The Reread of the Fallen
In my mind, there is a difference between "High" Literature and "Low" Literature. I use quotes because there is no judgement of quality. I actually don't have that much patience for some stuff I consider high literature, and most of my favorite books I would consider low literature.
What's the difference? For me, High Literature is not there for me, it wasn't written for me. In my view, High Litertaure is when the author has something to say, and must say it, and the book is the only way they found to say the thing they want to say. There's something inside of the author that must be taken out. Audiences, formulas, plot conventions, "readability", all of it be damned or, at least, it takes a distant back seat for that which must be done.
Of course, the people that happen to be authors happen to have read a lot and practiced a whole lot, they have internalized a literary universe which allows what they do to be amazing in ways that are deeply unique, in ways that transcends convention and mere literary analysis. High literature can suck, it can be deeply flawed. It can also border the unreadable sometimes. It can also become its own genre as modernity progresses and the very universe of High Literature wraps tighter and tighter into itself and forms its own conventions. But I digress.
I don't think that Fantasy has a lot of high literature under this definition. Tolkien, and Erikson. Maybe TWoT, I haven't read it. I think pretty much the rest of the people I've read are writing novels with the main intention of giving the audience a nice ride. Nothing wrong with that, I've seen the Brandon Sanderson Writing Courses on YouTube and really enjoyed listening to him talk about his craft, as much as I dislike his writing. Abercrombie is amazing, but he's writing for me and I can tell.
Malazan doesn't feel it is for me at all. Erikson clearly had something to say about compassion, and everything else took a backseat to the delivery of that message, book in book out. Erikson clearly had a whole world that was just spilling out of him in its complexity, a world that, quite frequently, one feels he doesn't fully understand! Many times I felt that I was reading him walk away from a certain scene, from a certain explanation, not only to build mistery for the reader but because he himself didn't want to spoil his own magic trick.
I don't think there has ever been an author in fantasy so brave in thinking about magic (whenever I say these things, take into account I have big debts with the genre, Hobb and Wolfe mainly). With Fantasy, as I grew up and started reading history and understanding the world a bit more, it was always a bit jarring to go back to read Fantasy because the worlds, including the magic, seemed awfully simple, like a kids play. Characters worked mostly as expected, and Magic did as well. Once you read a bit about the thousands of overlapping little factors, the bunch of shit that doesn't make sense, that happens in history around every single event, fiction that is too ambitious about the size of the world it imagines can feel just plain silly. Erikson brings in the true complexity of three fundamental things (People, Politics and Magic) to the fore and has no qualms about the sheer scale of each of them. Of course, one person can't really contain all that (there's a thread about authors and the idea of the Shield Anvil here, but I'll leave it unexplored).
That Magic, if it existed in the ways "High Fantasy" has thought of it, must behave in ways that are poetical and political, both whimsical and logical, that it should be as complex as the world it lives in, and to make a weird knot of magical conceits the very center of your plot is an incredible bet, that surely pays off in how beautiful it all is, and in being so expansive you can end up with a fairly ok understanding of how it "works" without ever achieving anything close to understanding it fully... which is the point. Even at the very end, I'm still trying to wrap my head about what exactly went down, and trying to understand if I'm even meant to piece it together? Does even Erikson understand what happened?
I can see how someone after taking such a long trip can feel frustrated. I think its justified. Erikson really is asking you for a lot and, even close to the end, you think there may be a conversation in which its all made clear, that the mysteries will be unveiled, and I'm not sure that that moment ever actually comes (it does come sometimes, for some of the stuff, and its so exciting and rewarding). And that's also part of what Erikson is asking for you. And here, you have to really get into a High Literature mood: Erikson is trying to do something to me, not just make me happy I read this mountain. It really is thematic that you're left confused until the very end, in ways that I can't go into without spoilers.
But I will always despise the following line of commentary that usually comes up in this sub: "If you hated it so much, why did you read the whole thing?"... well... have you read the book? You don't see how it is so thematic the fact of putting yourself through something long and desperate, wanting to find something at the end that you get but not in the way that you expected? You can't see how someone can react negatively to that? That's the thing with high literature: hating it is as valid a reaction as liking it. If Erikson is not writing to please you, how could you dislike someone for sticking around willing to be displeased, and then coming here to share that displeasure? That's as a normal and valid reaction to this mess of a work as loving it.
One final point about characters: we have really gotten used to a certain way of characterization that comes from writing seminar, screenplay writing, the industrialization and modernization of fiction. Characters need to have a Personality with Strengths and Weaknesses, Motivations, they should have an Emotional Arc to feel "Fleshed Out" to the Reader. A satisfying Emotional Arc resolves the inner tension of the character. They should have clear ways of being that we can tally. But... have you met people? They are not characters. They don't have "Emotional Arcs", their actions are not clearly driven by motivations.They barely change at all! They are not reductible to a one-pager not because they are "more complex" but because people are not coherent at all if they (we) are not awfully simple and sometimes very inexpressive. I've read a lot of complaints about "Characterization" in Malazan or the lack of it. Well, yeah, he's mostly trying to write people. Some people, you can really stand them out. Some people are more generic. Some people don't show a lot of themselves. The characterization of Malazan, with its peaks and valleys, is also one of the high points of it. Tavore is a wonderful example, one of the slowest, most austere, best characters in fantasy.
I wanted to do a spoiler free review. I think I will make another Spoilery post with like book rankings and character moments, but wanted to get this one off my chest. I have witnessed once more, and this time it felt more complete and satisfying. I'm happy I've read the Book of the Fallen twice.
EDIT (will also add this as a comment)
Non-Fantasy Books I think Malazan Readers would appreciate, I'll add a lot of essays that I think you'd like about or messy world, and just stuff that my intuition tells me a Malazan person would appreciate in their lives:
- Blood Meridian, No Country for Old Men and The Road by Cormak McCarthy
- Lonesome Dove by Larry McMurty
- Stalingrad: The Fateful Siege by Antony Beevor
- War and Peace by Tolstoi
- Crime and Punishment and Brothers Karamazov by Dostoievksy
- Cryptonomicon, Seveneves, Snow Crash by Neal Stephenson (and probably anything else by him)
- Hitler: 1889-1936 Hubris and Hitler: 1936-1945 Nemesis by Ian Kershaw.
- War and Peace and War and End Times: Elites, Counter-Elites, and the Path of Political Disintegration (Essays) by Peter Turchin
- Candide by Voltaire (kept thinking about Candide in the humorous parts of Malazan)
- The Path to Power (Volume 1 of Lyndon Johnson Biography) by Robert A. Caro
- Nothing is True and Everything is Possible by Peter Pomerantsev (essay about Russia)
- Hitler's Thirty Days To Power: January 1933 by Henry Turner Ashby Jr.
- Stalin: Paradoxes of Power and Stalin: Waiting for Hitler by Stephen Kotkin (incomplete Stalin biography)
- Fouché by Stefan Zweig
- SPQR: A History of Ancient Rome by Mary Beard
- Against Method by Paul Feyerabend