel Alessan recruits the protagonist Devin by a patriotic appeal to Devin’s Tiganan identity. Since many of the other characters are also from Tigana, it would be easy to assume that their goal should be to free Tigana from occupation. Certainly his mother thinks that to work towards anything else isn’t just a bad idea but a betrayal of Tigana’s lost generation.

But that is not Alessan’s goal. He wants to free the entire peninsula from occupation, not just Tigana. Early in the novel he makes his case to men of a different province conspiring against a different foreign occupier:

“Two facts,” the man called Alessan said crisply. “Learn them if you are serious about freedom in the Palm. One: if you oust or slay Alberico you will have Brandin upon you within three months. Two: if Brandin is ousted or slain Alberico will rule this peninsula within that same period of time.

This is a pragmatic argument: the whole Palm must be freed and united or else foreign powers will dominate it. But even here it is couched in ethical language about the “freedom in the Palm”. What Alessan means when he says freedom here, and what everyone means using the word freedom throughout the novel, is different from the modern use of the word. This is not freedom spoken of in the Declaration of Independence or the Declaration of the Rights of Man, the freedom to live one’s life without the King or Congress infringing on one’s natural rights. This is a strictly nationalist conception of freedom: freedom from foreign rule.

Typically, modern stories that advocate nationalism will do their best to conflate these two meanings of “freedom” to prevent the audience from questioning the virtue of the protagonist’s cause. For example, in Mel Gibson’s Braveheart the English are shown repeatedly abusing the natural rights of the Scottish, making them unfit rulers by Thomas Jefferson’s definition rather than forcing the audience to consider what might have motivated the historical William Wallace. Tigana doesn’t take this way out and even goes out of its way to show that foreign rule has had many beneficial effects. The presence of the Tyrants has ended the chronic feuding and constant wars of the various Palm provinces, saving countless lives. The Tyrants have also nearly exterminated bandits and brigands, making the roads much safer. Their courts support musicians, poets, and other types of culture, no small concern in a novel where most characters are musicians. Why endure war and all the inevitable suffering that accompanies it just to return to what will likely be less effective rule?

It’s all the more interesting that Tigana introduces these critiques given Kay doesn’t have any intellectual answer to them. That his sympathies lie with Alessan is made clear by the novel’s two sideplots, the Castle Borso scenes and the Ember Night sequence. Alienor and Castle Borso seem to be present in the novel solely to set out an idea (clearly author-endorsed but nevertheless extremely dubious) about the effects of “tyranny” on sexual practices. I put tyranny in scare quotes because the Alienor’s relationship to her foreign overlord seems unlikely to be different in any way to her previous arrangements with the duke of her province. The Ember Night section is an ill-conceived effort to give a political revolution cosmic significance by introducing a metaphysical threat against the whole world (well, it’s a little unclear, so perhaps just the peninsula?) and dispensing with it after about thirty pages. Here again, it is the “tyranny” (i.e. foreign rule, no matter how enlightened) of the Palm that has left it open to cosmic disaster.

All of this comes to a head toward the end of the novel, when love for Dianora and lingering anger at the loss of his son spur Brandin into renouncing his home of Ygrath and acclaims himself King of the Palm. Viewed dispassionately, to modern eyes this represents the fulfillment of everything Alessan has fought for. Brandin has lived on the Palm for twenty years, surely enough time to be considered naturalized, and he’s marrying a native. Moreover, he’s campaigning to defeat Alberico and unite the Palm into a single nation strong enough to resist future invasions. Inspired by this new nationalist platform, the common people rally to his banner, so he even has a democratic mandate (not that any of the novel’s characters ever seem the least interested in democracy). Although Brandin still maintains the spell that prevents people from hearing the name of Tigana, he even removes his punitive taxation on “Lower Corte”, providing them with the same benevolent rule his other provinces enjoyed. Surely this is wonderful!

But this just makes Alessan afraid. This is exactly what he said he wants to happen, but there’s just one problem: Brandin is unacceptable to him as king. The closest thing to an explanation the novel offers for this is the fact that Brandin still maintains the spell suppressing Tigana’s name, yet Alessan previously prioritized the “freedom of the Palm” over the restoration of the word Tigana even to the point of becoming estranged from his mother. If he brings his small force into the final battle on Brandin’s side, the result is sure to be unification of the Palm, but he’s willing to jeopardize the victory over Alberico in a far less likely scheme to defeat Brandin as well. The cynical explanation is that Alessan’s true desire is that he and no one else rule the Palm, but I think the real message is that Brandin is unacceptable because he was born in Ygrath, and that while he may have spent twenty years in the Palm, he’s not a native and never can be.

This isn’t stated, because as I said, Kay doesn’t offer any intellectual defense of the critiques of nationalism. His argument on behalf of nationalism is emotional, something typical of nationalist art but less common in modern fantasy. Characters in most fantasy novels love and hate other people, but few authors are better at showing characters who love their country than Kay. In Lions of Al-Rassan he puts this talent in service of a story that shows how patriotism can put friends on opposite sides of a destructive war, but in Tigana all his efforts are put toward making the reader understand and sympathize with the characters love for the Palm in general and Tigana in particular. It is this patriotism for a province he never knew, for instance, that drives Devin to abandon an increasingly lucrative career as a singer for the life of a revolutionary, a life to which he brings no applicable skills except that same patriotism. While reading the novel, I can almost buy into the idea myself.

But when I put the book down and think about it, nationalism doesn’t seem like such a good thing. I called Tigana a historical fantasy, but it is far less connected with real history than Kay’s later books, and no where more so than the thoroughly ahistorical depiction of nationalism without liberalism. The hero of Italian unification, Giuseppe Garibaldi, was a passionate advocate of universal suffrage, land reform, and the emancipation of women. In this his ambitions were frustrated and none of these things were achieved in the reunified Italy, because the real historical equivalent of Alessan (Victor Emmanuel II) didn’t see any reason to give up the power he had risked so much to obtain. Tigana presents a much more positive and successful version of the Italian reunification (and tells a fun adventure story while doing so), but in the process it purges what to a modern observer seems like the most important goals of the original unification movement in the first place.

Having dispensed with the easy part, let’s turn to specifics that the spoiler-averse will want to avoid. Looking around online, there are plenty of fans who are very pleased with the book, but among those less positive the main criticism seems to be that “not enough happens”. It’s true that some characters spend a very long part of the book traveling, but I would revise this complaint to: “The important things don’t happen.” To really understand why some people, and I am one of them, feel this way we have to go back to something I talked about in my commentary on the first four books and split the series into two stories, the fantasy story and the political story.

“When dead men come hunting in the night, do you think it matters who sits the Iron Throne?”  – Lord Commander Mormont, Game of Thrones

The prologue of Game of Thrones suggests we are reading a narrative that is based on a struggle with an adversary. In this case, that adversary is the supernatural evil represented by the Others. This is a very traditional story in fantasy, going back at least to Lord of the Rings, and it has a very familiar outline:

• Evil rises in a remote corner of the world
• Many refuse to believe evil has returned, or indeed that it was anything more than a legend to begin with
• But our heroes are wiser, and do their best to prepare and oppose it
• Though at first the evil acts principally in secret, but it becomes stronger and then bolder
• Finally evil declares itself in earnest, and those who scoffed now beg the heroes for help
• But it’s (nearly) too late as the seemingly unstoppable forces of evil crush all who oppose them
• At the very brink of defeat, the heroes achieve an unlikely victory at great cost

After reading A Feast for Crows I commented that somehow after four books Martin had only managed to get through the second bullet. Well, thanks to the Jon Snow section of A Dance with Dragons, we have now reached the third bullet. Perhaps even the fourth. That’s progress, I suppose. Despite Martin’s reputation for unpredictability, Jon Snow’s desperate preparations throughout Dance are clearly leading to some sort of disaster, and sure enough that’s what happens. There’s nothing wrong with these scenes, and indeed Jon’s execution of Slynt was one of the novel’s high points. But surely no one reading the book thinks that the Night’s Watch has a prayer of actually holding the Wall against the Others? The logic of these stories demands that the Wall, and therefore the Night’s Watch, must be broken, and the wights and Others must march south to teach those who didn’t listen to Jon and Mormont before him to be sorry. Since the biggest culprits are some of the farthest away, the white walkers have a lot of walking ahead of them. Meanwhile, by this point it’s obvious that Martin wants to emphasize the way squabbling over the Iron Throne is dooming Westeros, so it’s fitting that squabbling among the Night’s Watch will doom them in particular.

I admit that I didn’t expect things to start coming apart quite how they did, but frankly I don’t understand why Jon thought it was a good idea to stand up and announce he was breaking his vows. He spent hours planning with Tormund before that speech, so it wasn’t in the heat of the moment. And while maybe, maybe, Jon “We must stop the Others at all costs” Snow might be baited into going south because of Arya, why would the Night’s Watch want to help him? Why not send some wildlings who’ve sworn no vows? They seem quite loyal to Mance. Oh well. I assume this oathbreaking was the cause of the Ides of March business, and I have to say I can see exactly where Marsh was coming from.

The author is certainly very much on Jon’s side. Marsh is portrayed as a bigot too close-minded to see the existential threat posed by the Others even though it’s staring him in the face, unlike the wise Jon Snow (who, incidentally, is only, what, sixteen?). It was only after I finished the novel that I realized there are much better arguments for Marsh’s position than he makes. The Wall wasn’t built to keep out wildlings, Jon says, and in so doing he implies that by defending the Wall against them for Marsh’s lifetime and the thousand years or more before that (Other-free years, by the way) the Night’s Watch was just passing time. Who’s to say that the Others are going to march south? Jon assumes that the dead will rise in ever greater numbers, forming an army that only a perfectly disciplined and prepared Night’s Watch can hold back, but what is his evidence? His best source on this is Melisandre’s apocalypticism, but he doesn’t believe anything she says for much of the book, time he spends desperately preparing. The wildlings, far more knowledgeable about the Others and certainly plenty scared, seem to think that if they can just get far enough south to be able to find something to eat, they’ll be fine. Back when it was thought Mance really did have the Horn of Winter, Jon might have had a good argument that by not using it, Mance proved he knew the Others were coming, but in Dance Tormund says they would have blown it if they could. But no matter what anyone says, as readers we know this is a fantasy story, so Jon is right, and Bowen Marsh is wrong. And until we get closer to the ending, the Bowen Marshes of the story must carry the day.

There’s not much else to say about the fantasy story because not much else happens. When I first read Clash of Kings I was surprised that Melisandre, whose fire religion seemed to make her a natural enemy of the ancient evil in the far north, seemed thoroughly evil herself. That turns out to have been something of a feint, however, and she’s been steadily more sympathetic ever since, culminating in the Dance chapter told from her perspective. She seems to have been strictly on the side of good all along, she’s just got a ruthless pragmatism and some confusion about the meaning of her prophecies. That makes her a more interesting character than the evil sorceress of Clash of Kings, but it makes the overall story somewhat less interesting. The religions all seem to be wrong, which is a bit of a twist, but otherwise things seem very traditional: good guys, ancient evil, prophecies of heroes, and so forth. Personally, I’m not fond of prophecies, but I guess they come part and parcel with the increasing prominence of fantasy elements in the story. This has been a slow build throughout the series, but the fantasy story’s other thread, the Bran chapters, have are now indistinguishable from normal genre fantasy. I have no idea what HBO will do with this material if they ever get to this point. On the page it seems like a pretty standard take on animal links, elves, and nature magic. All right, but a little bland by genre standards. On screen, even with HBO’s budget, I suspect it will look ridiculous. Apparently people who read Martin’s Dunk and Egg novellas found the identity of the three eyed crow to be interesting, but I hadn’t read them, so it meant nothing. Making matters worse, as I’ve mentioned in the past I have an allergy to magical training scenes, so for me Bran’s chapters were a complete dud.

So much for the fantasy story, but as many people told me last year, it’s the political story that keeps them reading the series. This story has the virtue of actually being told, even though Dance has done nothing to dissuade me from my belief that Mormont is correct in the above quote and it’s the fantasy story that matters. But for all its byzantine complexity and endless detail, I was just as impatient with the pace of the narrative in Dance as I was reading A Feast for Crows.

To try to explain this reaction, I’ll have to go back to the series’ structure. At first, the political story is another adversarial narrative in which the Starks and others loyal to the king must stop the conniving Lannisters. The presence of a sympathetic Daenerys who regards the Starks and their king as traitors and usurpers complicates this from the start, and by the climax of Clash of Kings it’s basically out the window as the reader simultaneously roots for Tyrion and Davos on opposite sides of a battle to decide who controls the Iron Throne while Robb Stark is hundreds of miles away doing something or other off screen. If there was any doubt, the Red Wedding ended it.

When I was writing last year, I said the main characters were Daenerys, Tyrion, and Jon Snow, and that the shocking twists and character deaths weren’t so shocking when viewed through this lens. What I was getting at, but not quite putting my finger on, was that although the political side of Game of Thrones seems to be about fighting the Lannister’s usurpation of the throne, the series is actually about restoring the Targaryen dynasty. In such a story, obviously it’s the Targaryens (Daenerys and Jon Snow) who are the protagonists. To this was added Tyrion, because he is cool. I thought the way Dance positions Tyrion as a dragon expert was a little convenient, but I guess this was adequately set up in the previous books, and if short people make the best jockeys it’s reasonable to assume they make the best dragon riders as well. There’s an argument to be made for Tyrion being a Targaryen bastard, incidentally, but this would be such a misstep I refuse to believe it (it explains Tywin’s hostility, but it also cheapens it enormously, and there’s already way too many crypto-bastards in this series).

However, any Targaryen restoration must wait until near the end of the series. In the meantime, the story creates tension principally through the separation of characters. Daenerys is separated from Westeros, of course, but also the Stark children are separated from their mother and each other. The Starks all want to reunite, and because we like them we want to see them do it, so we feel tension until it happens. Well, it still hasn’t happened, and that in turn contributes to the feeling that the series is wandering aimlessly. This brings us back to the series’ unpredictability. The reader is waiting for these things to happen, yet other things happen instead. When the series works, it’s because these other things also capture our interest. When they don’t, the cost on the reading experience can be high. One of Feast for Crows‘ problems was that it introduced a separation between Brienne and Sansa that was only minimally justified in terms of Brienne’s motivation, seemed unlikely in the extreme to resolve just based on what Breinne’s information (Brienne actually finding Sansa by randomly asking people would have been absurd), and worst of all, with the reader’s superior knowledge it was evident it could not resolve because Brienne was never even remotely close to the right place. Even on a first reading, it was obviously a pointless exercise. Now, strictly speaking there was a point, but one outside the narrative: Brienne, like Arya before her, was unknowingly giving readers a tour of the ruined countryside so we could see how both the warfare and the resulting anarchy was devastating the common people. Without a good enough in-narrative justification, this ended up being a lifeless and academic exercise.

I believe this tension issue is the big reason why I enjoyed rereading the series, even Feast for Crows, more than when I read it the first time. Knowing ahead of time that none of the natural tensions were going to resolve, I was able to focus on what does resolve, movement along arcs that are only evident in hindsight: Tyrion toward his confrontation with his father, Cersei toward her arrest, Catelyn and Robb toward the Red Wedding, etc. However, it’s important to emphasize that Martin hasn’t truly subverted reader expectations, he’s merely delayed their gratification. Daenerys will go to Westeros and the Stark children will reunite (except poor Robb, anyway). This is difficult because our minds are accustomed to resolutions that happen in about a hundred thousand words, not two million (and series that end in a couple years, not decades). This is an example of how the huge length of the series distorts the reading experience.

A Dance with Dragons suffers greatly from this distortion. It continues the separations of Bran and Arya while also introducing more as various characters try to reach Daenerys and Stannis goes to fight Bolton. That none of these separations (except the ill-fated Quentin’s attempt to reach Daenerys) end within the confines of the novel has caused a lot of complaints. With Daenerys literally out in the wilderness away from everyone else, the book ends having introduced still more tension than it resolved. Apparently it was coordinating the approach of these various characters that gave Martin problems over the past ten years, but we’ll have to wait for the next book to really see what it is he’s trying to do. I wanted Tyrion, Quentin, Victarion, and Aegon to all arrive, meet Daenerys at the same time, and get to play off each other, but perhaps Martin has a better idea.

Beyond the characters moving slowly around Slaver’s Bay, A Dance with Dragons also sets up two key questions: what should Daenerys do about Meereen, and what should she do about her dragons? The first question is repeatedly posed and never answered, for nothing gets resolved about Meereen despite a huge number of scenes set there. Meereen, it must be said, is not nearly as impressive a creation as Westeros. Martin apparently wanted to tell a story about knights, so I suppose it’s not surprising that the city which is probably the series’ furthest point geographically, culturally, and narratively from Westeros seems the least inspired. But beyond the confusing names of characters and a political situation told in summary rather than the series’ characteristic detail, the actual story struck me as far less convincing than the degeneration of Westeros that Martin has spent so much time portraying. Daenerys spends the novel helpless in the face of what seemed like the anachronistic insurgency of the Sons of the Harpy. Not only does this sort of guerrilla warfare seem difficult to do properly without guns and explosives available to kill from distance, it’s carried out by the wealthy, which goes against everything I know about how this sort of thing works. I’m not an expert, but in these circumstances the wealthy are easy to defeat because they have something to lose: property, trade, and other assets. Daenerys has the backing of the common people, so even if she doesn’t have the stomach to storm the enclaves of the rich, the insurgents shouldn’t be able to operate among a hostile population. Toward the end of the book, it’s claimed that the untamed dragons have turned the common people against her, but I find this hard to credit, and even if it’s true, it doesn’t happen until the Sons of the Harpy have already forced significant concessions (i.e. her marriage). As for the other major question, how to deal with the dragons, Drogon’s arrival at the arena is my pick for the novel’s best scene, but it proves only a further complication. At the end of the novel, the dragons are anything but settled and Daenerys seems farther than ever from achieving her goals in Meereen or Westeros.

Back when the TV show Lost was airing, fans contemptuously referred to this practice as asking questions without answering the ones already posed. I say this by way of analogy, because most fans engaged with Lost in terms of the knowledge it withheld, not the action of the plot (the hermeneutic code, not the the proairetic code, to use the technical terms). A Song of Ice and Fire has some actual questions of this kind (Jon Snow’s parentage, the identity of Coldhands, the prophecies, and so forth) but they are on the sidelines for hardcore fans to debate while they wait for more books to be written. I think it’s a useful analogy, though, because as a six season TV series with a continuous story, Lost had to face many of the same structural challenges that A Song of Ice and Fire faces now, challenges comparatively shorter works like Lord of the Rings did not. It’s worth noting that like A Song of Ice and Fire, Lost built most of its tension of action out of the separation of characters, to the point it was criticized with some justification for being a show whose characters were continually journeying between the same five or ten destinations. Many people have observed that watching Lost episodes as they aired was a very different experience than blowing through the episodes on DVD, and I think it’s clear why: each time an episode of Lost ended, viewers had a week or more to reflect on how the show hadn’t yet answered the questions they cared about. Many readers who finish A Dance with Dragons today will think about how most of what they hoped to see happen still lies in the future, and they’ll have to think about that not for a week or even a year, but however long it takes for Martin to write the next book. I don’t want to make too much of this analogy, because part of the agony of watching Lost was enduring the suspicion that the answers to its many questions were being withheld because there were no answers (and, indeed, this proved to be the case). I have never doubted that there is an ending out there to A Song of Ice and Fire, so this is a case merely of (very) delayed gratification (unless Martin dies, that is).

In light of this caveat, it would be easy to dismiss these criticisms as the inevitable result of reviewing a piece of a story rather than the whole thing, and as my usual policy of reviewing a series all at once should indicate, I’m largely sympathetic to this view. It was something Martin himself said that made me reconsider.

You know, one of the things you learn when you are working for network television, the importance of the act to break because unlike HBO, network TV requires people to come back after the commercial. So you know, you always want to have an act break that it’s a moment of revelation, a twist, a moment of tension, a cliff hanger what it is, but each act has to go out on something, you know.  – George R. R. Martin, in a recent interview with Time Magazine

What Martin seems to be saying is that a storyteller should take the medium into account. If A Song of Ice and Fire were all one book, none of this would matter. But it’s not all one book, even though in 2030 people may read it as though it were. Certainly few authors can be more conscious of reader expectations than Martin after the reception of Feast for Crows. Once again, the Lost analogy is instructive, because despite its many faults, it always had extremely strong season finales (the season finale being the equivalent of the end of a novel). They raised plenty of questions and served as enormous cliffhangers, but in terms of their action they always felt like climaxes that paid off the narrative weight of the preceding season. The concluding chapters of A Dance with Dragons don’t have anything like this effect. Aegon lands on Westeros, Jon is betrayed, Selmy betrays the King, and Tyrion signs up with the Second Sons. But these events, important though they may be, aren’t sufficiently weighty to be satisfying. We’ve never met Aegon before this book and his rapid trip to Westeros just rubs in how long Daenerys is taking, that Jon Snow would fail to control the Night’s Watch was obvious throughout the book, Selmy is a very likable guy but Daenerys’ husband doesn’t matter, and while Tyrion getting in a position to make a difference again was nice, what I wanted was for him to meet Daenerys. Considering that unlike Lost this is a story based on action, not revelation, and especially given that Martin has considerable leeway on the length of the novels, I don’t think asking for a better climax is unreasonable. Perhaps the story he’s telling simply cannot be parceled out into satisfying chunks anywhere between one and four hundred thousand words without grossly weakening it. It’s impossible to say until the series is finished, but I’m skeptical.

Having ventured this criticism, it’s worth spending a moment to think about how the HBO adaptation of Game of Thrones restructured the storyline. Abigail Nussbaum thinks rather less of Game of Thrones the novel than I do, but she makes an interesting point when she says the novel is a YA story about the Stark children whereas the HBO show is an adult story about Ned Stark. I’m not totally convinced about the novel, since taken together Ned Stark’s viewpoint chapters are longer than any other character’s (18.5% of the novel) and, together with Catelyn, the Stark parents have a third of the novel, only slightly less than the children. But statistics aside, the HBO show necessarily marginalizes the children, especially Bran and Arya, and Ned Stark is the beneficiary of the extra attention. The result is a fairly straightforward story: Ned Stark goes against the Lannisters and loses. The climax comes at the very end of the ninth episode while the last episode serves as a coda to set up the second season, even to the point of including a few scenes from Clash of Kings. By comparison, Daenerys’ story, almost completely independent from Ned Stark’s, has its climax at the very end as it does in the novel.

I never read Game of Thrones on its own so I can’t say how different it felt to read just that novel, but I think the HBO show has a more satisfying structure. What the show will do with the later books, I have no idea. Clash of Kings features Tyrion even more prominently than Game of Thrones features Ned Stark, and has the battle at King’s Landing as a grand climax to Tyrion’s efforts to defend the city, but from there the scope broadens the climaxes get harder to find.

In a novel this large, there’s inevitably a lot more going on than what I’ve mentioned so far. I thought that Dance would have a big leg up on its predecessor just because it had those I allege to be the three main characters (who are also the most sympathetic, generally), but Tyrion, Daenerys, and Jon turned out to have some of the least effective chapters. Tyrion is mostly passive, Daenerys is mostly passive and in the throes of an inexplicable crush on the deeply unlikeable Daario, and while Jon at least works diligently, it’s in service to what is clearly a lost cause. Thankfully the new characters punched above their weight. Barristan Selmy and Jon Connington had interesting perspectives, and watching Wyman Manderly, a previously insignificant character, scheme against the preposterously evil Boltons was more fun than it had any right to be. I could have done with less of all the Reek business, it’s true. All right, I could have done with a lot less, but that’s mostly down to taste. I’m rarely impressed by psychologically damaged characters in fiction unless I have some reason to think the author is especially qualified to understand mental dysfunction. If I have to trudge through page after page of a depraved viewpoint, it seems to me I ought to at least be able to learn something from it. I feel the same way about Arya’s assassin training. That is, unconvinced there’s any psychological fire under all this smoke. But in a story otherwise full of ambiguity, having the Boltons as Gregor Clegane-style monsters to root against was surprisingly refreshing, no matter how the material was presented.

That’s how it goes with sprawling stories like this: which characters and subplots interest you inevitably comes down at least in part to personal taste. Once the series is complete, readers will have the luxury of skimming through chapters they’re not as interested in to get back to whatever they consider “the good parts”, but for now the speed at which the story moves is up to Martin. It’s easy to wish for more editing, but the Manderly subplot is an example of something that is surely completely extraneous to the overall story being told and thus a strong candidate for removal. I suppose the main difference between myself and the series’ big fans may just be where we draw the line in terms of interest.

To the people who have spent years fighting in the trenches of Internet forums over the merits of this series, I’m sure that sounds like a pretty mealy-mouthed way to conclude, but I really do think a lot of this is subjective. It’s great that some people like every part of these books, but I don’t…and yet, I like enough of them to keep reading, and I’ll get in line whenever the next book is released. In the meantime, I’ll keep wondering if this wouldn’t be a lot more effective if it were shorter, and thanks to HBO we may even find out the answer.

I seem to have something of an odd/even pattern with this series.  I loved the first book, Gardens of the Moon, and really enjoyed the third, the fifth, and now this, the seventh.  The three even numbered books, beginning with Deadhouse Gates, I’ve been a little cooler on.  Although it was my favorite of those three, I thought even Bonehunters moved too slowly, especially in its first half.  I’m not sure that Reaper’s Gale moves any faster but I liked it more.  The difference, I suppose, is the injection of characters and situations from Midnight Tides, plus some interesting new elements like Redmask’s rebellion and the Tiste Edur officials struggling to assert control over Letherii society.  Despite the huge variety of viewpoints and storylines, I was always interested in what would happen next.  I can’t say for sure without going back and laboriously counting, but I think Reaper’s Gale might have the largest cast of any Malazan book yet.  The huge character list is also incredibly diverse: mixed in with the usual grumbling soldiers, secretive mages, and scheming politicians are characters like Shurq Elalle who were primarily used for comedic effect in Midnight Tides but now provide a new perspective on the other characters.  I think my favorite Malazan books are the ones like Memories of Ice and Reaper’s Gale where a lot of characters meet each other.  This is an odd criteria, but as I discussed when talking about Bonehunters, it’s these meetings that really move the story forward in the series.

Whenever you have an enormous fantasy book with a ton of viewpoints, an important question is whether it all comes together in the ending.  With Reaper’s Gale, the answer is: sort of.  Most of the storylines resolve, but instead of all tying together it’s messy and complicated.  Yet this is, if anything, a virtue.  This is a messy and complicated book, it’s true, but one thing you can say without a doubt about the series as a whole is that it believes that life itself is messy and complicated.  If everything was tied up in a beautiful bow the way, say, Brandon Sanderson wraps up his novels, it would betray the essence of the series.  And that’s not a slam on Sanderson, by the way.  His books see the world through a rationalist lens and their stories reflect that beautifully.  The Malazan series depicts a chaotic world, and fittingly the narrative itself is shot through with chaos.

From the beginning, however, the series has constantly set out one organizing principle: unveiling power invites convergence, something extremely dangerous and unpredictable.  The ending to Reaper’s Gale is perhaps the best example of this yet.  In the series’ early books, characters said that no god can directly rule a mortal empire because doing so would be such an overt display of power that it would cause a devastating convergence.  Well, as described in Midnight Tides, the Crippled God has put a mortal puppet, Rhulad Sengar, on the throne of a powerful empire, and sure enough, by the end of Reaper’s Gale there has been an at times literally earth-shattering convergence. Characters from almost every one of the book’s divergent storylines end up in the city of Letheras.  Again, in a typical fantasy epic, the author would attempt to give each character a part to play in the climax.  Erikson has way too many characters involved to make that work, and he wisely doesn’t try.  Each character gets a scene or two in the final chapters, but the climactic showdown with Rhulad involves exactly one other character.  Dozens of other characters, most of whom were in one way or another trying to reach the Emperor, instead run into each other with unexpected (and generally calamitous) results.  Poor Rhulad, vaunted instrument of the Crippled God combining strength and weakness, turns out to be far less invincible than everyone supposed, leaving him merely weak.  There are probably at least a dozen gods, ascendants, and even mortals who are stronger than him just in Letheras by the end of the book.  Somehow, despite a metaphysical system in which abilities are never more than vaguely defined, the results of all these confrontations seem to make sense.

Needless to say, in a book this size I didn’t quite like everything.  I believe I have finally put my finger on what has been bothering me about the soldiers in this series.  When discussing previous books like Bonehunters I wondered about the way the veterans seem to exercise a great deal of choice.  After reading Reaper’s Gale I think my real problem is the motivations of the soldiers in general.  I’m not a historian, but from what I understand, the closest analogue to the Malazan system of armies would be the professional legions of the Roman Empire.  And while with any human endevor there will be a range of reasons, for the most part I think Roman professional soldiers, as the term professional implies, were fighting for pay.  Whenever there was political instability, after all, the way to shore up the loyalty of the armies was to raise their pay.  The Malazan Empire is relatively young and doesn’t have the Roman history of instability, so it’s understandable that their outlawed armies don’t declare Dujek and later the Adjunct their Emperor or Empress the way Roman armies in similar positions invariably did, but still you’d think they’d be fundamentally in it for the money.

Erikson does a good job portraying the day to day life of Malazan soldiers: the grumbling, the camaraderie, the boredom…but compensation is rarely discussed.  Soldiers gamble, so they get money from somewhere, but they rarely have any chance to spend money otherwise.  The army at Aren stayed quartered in the city, but this was presented as an anomaly.  Both Dujek’s and the Adjunct’s armies seem to be permanently on campaign, not even quartering for the winter.  Nor is there much mention of the mobile village that followed ancient armies around supplying them with food and vices.  In Reaper’s Gale, we see the Adjunct’s army taking a huge sea voyage and then fighting a guerrilla war across a ruined countryside.  Their previous campaign in Seven Cities was a lot of marching around in the middle of nowhere by themselves…no merchants, prostitutes, or other money sinks.  If the soldiers are getting paid, then they must be saving it all.  Many ancient armies didn’t pay their soldiers since they were expected to loot potentially large sums from captured cities, but we’re told explicitly that Malazan armies don’t do this, or at least are expected not to do it.  One final compensation for the typical Roman soldier was retirement: after a certain number of years, once the soldiers were too old to fight any longer, they were given money and land in the countryside.  Characters like Fiddler spend a lot of time thinking about “getting out” but they seem to mean desertion.  State-sponsored retirement is never mentioned, as far as I can remember.

Fittingly, given this payroll-free environment, every character’s back story that we learn about sounds similar: born into difficult circumstances, enlisting in the military was the best way to escape.  The exception are those who were fighting for some other army and joined the Malazans simply because they couldn’t think of anything else to do, like the former Seven Cities rebels Kalam, Quick Ben, and Corabb, all of whom end up joining the exact military unit they were previously fighting without ever coming up with a strong reason for doing so.  Having signed up for military service for what it was not, rather than anything it was going to give them, it’s not surprising these characters are confused about whether they should stay in the army.  On one hand, there’s the constant risk of injury and death, not to mention a great deal of privation.  On the other hand, the army is the only functional organization they’ve ever encountered and it allows them to hang out with their friends.

I’m not sure how realistic this image of soldier psychology is, but at least it mostly avoids glorifying warfare.  Whatever these people are, they aren’t heroes.  There has been a lot of discussion lately about the place of heroism in modern fantasy (Martin Lewis has a good summary).  I was interested, then, to see that the character Udinaas spends a lot of time using his present circumstances to illustrate the difference between stories told of heroes and how things really are.  This kind of thing goes back at least as far as Sam and Frodo in Lord of the Rings, but Udinaas and his companions are on a long journey where they don’t meet very many people, so they have a lot of time for discussions like this.  I don’t want to exaggerate the degree to which this ought to be seen as Erikson commenting on the fantasy genre because throughout the series he’s shown an interest in tribal life, and a lot of what Udinaas says might apply better to the oral storytelling he’d have heard as a Tiste Edur slave.  But Udinaas is part of a disparate group of people on a quest for a magical artifact, so it’s hard to ignore the possible reference to modern quest fantasy.  Not surprisingly, there are a lot of inversions of the “generic” quest (I put it in scare quotes because I’m not sure how many books are really published anymore that unironically use the old 1980′s quest template): the members of the group mostly dislike and distrust each other, they all have different and even contradictory motivations, and the more powerful the character the less they are liked and trusted.  Silchas Ruin is certainly no Gandalf.

So far, except for the fact this is just one strand among many, I might be describing Joe Abercrombie’s First Law Trilogy (particularly the second book, Before They Are Hanged, which if memory serves is the one with most of the quest narrative).  But there’s a very different feel here than what Abercrombie was up to in his trilogy.  Abercrombie’s Bayaz was a sort of anti-Gandalf: ancient, scheming, and cynically manipulative.  Silchas Ruin is a rather different figure.  He tolerates but does his best to ignore his weaker companions, and they have no illusions about his motives, or the fact that if they weren’t so much weaker than he was, he would consider them a threat and destroy them.  There is manipulation and deception in the Malazan series, but it’s not emphasized anywhere near the way it is in Abercrombie’s work.

Erikson ultimately strikes me as far more hopeful than Abercrombie (with the disclaimer that I haven’t yet read Abercromie’s latest two novels, nor the last three Malazan books).  The end of the quest subplot in Reaper’s Gale is almost comically straightforward.  After the long trip, no miracle occurs, and everything happens exactly as expected.  Silchas Ruin is far stronger than anyone else present, so he gets his way.  Anyone who tries to stop him gets run over.  But afterward he goes back to Letheras, and facing true convergence there he’s not at all successful.  The powers of the Malazan world are far too numerous and too varied for anyone to manipulate the outcome of conflagrations of that kind.  Admittedly, the Crippled God, Shadowthrone, and Quick Ben all claim to be guiding events and one might eventually be revealed as a mastermind, but so far it seems doubtful any of them are really in control.  Earlier I called this wild and unpredictable mix of powers chaotic, and while that may not seem comforting, it still seems much better than the First Law world full of cynical manipulation.

The other dispiriting element of Abercrombie’s work that has attracted the label “nihilist” is his depiction of a world with a high fantasy veneer–quests, great struggles, and so forth–but with low fantasy motivations and outcomes underlying it.  Important people do things because they are greedy, power-hungry, or outright malicious, his work seems to say, and talk of good and evil is just their way of manipulating fools.  If people are suffering in the First Law trilogy, it’s often because they are manipulated according to the selfish desires to those in power.  Even more often, they suffer for no reason whatsoever.  Admittedly, the Malazan series is not the polar opposite of this.  There’s quite a bit of suffering due to the manipulation of others, and certainly there are tragedies that prove meaningless (and thus all the more tragic).  But the series’ high fantasy trappings have (so far, at least) not been false.  There really is a war between the gods, and despite some extenuating circumstances the Crippled God seems to be more than a little evil.  Those opposing him are rarely (if ever) wholly good, it’s true, but for most of them mixed somehow into their self-interest is the idea that this evil must be opposed.  Viewed against this backdrop, most of the suffering endured by characters in the series is dignified in some small degree by the distant context of this struggle.

I’ll have to finish the series before I can say anything definitive about how I feel about the Malazan approach to fantasy.  Personally, my primary criticism of Abercrombie’s First Law trilogy was that it seemed to ignore the possibility that those in power sometimes really do genuinely believe their rhetoric.  This is a dangerous omission, in my view, because the lesson of the twentieth century is surely that ideology can be extremely dangerous, and much suffering could have been avoided if certain political leaders really were the cold blooded Machiavellians that Abercrombie depicts.  In the huge variety of characters in the Malazan trilogy, there are many whose actions are dictated by their psychology, but ideology seems to influence only a few: Karsa Orlong, definitely, and perhaps Corabb.  But with the motivations of many of the most important characters like Shadowthrone, Laseen, and the Adjunct still obscure, all this could change dramatically over the course of the last three books.

At this point in the series, it is easy to recommend. If you haven’t read any of the Malazan books, start with the excellent Gardens of the Moon, not here. If you aren’t going to like Bonehunters then it’s extremely unlikely you liked the first five books enough to get to this point. As you would expect in book six of a ten book series, not a whole lot gets resolved, and my usual practice of reviewing series rather than their individual novels seems like a good idea at this point. But since I’ve already been reviewing these books individually, it’s worth considering how Bonehunters develops the ongoing concerns of the Malazan series and the degree to which it shares the flaws and virtues of the earlier books, at least as I see them.

More so than previous books in the series, Bonehunters gets off to a distinctly slow start. The first third of the novel reintroduces dozens of characters from previous books and sets them in motion. Characters are traveling every which way on the Seven Cities continent, and since mapmaking is apparently a popular pastime for the series’ hardcore fans, it would be interesting to see an animation of the various characters and groups of characters criss-crossing the continent with their journeys. Much of the content of these traveling scenes takes the form of introspection, as characters think about where they’ve been (probably to help readers who didn’t recently read the previous books), where they are now, and what they hope to be doing in the future.

It would be easy to overstate the problem here. It’s not boring, exactly. Erikson’s characters are thoughtful and have interesting observations. But in a series this long, for someone like myself who has been reading these books in a relatively short time period, it’s inevitable there’s some repetition. How many times have characters in these books looked at the landscape around them and meditated on how the passage of time has laid low cities and wrought many changes while still leaving evidence of the ancient patterns? More pragmatically, much of the first half of the book is spent with the titular Bonehunters, and their concerns are much the same as they were in House of Chains: the poor morale of the army, uncertainties about its commander, and so forth. The plot doesn’t help matters, for like several previous novels in the series there is a big set piece battle in the middle of the book, and the novel’s climax is such a direct echo of Deadhouse Gates that it must have been intentional: Laseen is confronted over her conduct (though a rather different conclusion is reached than in Deadhouse) and again Kalam has to have a cartoonish battle with dozens of disposable Claw ninjas in Malaz City.

Perhaps my biggest problem with the introspect moments is they tend to emphasize one of my least favorite elements of the series, namely the way the characters so often seem weakly motivated. Why do Apsalar and Cutter work for Cotillion? Why is Fiddler still in the army? What is Kalam doing with his life now that he’s out of it? Where is Karsa Orlong going? The characters themselves wonder about these questions to varying extents, which is never a good sign. Since one of the series’ principal themes seems to be humans standing up to their gods and seizing their destiny, it’s frustrating not to see a little more, well, seizing.

This notion of character motivations is an interesting one in light of the fact many of them are in the Malazan army. Fundamental to military service throughout history has been the abdication of agency. A soldier follows orders and therefore does not have the freedom, or the burden, of deciding what to do. Although Bonehunters spends a lot of time portraying the life of the ordinary soldier, it rarely shows the compulsive side of military service (making a joke of it, for example, when Ganoes Paran is mistaken for a deserter). Veterans like Fiddler and Gesler are frequently presented with opportunities to desert without any consequences. As these characters have some contact with the overarching high fantasy storyline, returning to the army and remaining subject to its discipline is to some degree an endorsement of the Adjunct’s objectives, and by extension those of Empress Laseen and the Malazan Empire as a whole. Fiddler, understandably, finds the choice difficult, for he doesn’t have even remotely enough information to judge Laseen, nor does the reader. Militaries in the real world can sometimes seem mysterious because their actions are the output of vast bureaucracies, but in the Malazan army the confusion stems from the leadership. The Adjunct is a mystery to everyone, and Laseen even more so. When Kalam confronted her at the end of Deadhouse Gates, Laseen seemed like some sort of mastermind. Confronted again in the similar scene at the end of Bonehunters, she seems weak and desperate, helpless in the hands of malicious advisors. Which portrait is more accurate? Who knows? Later books will settle the question, I assume.

Of course, not all the characters are aimless. Ironically, Icarium, a character who is defined by aimless wandering, finally gets a purpose in this book, and his scenes are some of the most entertaining. But the ruminations of the purposeful characters are even more frustrating since Erikson isn’t willing to give the reader more than the tiniest hint of what they know and what they are trying to do. Quick Ben, for instance, is full of plans as always, none of which are ever communicated to the reader. Ganoes Paran arrives in Seven Cities and is at the center of some of the book’s best scenes, but exactly what he knows and what he’s trying to accomplish tends to stay vague. In Memories of Ice, I was surprised I found it exciting when characters got together and talked about things. The reason, which I partially understood at the time, is that these conversations forced their motivations, ideas, and goals out into the open instead of being hoarded away from the reader’s view. This doesn’t happen often in Bonehunters, with characters sometimes going to improbable lengths to avoid cluing the reader into what’s happening (I’m thinking here of when Kalam, Fiddler, Apsalar, and Quick Ben are all traveling together and do their best to avoid talking to each other about their plans). I’m well aware of the narrative principle involved here. In a heist film, often the viewer isn’t told the plan, lest it become boring watching it actually carried out. But when this information is concealed over thousands of pages and dozens of viewpoint characters, it’s hard not to feel a little resentful toward the author, fair or not.

The differences in these two types of characters stem from the way the novel combines high fantasy and low fantasy. People like Quick Ben and Ganoes Paran are living in a high fantasy story as they struggle against the Crippled God and his allies. The soldiers of the Fourteenth Army, many of whom are colorfully fleshed out in the early parts of the novel, are in a low fantasy story about a military campaign. This allows us to view some of the same events from two very different angles, but it does make it that much more difficult for the myriad viewpoints to coalesce in the reader’s mind. The high fantasy characters tend to have strong motivations and clear goals, but they do their best to hide them from others, including the reader. The low fantasy characters are caught up in their machinations and wondering if they should be trying to free themselves, but they know even less than the reader about what’s going on.

The battle at Y’Ghatan is in the middle of the book, but it serves as something of a climax to the low fantasy side of Bonehunters. Certainly it brings the questions about motivation into sharp relief. Why are the soldiers risking their lives attacking Y’Ghatan? Is the rebellion in Seven Cities really a going concern? Leoman’s army is plagued by the same questions. Their rebellion has clearly failed, so what is there to fight for? Leoman, of course, produces a startling answer. The resulting battle is another of example of one of Erikson’s recurring motifs, the battle as hellscape. Y’Ghatan is a rather more literal manifestation of this than Pale and Capustan, though the effect is somewhat diminished by the repetition. The Fourteenth Army finds in Y’Ghatan the fires of hell, and the survivors must journey through what is again a literal underworld in order to escape. This, it is implied, is the sort of event that may forge the Fourteenth into something more than just a ragtag army. The Bridgeburners apparently had it easy: they just had to walk through Raraku. The idea that collective identities can ascend toward the divine just as individuals can is one of the most interesting in the Malazan series, and the contrast between the Bridgeburners and the Bonehunters raises the question: just what is required, here? Why isn’t it happening all the time? The mechanics of this is vague, as is everything magical in the Malazan series, and the scenes where Paran summons the ghosts of fallen soldiers muddy the waters still further.

I suppose I’ll have to wait for to find these answers until I read the concluding novels of the series. Certainly Steven Erikson said as much when he was responding to what I wrote about some of the earlier books in the series, feeling that it was presumptuous to speak about the themes of the series without seeing how they are fully developed. While the character of Ormulogun, official artist of Onearm’s Host, and his arguments with his “critic” Grumble are clearly a humorous take on the relationship of an author to his critics, Bonehunters also provides another model. In Deadhouse Gates, much was made about the importance of Duiker surviving to tell the story of the Chain of Dogs, although I was much less enthusiastic about this, assuming it would merely fuel more bloodshed. In Bonehunters we find that in Seven Cities, the Chain of Dogs is worshipped by a growing cult made up of the very rebels who once hated and feared it. In the Malazan Empire, on the other hand, slander has taken root which blames the Wickans in general and Coltaine in particular for the disasters that struck the Chain of Dogs and the army at Aren, resulting in vicious pogroms against Wickans. Only the survivors of Coltaine’s army in the Fourteenth know better. Duiker’s mission to tell the world the truth about what happened seems to have been a miserable failure. What are we to make of this? Is every historian helpless in the face of the biases and ulterior motives of readers? The answer is important because, with apologies to Ian Esslemont, surely the preeminent historian of the Malazan Empire is Steven Erikson.

Talion: Revenant is about a man named Nolan who works as a Talion Justice. The Talions are an interesting institution. At one time they were the administrative, judicial, and enforcement apparatus for an empire, but that empire fell long ago. The Talion organization survived, remaining aloof from the various successor nations and serving as an international peacekeeping agency. Most Talions are soldiers of one sort or another, working to stabilize the international order by training the armies of the post-Empire nations up to some minimum standard (presumably in exchange for payment that funds the Talion administration as a whole, although if that was directly spelled out I missed it). The exceptions are those of the Justice division. Like a fantasy FBI, they rove the countryside enforcing the common law of the old empire, usually working alone. Although generally a Justice is just an ordinary person whose authority is recognized by most nations, he or she does have a slightly magical sword and a tattoo that can remove a soul from a body in a particularly feared sort of execution. I don’t remember it bothering me originally, but now the thought of lone people roaming the countryside acting as judge, jury, and executioner sounds, ah, problematic. There are a couple checks on their authority: first, they have to report in detail to the head of the Justice division, but second and more importantly, the tattoo is tied to a ritual that supernaturally kills anyone who acts unjustly. If that still makes you feel uneasy, well, this is a book that questions how to properly administer justice, but not what justice is.

The book is structured so that “present day” chapters of the adult Nolan at work as a Justice are interleaved with scenes from his childhood training. At first, these training scenes mainly provide a colorful background, but eventually it turns out Nolan’s mission in the present will force him to face demons from his past and it all comes together. The whole thing is told in a first person narrative that is mildly didactic in its quieter moments (this is one of those fantasy novels where the protagonist takes the time to explain details about magic, culture, and so forth as they are encountered in the narrative) and choreographist when the fighting starts.

So is it any good? Well, not everything about it works. The childhood training scenes feel a little hazy and indistinct, with only three other students are given any characterization. It’s not Stackpole’s fault, but a year after this book was published, the first Harry Potter was published in the UK. While the worldbuilding of the Harry Potter books leaves a lot to be desired, the early books provided–and set future expectations for–a depth to the fantasy school experience that Talion: Revenant can’t hope to match with only half its narrative. There is also a little bit of a Mary Sue issue with many of these scenes as the teenage Nolan constantly performs amazing feats that outdo anyone in the history of the training system. Some justification for this is provided (Nolan came unusually late to Justice training so he thinks outside the box) but it gets to be a little much. Luckily, it’s counterbalanced by the adult Nolan chapters, as in that era Nolan is mainly known for certain high profile failures.

However, the principal selling point of the novel is the Talion organization in general and the Justices in particular. As a Talion Justice, Nolan is essentially a superhero. He wears a costume that conceals his identity, he has special powers (albeit modest ones), and, of course, he fights crime. His mission in the novel even requires him to adopt an alter ego. The Talions graft the superhero model on to a military structure, giving the book much of the appeal of both superhero and military fiction. Though technically not a soldier, Nolan’s friends from his training days were literally comrades in arms in increasingly military-oriented exercises and the requirement that he absolutely obey the orders of his superiors within the organization becomes an important issue as the novel progresses.

Talion: Revenant was apparently the first novel Michael Stackpole wrote, even if it wasn’t the first he published, and the prose has some of the awkward moments you’d expect from a first novel. Since most of the novel is spent exploring the nature and implications of the Talion organization, the rest of the world can sometimes feel like a stock fantasy setting. Stackpole definitely sets out to provide interesting twists on some of the generic ideas he uses, however. His elves are xenophobic warrior savages, for example, and in a particularly memorable sequence, his goblins turn out to live in underground colonies much like ants.

Despite occasional discussions about the proper role of fear in the administration of justice and some rather melodramatic climactic scenes, Talion: Revenant is content to be–and succeeds at being–a fun, adventure fantasy. Although apparently considered too long when Stackpole first wrote it, by modern standards it’s of average length and tells a single, self-contained story. Michael Stackpole has promised to write a sequel if the electronic version sells a sufficient number of copies, but rest assured it would be the old-fashioned kind of sequel, not a direct continuation.

This isn’t obvious at first, with the labored cod-medieval infodump in the prologue and the protagonist Prince Herric’s horror at having his engagement with the love of his life broken in favor of a treaty-sealing marriage with a child. Whatever reservoir of sympathy I might have had for hereditary nobility’s difficulties with arranged marriage has long since been exhausted by other authors, but Wood doesn’t end up making a huge deal about it. Herric moves on with his life because he’s got bigger problems: the unceasing raids by Viking-analogous northmen have brought Herric’s nation Athgar to the brink of collapse.

Although Wolf’s Cub is a vaguely Arthurian romance, the choice not to use the trappings of the elaborate monarchies of the High Middle Ages (the time when Arthurian legends got traction regardless of when the real Arthur, if any, might have lived) gave the story a pleasantly unique feel, at least for me. The monarchy of Athgar claims a direct connection to a mighty past, but it’s clear that while they live in the ruins of a magnificent civilization, the novel’s Athgarian nobility are a tiny warrior elite who have lost all the civic institutions that made a continent-spanning state possible. None of the pomp that I associate with medieval settings is present: the nobility is too busy with real combat to bother with stylized forms like jousting and dueling, the peasants are too close to dropping below subsistence level to levy in large numbers if at all, and with the low agricultural productivity cities and markets cannot be supported. This is a kingdom that, whatever its history, is in serious danger of collapse. Not to some dark lord, either, but to northmen sent raiding by population pressures at home.

This is still fantasy, so there is something of a dark lord in the picture. It seems the good old days were made possible by wise kings using wizards as a sort of civil service. But in the chaos surrounding the collapse and fragmentation of the old system, the wizards withdrew to a few mountain kingdoms and were persecuted whenever found in most of the small successor states. Athgar has its share of trouble with the neighboring wizard nations, but the question as to whether these wizards (thought to be irredeemably evil by a prejudiced populace) are really dark lords instead of rational political actors is a major concern of the Athgarian monarch given how weakened the nation has become due to the raiders.

I generally don’t read romance novels unless they are genre crossovers like Time Traveler’s Wife or A Civil Campaign, so I’m not really qualified to judge the romantic elements. All I can say is, I found Herric and his young bride to be sympathetic and believable. Unlike (I gather) typical romance stories, not only is their relationship is not really the center of the book but to a large extent it’s not even the center of their own lives. Perhaps their relationship is just a bit too understated, actually: the business of producing an heir is ignored (and not even discussed!) for quite a few years after it becomes possible, but I guess I can forgive the story this small anachronism.

Ultimately Wolf’s Cub is kind of hard to pin down, something that probably hasn’t done it any favors when it comes to finding an audience. It’s a character-oriented romance whose main character spends more time fighting battles than he does with his love interest. It’s a “gritty” fantasy in the sense that it takes place in a world of moral grays filled with bloodshed and difficulties, but its main characters are fundamentally good people whose lives are clearly destined to fulfill a prophecy of restoration. It’s also a book about the costs of war and the importance of peace that doesn’t try to shock the reader with descriptions of blood, entrails, and suffering. Finally, it’s a book that examines prejudice and the myths society tells about itself while also unironically portraying its protagonist as a hero. If there are other books along these lines (YA fantasies maybe?) I haven’t read them.

One final note: originally published in 1998 by a publisher who I believe went out of business, Wolf’s Cub and its sequel are back in print as ebooks. The death of the concept of “out of print” is the best part of the transition to electronic formats and I hope more authors do this as the market grows.

There are a reasonable number of examples of authors of long series writing short stories that fill in elements of the back story to their epic. Night of Knives is not a short story (despite occasionally being called a novella), but it’s “only” the length of a typical novel and so is about a third the length of the other Malazan books (including Esslemont’s later novels). That and the story’s very limited timespan (less than twenty four hours, give or take a few flashbacks) give the whole thing the feel of a distinctly minor piece of the larger series tapestry. It’s not particularly informative, either: I came in with plenty of questions about the relationship of Kellanved, Dancer, and Laseen, but either the answers were too subtle for me or they just weren’t there.

The story is told through the eyes of two Malaz City inhabitants: Temper, an old soldier with a past, and Kiska, a young spy with a future. Temper is an interesting fellow whose flashbacks actually do fill in some interesting details about the Empire under Kellanved, but I’m afraid I wasn’t too impressed with Kiska. She starts the novel as essentially a freelance spy, patrolling rooftops looking for interesting activity like a superhero. While I’m happy to grant that the presence of magic can be credited with dramatically altering societies from the examples in our past, I’ve never been happy with characters like this who you can’t possibly imagine ever existing in the real world. Kiska is particularly reminiscent of Crokus in Gardens of the Moon in that she seems to live a relatively comfortable life, has a very knowledgeable and influential mentor figure, and still pursues this silly avocation. For most of the novel, she is continually informed she should lock herself inside like all the sensible people have done already and stop trying to get herself killed. As readers we know that as one of the main characters she’s safe, but she doesn’t, so it’s hard to see her insistence on being involved as anything other than idiotic. I know that this tension between a desire to play a role in the events shaping the world and the self-preservative instinct to keep your head down when larger powers are on the move is present in Erikson’s work going all the way back to the prologue of Gardens of the Moon, but the disparity between Kiska’s abilities and her circumstances seems far greater than, say, Ganoes Paran’s situation in Gardens.

In any case, the story moves along in a reasonably entertaining manner. If you’ve read Erikson’s first five books you have a decent idea of how it ends up, but there are some interesting twists along the way. Somewhat unfortunately the climax centers on an Azath house in crisis. A lot of fantasy novels involve damsels in distress, but the Malazan books seem to prefer Azath in distress, with permutations appearing in Deadhouse Gates and Midnight Tides as well. Earlier I mentioned I didn’t see how people read the series as the books come out (i.e. with large gaps between each book) given the dizzying number of characters and storylines, but the problem with reading it all in a short time as I’m doing is there are some patterns that get a bit wearing. Even leaving the Azath out of it, there’s the matter of the endless procession of imprisoned ancient entities trying to get free. It would be interesting to go back and see just how many of these there have been: just off the top of my head, there were Jaghut in Gardens of the Moon and House of Chains, Forkrul Assail in House of Chains and Midnight Tides, the Hounds of Darkness in House of Chains…it’s not that these episodes aren’t all interesting and relevant, but it starts to get a little hard to worry overmuch about the apparently horrifying prospect of the Stormriders breaking out due to the lack of magic users on Malaz island after seeing plenty of similar and worse apparitions try similar escapes, often successfully, in previous books.

Night of Knives is worth reading if you’re a Malazan fan, just set expectations appropriately. People new to the Malazan series should start with Steven Erikson’s Gardens of the Moon. Most people seem to agree that Esslemont’s later novels are better, and really there was nothing much wrong with Night of Knives other than a certain lack of ambition, so I’ll read Return of the Crimson Guard after Reaper’s Gale.