Customer Reviews

Gardens of the Moon (Malazan Book of the Fallen)

5 star:		(141)
4 star:		(99)
3 star:		(46)
2 star:		(47)
1 star:		(38)

 

 

After reading the reviews, but also talking to some people who have read Erikson's works, I must say I found myself to be an oddity. I neither love nor hate Erikson's works. Or, to be more precise, I love and hate them at the same time.

The problem with this book (as well as the entire Malazan series) is that both the proponents and the opponents are right. That is, Erikson's writing has some excellent points, but it has some major weaknesses itself. It's one of the very rare cases where I'd describe the quality of the writing as "controversial".

First, the strong points. Erikson is an excellent worldbuilder. He's an excellent character builder. He's a great plotbuilder. He's got all the qualities a good fantasy writer needs. If you find a plotline, you're guaranteed to find it well constructed. If you find a well-formed character, you'll find him/her believable and coherent. If you find some world description, it'll surely be breathtaking.

Now, the weak points. It's no coincidence that I started each of the sentences in the previous paragraph with "if you find". The problem with Erikson is, sometimes you get tired of searching. I think the one quality Erikson lacks most is underlining. Even mediocre fantasy authors know that in order to get the reader focused on their writing, they have to let him know what's important in the book and what's not. Erikson seems to ignore this truth - he seems to be constantly poking the reader, telling him "there are no less important parts in the book, everything is equally important".

To show how much this is an issue, a comparison. I find that Martin actually cares for the reader's attention and keeps track of his main characters and plotlines - I don't have such feeling with Erikson. The Malazan series are full of intricate descriptions of places that you'll never again see and that have no plot meaning, of characters that you focus on and study their development only to have them disappear and never show up again, finally, of plotlines that you consider major but that suddenly turn up to be only side-events of no real meaning.

Then again, though I consider myself a capable reader, I also tend to be somewhat impatient. For a more patient reader, the abovementioned downsides might not be a problem at all - if you're the type of reader who reads the entire book inside out and remembers all the tiny details such as what the serving maid on page 154 wore, you're bound to love Erikson's books. Remember, his writing is really excellent - it's the "look and feel" that might scare you off. If you've had problems tracking through Martin or Hobb, you might want to stay off this one - just to avoid straining your nerves.

Now where do I start? Gardens of the moon is the first book in a series of 10 (5 out so far) based on at least 5 continents and I estimated over 10 different character POV per book. There is also about 300, 000 years of relevant history, numerous different species and a completely different system of `magic' to the regular fantasy fare. With countless mysteries and good number of extremely powerful beings it is quite hard to get your head around it at first. So I will try my best in this review to give you a good idea of what to expect from the series as a whole.

Firstly if you are looking for any of the following, beware!

A young nobody (or lost prince) finds famous sword, hacks up baddy, saves the world

Main characters that never seem to die

A light read i.e. Few brain cells or imagination required (Harry Potter?)

Author spoon feeding i.e. everything is explained immediately

Elves, Orcs, Hobbits, goblins etc

After about 100 pages of gardens of the moon you will be very confused, after about 200 it will be even worse, it was for me when I first read it. The story does pick up, but there are still a number of things that will have your head spinning. Erikson is not the type to give info dumps so the brain cells will have to stay sharp while reading this book since the info is spread through all the books. The first book is the weakest of the 5 currently published simply because it is impossible to fully understand everything that happens since you don't have enough information about the Malazan world. But perseverance pays of tenfold as soon as the second book and there is hardly any filler (WOT?) so it is worthwhile not to skim through.

To give a head start I would say that there are 2 definite constants in the Malazan world. The first is convergence which means that power draws other power. And the second one is a balance of that power. It is also useful to condition your thinking and remember that this is a completely different world and is not based on LOTR or D&D, for example a god is not one in the conventional sense, but is just a powerful being who commands a warren (a realm can be used to release magic into the Malazan world).

Even though gardens is a good book, there will always be debate about its quality since it is quite complex and a lot of people can't take that. However, that debate dies off after Book 2 (Deadhouse Gates) , which even with a good dose of extra mystery is easier to follow and the Erikson proves himself as top class with incredible story that leaves most people very numb and wanting more. If you are not hooked after that there is still some hope as book 3 (memories of ice) is in my opinion even better.

There will invariably be comparisons made to George Martin's (another favourite of mine) song of ice and fire. Which is fair since they are both gritty and main characters can and do die. However, I would say that Martin is more character driven, while Erikson is more event or plot driven. But both do it so well that they are arguable writing the best ongoing fantasy series at present, other really don't come close.

So you should get into the Malazan series if you're looking for:

A powerful story that will blow you away

An intriguing web of plots with no clichés

A chance to test the limits of your imagination

A different world you can really get into

Enjoy.

There's good new and no so good news.

The good new is, Erikson's "The Gardens of the Moon" is a fat, intelligent and wonderfully convoluted fantasy novel. Along with Ricardo Pinto's quite dissimilar but equally intelligent "The Chosen", this is one of the best genre debuts to appear in the last two or three years. (As an aside: Erikson is a Canadian, now living in the UK. Pinto is Portuguese, but also lives in the UK. Hmm, wonder if I should emigrate too? After all, look at Poirot... Quite good for the little grey cells, it seems).

The not so good news (well, the daunting news, at least) is that "Gardens" seems to be the first of a projected 10-volume series. Oh dear! Not again!

Of course, the good news is not going to sound too good if you don't like "military" fantasy. "Gardens" is very much about war, dealing as it does with the Empress of Malazan attempting to conquer, by foul means rather than fair, everything in (and indeed out of) her site. There's a lot of intrigue and a lot of politics, and there's a hell of a lot of (deftly distributed) historical background, but in this first instalment at least, that's what it pretty much boils down to.

Conversely, the not so good news is going to sound very sweet if you're the sort of reader who gobbles up each and every of Glen Cook's "Black Company" books the moment they appear. "Gardens" is not only similar to the Black Company series in that it deals mainly with the often magical struggles between irreconcilable and not quite comprehensible adversaries, but also in that it generally depicts events from the viewpoint of the more or less "ordinary" soldier (sorcerous or otherwise). Erikson is, however, better at this than Cook; he is also rather more ambitious.

Think of it this way: "Gardens" is reminiscent of Cook, if Cook wrote like George R.R. Martin. That should give you an idea.

Finally: this is not a book for the casual reader. If you tend to read a chapter or so every few weeks, don't bother. You're bound to get confused. There're just too many characters, too many deviations, too many goings-on. This is one of those books that demands your attention.

Well then, that's that. I'm off to England!

A friend who picked this book up in England mailed it to me, and I have mixed feelings about that. I'm glad I got to see a book that I might not otherwise have found; but hope it doesn't mean that it'll be difficult to obtain the sequels! Finding it on Amazon gives me hope...

There were times when I admired the author's willingness to drop the reader into the middle of the world/story, and let details about the world unfold around them; there were other times when I found it disorienting and annoying. If it was a conceit that was deliberate, then my advice would be that it was only partially successful. If the reader's viewpoint had consistently been that of a character who shared the sense of "this is all strange to me", it might have been easier to take. It was sometimes difficult to feel as if you were the only person who didn't understand the ramifications of various references, and yet you were unable to ask the questions you would if you were on the scene. However, I sympathize with what I might guess is the wish to avoid needless exposition -- in a book as long as this one is anyway, stopping every page to deliver a paragraph of explanation might have bogged it down before it could ever get rolling.

A word about orientation -- should the author or anyone in connection with the book ever decide to peek at these online reviews, some advice. This was a book in which a map at the beginning wasn't just a luxury, but a necessity. Throughout the book, too much of the comprehension of the overall plot hinged upon references to the wider world outside of the campaign on which the book focused. It was a mistake, I feel, only to include a map of Genabackis. From the opening pages, taking place in Itko Kan, I wasted frustrating minutes trying to place that on the map, only to understand much later that it was off the map, elsewhere; later, I felt that it became important to the plot to understand Genabackis' relative position to Unta, or to the Seven Cities; or to understand the extent of the Empire in relation to the world, or the lands from which the Pannion Seer might come.

Without a map of the full world to help ground me, I felt as disoriented by the invisibility of the world around Genabackis as I did by the lack of expository stage-setting at the beginning of the book.

Don't let this griping fool you into thinking that I didn't enjoy the book and don't, as my subject line says, eagerly await more. Despite an agreement with another reviewer here that the names sometimes were oddly distracting, by about the middle of the book I'd gotten used to them, and felt an attachment to the world and its characters. I want to find out what happens next!

The first thing I'll say is that I probably would have stopped reading this novel after a couple hundred pages except for two things:

1. Many reviews here mentioned it's slow going and confusing at first, but picks up near the end.

2. I'd actually read the prologue of the third book in the series (Memories of Ice) first, and had been blown away by the writing and imagery.

In the end, I'm glad that I continued reading, but I'm going to start with my dislikes because I want to end this review on a positive note.

The book as a whole is somewhat confusing initially because the author throws a huge amount of names at the reader. Places are given little 'context' and a large cast of characters is introduced quite quickly. For awhile, each chapter or couple of chapters then introduce more places and more characters. It is not easy to keep all of it straight. Sometimes the reader is left to wonder what a word means when referencing a character. ie, there's one specific case where one character notices another, but the word used to describe the new character could be anything from the character's name, his rank, or even his race. Erikson is also not particularly good about describing the non-human races. I'm a believer that mannerisms or descriptions of non-human races shouldn't be the focus of every sentence in which they speak or act, but I do think that a description to fix their 'look and feel' in the mind of the reader should be done fairly quickly, and Erikson often doesn't include any of this until well after a race is mentioned for the first time.

His descriptions of battle scenes can be quite confusing in this book. Plus, I was left wondering why the two sides shown in the beginning needed such huge 'traditional' armies when magic more or less trumped them the way a nuclear bomb would trump a World War II army.

The characters are pretty stereotypical in most cases, and there really isn't much fleshing out of them as time goes on. This, by the way appears to be the case through at least the third book in the series. If a character changes, it's usually because of an outside influence that forces the change, not due to any real character development (there are a couple of exceptions).

The final thing that I didn't really like was that the characters often seemed to be behaving more like "Dungeons and Dragons" roleplaying parties rather than real people. There were times when it literally felt like I was reading multiple D&D adventures rather than a coherent novel.

So what did I like about the book? The first thing is that it's part of a much better series than this first novel would indicate. Without giving much away, many of the characters in this novel have significant backstories and depth that only becomes revealed in the later novels.

I liked that the world was dark and felt reasonably realistic for a magic heavy novel. It focuses a great deal on politics and war, and generally does a good job. The magic itself, while mechanically confusing initially (and it gets better explained later in the series) is quite interesting.

Even though Erikson's ability to introduce an intensely evocative scene isn't at full strength in this novel, there are hints of it from time to time when you can almost see an epic image or sequence in your mind's eye as if it were on a movie screen.

I know I haven't given much of a synopsis of the novel itself, and the main reason is that I finished it over a year ago. While I remember specific scenes in great detail, the overall flow and plot of the novel eludes me. This isn't really a negative knock, as I have this problem with a great many books, but my impression is the plot does meander and take awhile to actually get anywhere. Still, if you have the time and patience to get through what really feels like a prologue to the rest of the series, I think it's worth it. I might recommend that you do what I did and pick up "Memories of Ice" in a bookstore, and read the prologue. If it hooks you, I think you'll find the build up worth it. While I gave the book '3 stars' (and this isn't one of those cases where it's really 3 1/2 stars to me), the series up through 3 1/2 books is closer to 4 - 4 1/2 stars.

I received the first three books in the series as a gift from a friend who thought that I would enjoy them. I did enjoy this first book, but not without reservations.

The Malazan Book of the Fallen introduces a very complex fantasy world with nation politics, a multi-tiered magic/religion system, multiple races, and a whole lot of fighting. Often when a writer is going to introduce the reader to this kind of fantasy world, they do it through the eyes of a child coming of age. Both the main character and the reader get introduced at the same moment to the key concepts when you begin with this kind of trope. Erikson provides no such easy way out for the reader. You are flung from the beginning into a swiftly moving situation, and left on your own to figure out what everything means. Although this does eventually work, it takes quite a while to get into the book as a result. Many readers may give up before getting to the point where they understand what is going on in Gardens of the Moon.

Ultimately, I was intrigued by the world of the novel. It is very heavy on the battle detail, which may turn off some more magic-and-intrigue-oriented fantasy fans. I found the characters to be the strongest point (something that I would not have predicted during the first few chapters). The personalities feel quite real. Sometimes the very reality is distracting, as Erikson layers out even the most minor of characters with an attendant set of quirks and personality traits.

Gardens of the Moon is a very long book. Furthermore, it is a very dense long book. The amount of material that he crams into the 657 pages is huge and quite probably too much. Still, he nearly gets away with it-- and given how complex the project is, that achievement is enough to keep me reading into the next in the series.

If you are a reader who likes George R.R. Martin and feel like you can tolerate even more complexity, then this might be a book for you. If your fantasy tastes run more to Lynn Flewelling and Mercedes Lackey, then I suggest you take a miss on The Malazan Book of the Fallen.

This is a superb book, and is quite challenging to read. But once you get used to the way the writer writes, you will be surprised. This is a book full of action, there is always something happening, and you don't just see it through one persons view-point but several. There are several characters it is based around, not just one main character.

The story is a fantastic one and can be quite complex. You try to work out what will happen or why it happens before you are told. The beginning may be a bit confusing but later on you start to understand it more clearly. I would say this is probably one of those books where there are some people who will get hooked on it and then those who may not like it at all. But I would say give it a try.

I had loads of fun reading this book and recommend it to anyone who likes fantasy books and it is a challenging one. I would also recommend it to any other book reader. This is my second favourite book of all time, and I can't wait to start reading Deadhouse Gates which is a follow on from this one. Well Done Steven Erickson, keep the excellent work up.

Overall: Fast pace, astonishingly detailed, innovative, powerfully engaging, massive, panoramic and highly intelligent. An author to watch out for.

Before I grab a long epic read, I like to understand what I'm getting into. This 10 book epic is 3.5M words long! This first book has lovers and others that have weighed in with opinions. For me, Erickson hits it out of the park in every volume though you won't know how well until book 10.

Waiting on book 10:

The whole is much greater than the sum of its parts in Erickson's approach. As I read the book by book review of this epic by Amazon readers, they are not much help. None of the individual installments stand on their own but are a distinct reading pleasure within the total.

After reading nearly 10,000 pages of Malazan-world, you should understand that you are making a long term commitment of 100's of reading hours. The good news - It's worth it ... stick it out. The bad news ... book 10 promises to close the epic.

I'm choosy in where I invest reading time in massive fantasy. I've been gyped. JRR Tolkien finished the first modern fantasy epic. How Erikson wraps up the 10,000 page epic should be a wonder.

Given the wonder, I cannot recommend this entertainment highly enough to you. After 10k pages, the mystery for me is whether it's 80% fantasy and 20% ScFi or vice versa or neither. The conclusion should answer that question. This work is interchangeably intensely dark and ineffably noble. The reader must glean the differences that are buried in the many levels of complexity as the story unfolds. Erickson's command of the language is the best I've ever seen and is subtly significant to the story. Philosophical threads are profoundly explored across the volumes. The reader is kept unsettled in distinguishing the nature of selflessly good and monstrous evil. Erikson's writing style pushes the readers own command of language to reveal the masterpiece that the Malazan books represent.

My only issue, and it's not trivial, is that the 10 book series really, really needs a reference companion. There are hundreds of characters, dozens of races, 300,000 years of active story, a global map never revealed, and maps that might be the worst I've ever seen for following the volume being read. I gave up on trying to discern location, distance and destination language. Characters appear and disappear from the narrative but return two or three volumes later. This not normally an issue except that Erickson's characters are so vastly different and unique that a quick refresher is needed for reference.

BOOK 10 update:

Erickson closes the curtain on this magnificently entertaining mega-epic after 3.5M words. Individually, each of the 10 volumes is 5-star, none stand better than another in their turn and they have kept this reader eager and wanting. In total, the now complete 10 volume read is rather off the scale for a numerical rating in my humble opinion. I can't imagine that a fantasy reader can claim knowing the genre without completing the Tale of the Malazan. It's for that reason that relating the story in a review does an injustice for the masterpiece that I think will be the legacy in years to come. The Tale of the Malazan is simply too massive, too complex, too nuanced to be adequately related.

Erikson's style has remained on the edge of a kind of fantastical insanity with each volume. His style is disturbing and gritty at more levels of emotion, philosophy and logic then a reader might absorb. His mastery of characters is stunning in their entanglement in the tale. His mastery of the mind numbingly horrific opening line is rather unparalleled. The reader must strain to climb the wall of image intensity that Erikson paints in words, themes, characters and scale. Erikson's work is philosophical, psychological and compelling in the fantasy that he has so intricately woven. Depravity, emotion and nature are unleashed in an assault on the reader's senses.

Through book 9, an ending was a great mystery and seemingly impossible to imagine. Book 10 would make or break all that Erikson had produced before. Book 10 quite simply delivers on all levels. The tapestry woven in the 10 volume story is absolutely stunning.

Bravo Steven Erikson!

It's always a question for fantasy fans: do I really want to read a first book in yet another long series? Remember when we moaned about when everything was a trilogy--now I'll be happy to take a simple three-book series. Wouldn't it be great if you could tell ahead of time if the trip will be worth it? Well, thanks to the quirks of international publication, you can with the Malazan Book of the Fallen. Gardens, the first book, may be the only book out in the States, but there are four others already released in Canada and I'm happy to report that while there are some hit and miss points, and certainly some flaws, overall the series (a projected ten-book one) is well worth jumping into with Gardens of the Moon.

This is gritty world and war fantasy; you won't find slender glowing elves or small sheltered folk. In tone and character, this one is pretty much a direct descendant of Glen Cook's Black Company series (minor digression--if you haven't read that, you should. By the time you're done there should be a few more Malazan books out there--in paperback no less). To recognize the familiarity is not to do any injustice to Erikson, however, whose world is rich in characters, race, and magic and highly original.

There's no point in recapping plot since a) there's too much of it b) it's way too complex c) it starts in the middle really and you'd have to also explain what precedes it and d) it turns out it isn't the plot you thought it was anyway. Suffice to say that the plot is generally one of the book's and series' strengths and involves among other things sundry wars of empire and rebellion, political infighting, and competition among various Ascendants (god-like beings), Gods, and Ascendant Wannabes At times Erickson seems to layer complexity for complexity's sake and sometimes seems to pull a twist out of his, ummm, out of nowhere just because he can, but it's multi-layered and intriguing throughout. And it isn't handed to you. Expect to have to figure some things out, expect to get some things wrong. And don't expect everything to have answers or resolutions or even explanations. Something to look forward to is that explanations/background are almost always forthcoming, if not here than in future books. I kind of like not having every first reference to something (a race, a form of magic, a place) be introduced with a paragraph or page of clumsy exposition--"Why look, it's a Faruvian Waldorf. How strange to see it in this place when we all thought they were wiped out in the third age when Astor the Mighty corrupted all four-legged creatures and waged a war of attrition with . . . " The lack of explanation can be frustrating at times, but it's a stimulating frustration.

Characterization is a bit shallow in the first book, partially because there are so many and the plot so layered that it's tough to commit the time to them to give them the depth they need. And Erikson relies a bit too much on telling us what a character is rather than having the trait reveal itself or develop (the undying loyalty some characters inspire, for instance). But many of the characters deepen as the books add up. Those that survive that is. Another welcome touch is that Erikson isn't shy about killing off characters we've spent some time with. the luxury of ten books and hundreds of characters. He also does a much better job with camaraderie than with romance. Luckily, there's much more of the former than the latter so he plays to his strength.

The world creation is original, detailed, and varied. The geography is spacious, covering events on several continents throughout the series. The time period is literally millennia-based which adds to the richness of events. Since some of the characters are immortal (while others strive to be), past is seldom simply prologue here. These are people with long memories, long grudges, and long-lying plans. The basis of the magical system is revealed bit by bit in its interesting and as far as I know highly unique fashion. Alchemy and rough munitions work side by side with the magic as well.

Flaws can be found, as mentioned, in some of the weak characterization and overly complex plotting. And as the books go on Erikson seems to fall prey to a "create the baddest toughest creature in a fight" who then somehow is taken down by someone even tougher despite his being the "toughest" pattern. A equals B and B equals C but somehow A kicks C's butt. that happens a bit too often.

But in the long view (the very long view--these are not slim books and there are a lot of them), the series is a welcome addition to the fantasy genre and Gardens a strong start. Strong enough that when I finished it I went ahead and ordered all the rest from Amazon Canada rather than wait for them to come out in the States. In fact, I had them shipped courier so I could get them before taking off on vacation. The extra money is testament enough to their enjoyment. The books aren't all equal in quality, but the trend is toward improvement, with the noticeable addition of more and better-written humor in the last two. A strong recommendation for this book and the series as a whole.

Erikson avoids the slow introductory phase in most fantasy by omitting it completely. "Gardens of the Moon" begins in the middle of the war, with little hint of why the war started. Mages hurl bolts of energy with no explanation of the magic system save the power sources called "Warrens," dimensional rifts that cleverly take the characteristics of each type of power. The pace thankfully quickens once the action moves to Darujhistan, then slows with divine meddling outside the city. The endgame occurs in the deliciously subtle setting of a masquerade party, but the conclusion resolves only one plot thread.

"Gardens" moves through several dozen point-of-view characters, but this scope leaves some major ones ignored. Whiskeyjack is absent for a hundred pages after the first sections. After being featured in the first chapters, Paran is absent for two hundred pages in the middle. With demigods scheming and gods walking in a mortal's dreams, the human characters feel insignificant. Their actions don't hold much weight when demigods wield soul-stealing swords and dead human characters are brought back to life by sorcery or divine will.

Most of these myriad characters are vividly drawn, especially the jester Kruppe. Only a few have interesting motivations, such Whiskeyjack's angst about the war and Rake's concern for his people. Except for Paran's conclusion and a thief who falls in love, no character develops through the novel. They scheme and react, they fight, they die and come back from the dead, but they never grow.

The Malazan saga invites comparison with the current master of epic fantasy, George R. R. Martin, especially since Erikson's publisher Tor compares them in their own press release. Although equally epic and detailed as Martin's "Song of Ice and Fire," Gardens falls far short of Martin's work in believability and characterization. Martin's characters are all realistically drawn; they grow and change. In the absence of meddling gods, their actions have consequences and their deaths are final. Erikson's characters are flat and the humans' actions ring hollow.

Despite this, "Gardens of the Moon" still outpaces almost all other current fantasy.