Hidden Gems: The Malazan Book of the Fallen sequence by Steven Erikson

Canadian author Steven Erikson launched his Malazan Book of the Fallen series with The Gardens of the Moon in 1999. Word spread quickly on the internet, and won the book some significant attention in the publishing trade. The buzz was strong enough to allow Erikson to seal a deal to take the sequence to ten books; volume 9, Dust of Dreams, was released earlier this year.

I’m not going to beat around the bush here; the Malazan Book of the Fallen is some of the best high fantasy ever written.

The first thing that hits you is the sheer scope. The books are set in a vast world, layered throughout with history, texture and gritty realism. Erikson trained as an anthropologist and archaeologist, and it shows — he knows how cultures work, and clearly wasn’t afraid to put in the huge time investment required to ensure that every part of his world made sense long before he began writing about it. The setting began as the backdrop for a role-playing campaign in fact, back in the ’80s, and Gardens of the Moon was initially conceived as a movie script.

This leads me to another outstanding element of the sequence: its freshness. Erikson takes great pleasure throughout his work in overturning cliches and avoiding tired fantasy tropes. There are no cookie-cutter kingdoms, no wise wolves, no thinly-disguised elves or dwarves or orcs, no mystical objects of overwhelming dark power. Instead, Erikson offers a stunning array of  unique creations. Wherever there’s an easy, familiar path, Erikson turns away from it. Nothing is hard and fast, nothing is black or white. There are no moral absolutes to be found — just wonders, mysteries and evocative questions.

The characters are just as varied, innovative and flexible. You’ll find a psychopath who can turn into a horde of rats, a renegade priest with hands of pure chaos, a noble barbarian on a quest to destroy all of creation, and a dazzling array of lunatics, charmers, soldiers, schemers and godlings — and that’s just amongst the secondary cast. They’re complex, flawed, and vibrantly real. All of them. And that’s a hell of a lot of different people. Forget any notions you might have of one primary hero, one group of heroes, or even one set of heroes working on the same side. Over the series, Erikson creates a tapestry of different characters, situations and interests, each of them following their own logic and beliefs. They range from the lowliest grunts and paupers up to the very primal powers of creation itself. No one is totally virtuous or totally wicked. They co-operate and clash, ebb and flow, and the story dances with them.

But although it may all sound chaotic, impossible to follow, Erikson’s real genius lies in welding all of his boundless inventiveness into a compelling whole. He’s a masterful builder of tension. The story may move between a range of people, but they’re each faced with different aspects of the same rising tide. Each has a part to play, and as events move toward their inevitable, shattering climax, the different pieces slot into position. The end result is breath-taking in its power.

The single greatest flaw with the series lies in its first seventy pages or so. It’s just not easy to get into, initially. Something is off — the characters just don’t gel with the reader to start with — and quite a few people find themselves giving up in the first fifty pages. I was one of them; I tried Gardens of the Moon shortly after it appeared, gave up on it quickly, and only returned in 2008. Persevere, I beg of you, and commit to reading the first hundred pages. By that point, you’ll be hooked almost without noticing, and the rewards are greater than you would imagine.