The Malazan Book of the Fallen, part 2

This is the part that needs a bunch of warnings. Spoiler warnings, first of all - I am not going to mask them in any way. Read on at your peril. And trigger warnings - the major part of my criticism of this series concerns the handling (and amount) of rape and torture, so I will be discussing those scenes in hopefully not too much detail.

First, though, let me talk about some purely technical stuff. The series is a major accomplishment of worldbuilding, yes. However, the balance between clever worldbuilding and the structural stability of the plot is important, and I think Erikson misses the mark here. There are too many characters who are built up as "major players" who have little or nothing to do in the finale. Icarium, for example, spends eight books being touted as the uncontrollable destroyer of worlds, and spends the entire last book unconscious and chained to the ground. His role as a deus ex machina in Dust of Dreams could have been performed by literally anybody - we don't even know it's him until the last minute. Karsa Orlong, likewise - his major accomplishment takes place in Reaper's Gale, but he's dragged along for the next three books for no detectable reason. Some subplots, like the Shake/Tiste Andii/Kharkanas one, take up a big chunk of space (and are apparently going to be explored in detail in a forthcoming trilogy) but don't overall add much of anything to the actual plot arc of the series. It's possible that a lot of this stuff will seem better integrated if I read the five outrigger novels written by Erikson's writing partner, but that really emphasizes how much of this was not planned adequately (or edited all that hard, although I can hardly blame an editor for not foreseeing which subplots to cut.)

The other major technical issue I have is the heavy-handedness of the Messages. They're worse in some books than in others - for example, Midnight Tides is my least favorite of the novels partly because its full of melodrama, but mostly because it was written as a scathing indictment of modern Western capitalism (probably just American capitalism, actually.) It would have been bearable if Erikson didn't use every other scene as a soapbox to rail about debt, colonialism, the profit motive in military conquest, treatment of the poor, of veterans, etc and etc. The empire of Lether is cleverly created to illustrate these points, and it would have done so just fine without all the explicit ranting. Toll the Hounds has the same problem, one or the other of them is a little too Religion is Bunk even for me, and in Dust of Dreams the message appears to be Women are Vindictive Shrews who Hate One Another.

Which brings us to our next problem. As I said in the previous post, Erikson has a lot of female characters and generally handles them as well-rounded, fully-developed people.

Who get raped a lot.

Not all of them, sure, and some of them are handled in ways that show he's at least trying - the mid-battle rape of Stonny in Memories of Ice, and her immediate, bloody, and immensely appropriate revenge (and subsequent trauma) is probably one of the better ones, and the fate of Felisin in the mines seems realistic both in terms of sheer human behavior (young, powerless woman uses sex to secure protectors in a no-rules prison environment) and her individual reaction (serious trust and intimacy issues, a relationship with sex that even the male characters of dubious morals recognize is pretty fucked-up.) But those are the best-handled ones, and there's a long, long downslope. Seren Pedac gets really drunk after witnessing her friend's suicide and gets gang-raped, and Erikson makes a totally hamhanded effort to explain that of course this isn't her fault or anything, it was still caused by her subconscious desire to punish herself. Which is only minorly tolerable in that it's explained by the person who slaughtered her rapists, so his opinion of the excusability of their behavior is pretty clear. (And then he arranges for her to get some magical therapy, which... ok, fine. I guess.)

But then we have Karsa Orlong, who considers rape a privilege of victory in battle (he later - many books later, when Erikson is obviously trying to rehabilitate his character - explains that he only rapes people because of the drugs his tribe used to make them fearless, but this is a total retcon - the first rape scene explicitly made reference to the fact that he didn't use the drug.) We have Shurq Ellale, an undead woman who needs to feed her sorcery by having sex with men, and who incidentally rapes a guard in the house she's robbing. (This is given zero attention, explanation, or justification.) We get many, many incidental scenes, mentions, and threats of rape throughout. And then there's Hetan.

Hetan is a woman we first meet in Memories of Ice. She's a member of a barbarian tribe, the daughter of the warlord who rules all the tribes. She's clearly a sexually liberated woman - she sleeps with a number of the male characters in an aggressive way, which is totally played as consensual and for laughs, and her brother witnesses all of this and clearly thinks it's just fine. She's also clearly described as a ferocious warrior, and it's clear that in her culture women are not only fighters, but tremendously effective ones. (They're humanoid but not actually human - the genetic relationship is never fully explained but they physically differ from your garden-variety human.)

We don't see her again until Dust of Dreams, where she's married to Tool, who has taken over leadership after her father's death, and she has twins by one of the funnier earlier encounters and a son by her husband. Now her tribe as portrayed as totally patriarchal (despite offhand references to female warriors and clan leaders) and the women as totally beaten-down and oppressed. Hetan is criticized a number of times, offhandedly, as being a slut. And when Tool is killed, the "traditional" "punishment" is delivered to his family - his children are to be killed (the ten-year-old girls will be raped first so they can "carry [their killer's] seed to the gods.") And his wife will be maimed and then raped until her will is broken, then kept around to be "used" at the whim of any male of the tribe. The women carry out the maiming and then stand around and cheer as she's raped - one of them later explains that as long as there's a "hobbled" woman around, their husbands are less likely to brutalize them in bed. The book is filled, as well, with examples of women being shrewish, jealous, possessive, insecure, and horrible to one another, in the usual fashion of "Erikson tries to make a point."

So. Yeah. First of all, the idea that a tribe would allow their women extensive weapons training and combat experience, and then treat them like disposable sex toys, seems totally, ragingly implausible. And also unwise. So I tend to think that Erikson made this change in order to come up with the worst possible fate for Tool's family, so that his audience would believe that he'd lose his temper. (And he does, briefly, but he then calms down and his little tantrum doesn't seem to have any long-term consequences.) And that's where I have a problem. This isn't a natural consequence of war or a desperate scheme gone horribly wrong, this is a situation specifically crafted so he can describe a mutilation and gang-rape. And when I think of these books, that's the image I think of. Not the heartbreaking conclusion to Deadhouse Gates, not any of the well-earned rewards the survivors get at the end of the series, not any of the thrilling battles or cunning plots. It's this one deliberately shocking image. And so I don't actually recommend these books much, and I won't recommend them at all to women. It's a damned shame.