Midnight Tides

by Steven Erikson

Your average fantasy novel protagonist is some adolescent chump from a shithole, backwater village. This convention gives the author an excuse to have one of the characters explain every detail of his world to the reader, by way of the protagonist. By contrast, the main characters in Erikson's 'Malazan Book of the Fallen' are almost all supreme badasses, who already know everything about the story's magic system and the worlds history, and never bother explaining anything to one another. The reader is simply dropped into it all, and has to figure out what's going on behind the scenes, in terms of the magic system, the world's history, and even the characters interpersonal relationships (those last two are often one and the same in the case of the older characters), from what's shown 'on-screen'.

There have now been five of these books (each one a 700 page plus behemoth), so by now we have a reasonable handle on how stuff works in the Malazan world, although there are still a lot of mysteries. It's interesting to see that you actually don't need any elaborate explanation of the magic system, since once you've been shown a few sorcerous battles you know how it works practically, and any 'a warren is a conduit of magical power' type explanation is revealed for the Star Trek-esque babble it really is.

The Malazan series will eventually be ten books in length, so it's now halfway through, and already it's huge cast of characters and sprawling plot dwarf the likes of The Wheel of Time. It's a very ambitious series, and it amazes me that Erikson can churn each episode out so fast with such consistently high quality. Midnight Tides starts on the far side of the world from the settings of the previous books, with an almost entirely new cast of characters (this is the second time in the series he's done this). Like the previous books, this one tells a discrete story which is somewhat independent of the rest of the tale, but still fits into the larger plot arc.

The plot is driven by the fractious relations between the rich and powerful kingdom of Lether, and the introverted but sinister Tiste Edur (vaguely analogous to Dark Elves in generic fantasy terms). The Tiste Edur are an old, magical, long lived race, who have mainly minded their own business for the past few millenia, but whose warring tribes have recently been united by the Warlock King, a powerful sorcerer who pretty much has 'hidden agenda' written all over him. The Letherii are their aggressive, expansionistic neighbours to the south, whose debt-oriented capitalism and glorification of greed have given them great power and dominion over almost all other cultures they've come into contact with, but at the price of a large discontented underclass, and providing Erikson with an opportunity to comment not terribly subtly on contemporary real-world politics.

While he made the commentary a bit overt, he still does it well. One of the Crippled God's speeches about the his take on 'honour' and 'loyalty' was particularly memorable and thought-provoking, despite it's obviousness. One of the things I like about the Crippled God as the major villain of the overall series is that he isn't just an evil force that came out of the blue to wreck chaos, his very presence represents the failures and the arrogance of the societies in the Malazan world. He might be an evil bastard, but what Erikson seems to be heading towards is that even if the Crippled God is defeated in a huge cataclysmic battle, (like most epic fantasy villains are), he has a lot to teach his enemies, and if they fail to learn from him, they'll just end up making the same mistakes over and over again.

The cast of characters is typical Erikson, including gods, demons and various kinds of superpowered mortals, but the central characters are two sets of brothers, one family Letherii, the other Tiste Edur, and you'd better believe they're all in for a whole lot of drama, angst, and big monsters exploding.

All of the books in the series have been dark and grim, but this one is even more so than the others. The Edur are all naturally reserved and moody, while the Letherii are part of a particularly unpleasant culture (one that probably seems more unpleasant because it is deliberately an uncharitable reflection of ours). To balance it out, Erikson increases the humour a great deal, but unfortunately chose to place most of it in one plot thread. While the humour is still usually pretty funny, the abrupt change in mood from dark to silly every time there's a scene change doesn't sit well.

But despite this minor criticism, it's just as good as the rest of the series, and I'm looking forward to the next one, due out early next year.