The Crippled God

You might imagine that it's difficult to write about the tenth and final book in a series without taking a step back and viewing the entire series as a unit. The inertia of over 3 million words and close to 11,000 pages just does not allow for no retrospection at all.
The Crippled God alone is a difficult book to read since it bears the weight of all the unfinished narratives in the previous nine volumes. In some ways, the nearly 1200 pages feel rushed, moving often from viewpoint to viewpoint sometimes after only a few paragraphs. Needless to say, I cannot with any conscience recommend that someone unfamiliar with the other books even look at The Crippled God; it would simply be opaque to all attempts to understand what is going on.
Nonetheless, The Crippled God typifies what has made the Malazan Book of the Fallen such an entertaining and thoughtful series. Despite the cast of hundreds (if not thousands), each character has a unique voice and backstory that is brought to the fore upon their appearance. And although most of the characters are soldiers fighting for causes they sometimes barely understand, the book steadfastly refuses to become cynical. It's too easy for world-weary fighters to think the worst of people, and Erikson refuses to take that path. Instead, his writing emphasizes the individual humanity of the characters, ticking through their foibles (sometimes with tremendous humor) and ultimately the family-like nature of their companionship as they work and fight for a common cause. The resulting emotion is the opposite of cynicism—it's one of tremendous hope, especially as the human armies gather more and more unlikely allies in their struggle. These allies recognize the strengths of being human—that same hope, but also perseverance and sacrifice—and it causes them to join when otherwise they might not.
Erikson accomplishes this by actually concentrating the narrative more on the individuals in the midst of the struggle than on the global effects of the struggle. Anywhere from a third to half of the novel is interior dialogue, characters thinking to themselves about their circumstances, their histories, and their future. This also has the effect of slowing down the reading, forcing the reader to follow the trains of through that are often more twisty than the action taking place in the physical sphere. It's powerful writing, much the same that endeared the reader to these characters and their stories volumes ago. It's just more than what we usually get.
The Crippled God is a fine capstone to a magnificent series, one that will influence fantasy writing for years to come. My first two reactions upon finishing the series are indicative of its power: for the last 25 pages or so I held back tears until I could do so no longer. These are characters that I have come to know and appreciate, fully realized and brimming with personality. To read the conclusions to their paths was emotional, and to recognize the appropriateness of each was even more so. I wept not just for the loss of the characters as the last book concluded, but for the mastery Erikson used to create and portray them. My second reaction was to go back and start over, to recapture the joys of discovery and to discover more as threads I had lost over the last decade of reading were brought back together. And I am confident that I will reread them all someday, perhaps not soon as my book stack has grown large over the past few weeks. But I'm sure thoughts of the story and the characters will return again and again until I pick the books up for another reading.

Fantasy and Nihilism

It was news to me. Apparently my reading tastes are leading to the downfall of Western civilization. My teachers must be so proud.

On 14 February, a blogger on the ultra-conservative Web site Breitbart wrote about how modern fantasy is destroying the obvious pattern of easily recognized good and evil in the "good old stuff," especially Tolkien and Howard (http://bighollywood.breitbart.com/lgrin/2011/02/12/the-bankrupt-nihilism-of-our-fallen-fantasists/). In a nutshell, and in high-falutin' language as well, blogger Leo Grin says

But it was only recently, after decades of ever-increasing reading disappointment, that I grudgingly began to admit the truth: I don't particularly care for fantasy per se. What I actually cherish is something far more rare: the elevated prose poetry, mythopoeic subcreation, and thematic richness that only the best fantasy achieves, and that echoes in important particulars the myths and fables of old.

This realization eliminates, at a stroke, virtually everything written under the banner of fantasy today.

It seems Grin is well-read, based on his examples of fantasy "soiling the building blocks and well-known tropes of our treasured modern myths" but there are a couple of ways to argue with his vision that offer a more expansive and perhaps even mature view of how literature, and perhaps the world at large, actually works.

The first is to point out that perhaps he isn't as well read as he thinks he is, or perhaps not as close a reader as he would like. You see, I (and a lot of other people as it turns out) have a real issue with setting up Tolkien and Howard's works as stereotypes of a heroic form. Taken as a whole, Tolkien's works are about the fallen nature of the world, how everything seems to be getting progressively worse and worse since the golden age when gods walked the earth. In fact, this downward progression of civilization is a common point amongst most of the major Western mythologies, from Greek to Norse, and including Christianity—where man has been booted from the garden of paradise itself. Tolkien probably recognized this pattern as he appropriated it for his own use through his works. Remember, the end of The Lord of the Rings is not a triumphant celebration of the heroes' return, but a sad departure as those heroes leave Middle Earth for the Grey Havens, as there is no longer a place for them in the world of men.

Similarly, I think Howard would be appalled at the idea of using Conan as a role model. If anything, Conan typifies the attitude of doing whatever it takes to get by. He tries to spill as little innocent blood as he can, with varying degrees of success. He despises civilization, not for the advances it makes, but for the effect those advances have on individuals, that of often removing individuality and making them reject the moral values of independence for indolence and sloth.

The dichotomy of these two paragraphs also represents a dichotomy in the very nature of these kinds of works. I would argue that Tolkien represents heroic/epic fantasy while Howard represents sword and sorcery (for an excellent description of the differences and a history of sword and sorcery, I recommend again the introduction to Swords and Dark Magic, edited by Lou Anders and Jonathan Strahan). The very goals of these two schools of fantasy are different, and to lump them together as though they are the same thing is a mistake. To be sure, they have the same roots, but their lineage and intent are far different. I would argue that sword and sorcery has always been about the individuals and the gray areas that they inhabit. In fact, the works of the three Big Names that Anders and Strahan cite as the seminal authors of sword and sorcery, Howard, Leiber, and Moorcock, are rife with moral ambiguity and gray areas. Fafhrd and the Gray Mouser are rogues and mercenaries, available to whomever will pay them the most money. Even their companionship is sometimes endangered by their taking different offers and finding themselves at odds with one another. The moral ambiguity of Moorcock's works I leave as an exercise for the reader, since it doesn't take much effort to refute the idea of Elric as moral icon.

So Grin holds up these two archetypes as examples of the golden nature of fantasy, and yet both Tolkien and Howard do not really contain the qualities that Grin pines for.

A second refutation would be to take a step sideways and talk about "taste." I find it odd that Grin (or anyone for that matter) clings to the idea that their decisions about what qualifies as good and bad writing are to be held out as the sole arbiter for that kind of decision. To be sure, it makes my position as an amateur literary and film critic difficult; here I am talking to people who read my blog about how I interpret the things that I read or watch. But I am always cognizant that it is my opinion, and that other folks may hold different opinions. I feel my job as a critic is to describe my perception of a work to such a point that a reader can use it as a touchstone upon which to build their own opinion. And sure, I can read Grin's blog as just his opinion, but there is a qualitative difference between discussing the relative merits of a work and saying that an entire genre is leading to the downfall of our culture:

In the end, it's just another small, pathetic chapter in the decades-long slide of Western civilization into suicidal self-loathing. It's a well-worn road: bored middle-class creatives (almost all of them college-educated liberals) living lives devoid of any greater purpose inevitably reach out for anything deemed sacred by the conservatives populating any artistic field. They co-opt the language, the plots, the characters, the cliches, the marketing, and proceed to deconstruct it all like a mad doctor performing an autopsy. Then, using cynicism, profanity, scatology, dark humor, and nihilism, they put it back together into a Frankenstein's monster designed to shock, outrage, offend, and dishearten.

One of the goals of my own writing is to open the door to conversation, for people to react to what I am saying and challenge me or expand on my thoughts, to help me better understand and appreciate the things that I am writing about. Grin's writing, on the other hand, seems intent on closing down conversation. It's hard not to read his long treatise without envisioning a petulant child, bottom lip poking out, muttering "it all sucks." And to that child, I would say—maybe, but perhaps it is just different than what you like.

So, here's the ironic thing about all this. On the same day that Grin published his diatribe, I posted my review of Steven Erikson's Dust of Dreams. And in his diatribe, Grin specifically calls out Dust of Dreams as an example of the fallen nature of modern fantasy, while I celebrate it for its power and effectiveness. It's interesting to note that Grin's opinion of Dust of Dreams seems to come only from his browsing through the Amazon reviews of the book, as his negative statements are quotes from them, without any opinion of his own added in other than a sort of "see, that's what I'm talking about." And it may come as no surprise that Grin cherry picks the reviews to find ones that reflect his opinion, leaving out ones with opinions to the contrary.

As you also can imagine, the response has been pretty harsh. I particularly enjoyed Joe Abercrombie's idea of a bunker from which civilization-ending fantasy writers irregularly expel their noxious books (http://www.joeabercrombie.com/2011/02/15/bankrupt-nihilism/). It's very odd to find people yearning for a return to a golden age that, upon closer examination, never really existed. But I'm also fairly sure that kind of fantasy writing is available to someone who really seeks it out. As for me, I grew tired of the same clichés and tropes. I appreciate the "new" direction fantasists have taken, in part because I see that direction as growing the genre, expanding it beyond the elements that have caused it to be condemned as unworthy of critical merit. And the funny thing is that there's room for folks like Grin and for people like me, all of whom appreciate what the genre has to offer to us, though perhaps different aspects of it. But I somehow doubt that Grin has any appreciation for the fallen readers like me.

Forget my teachers…my mom would be so proud. From the day she "caught" me taking some fantasy novels with Frazetta covers on them to church to exchange with a friend, she's been pretty convinced I'm contributing to the downfall of something or other. And now it's been confirmed.

Dust of Dreams

It used to be that high (or epic) fantasy always had an air of optimism about it: no matter how horrible the evil forces threatening the realm/line of succession to the throne/world, there was always a feeling that the good guys would win. This implies that there was a demarcation between good and evil in these books, and if we look back to perhaps the progenitor of the genre, The Lord of the Rings, it really is pretty clear who the myriad bad guys are versus the forces for good. I can't say for sure when this all changed, but I think one of the first to break apart this near-ubiquitous trope was Stephen Donaldson's Thomas Covenant books. I've written earlier about his Mordant's Need books, where Donaldson upsets the trope of the virile male hero fighting a straightforward series of battles, by having a non-descript and confused heroine fighting for reasons she doesn't truly understand. Donaldson's Covenant books do a similar thing to the idea of good versus evil, because the titular hero, Thomas Covenant, is among the most unlikable protagonists in all of speculative fiction. Donaldson spends a lot of time making Covenant distasteful, and while there are some interesting ideas in the plot of the books, a lot of the originality in them comes in the idea of a hero that the reader does not (or even cannot) like.

In some recent conversation with other fans of speculative fiction, I talked about (and discovered as I was saying it) that I've either grown past or grown tired of the recycled tropes of fantasy. This in turn has led me to the crop of fantasy writers I am enjoying now, like Patrick Rothfuss, Scott Lynch, and Joe Abercrombie, who just turn the genre on its head. I also realized that writers with larger portfolios, like Steven Brust and Guy Gavriel Kay, have been doing this all along, which explains in some part why I enjoy their work so much as well. This is not to say that similar trope-busting isn't taking place with other authors, but I have begun to recognize it in the things that I really like.

Which brings me in turn to Steven Erikson, author of the Malazan Books of the Fallen. I've written about some of his books in the past, about his tapestry-like structure of several stories going on all at once brought together in a conclusion with unexpected twists that still satisfy the reader. I've written about how he excels at characterization and dialog, and that while there may be some common characters and history between the books, there is not very much to link them. As it turns out, either I am not a very close reader—and with each volume weighing in at around 800 pages, it's easy to get lost in the plotlines—or he is exceptionally crafty, because Dust of Dreams is the first half of the novel that is going to attempt to tee everything up. This book and the just-out-in-hardback The Crippled God together form a single story that brings all the disparate plotlines and characters from the first right novels into another, though larger, neat bundle. And with this tying up, it has become clear to me just how cynical are the underpinnings of the series.

Unlike Abercrombie, who wears his distaste for the body politic on his sleeve, Erikson is a lot more subtle in his unflattering portraits. While Abercrombie's characters are just ambiguously moral—neither good or bad, or perhaps both good and bad—Erikson's characters act in ways that convince the reader to trust them and their opinion. And instead of that opinion turning out to be wrong, it is almost always excruciatingly right, casting the idea of culture and civilization as not evil, but unendingly arrogant and ignorant. The lesson seems to be that in general individuals are trustworthy, but their morality becomes shiftier as they group—which I would argue is a disturbingly accurate description of the American political process, if Erikson wanted to make that kind of observation. To be sure, there are evil and stupid individuals in Erikson's novels, but they are not common and they are sometimes played for laughs. But the heroes of his novels are given to introspection and observation, and nearly every one of them turns away from his vision of the contemporary world they inhabit with disgust.

This turning away from the old ways is a driving theme in Dust of Dreams, as it becomes explicit that the previous books have been leading up to a war between the old gods of this world and the new ones. Ironically, all the gods appear to want to use the human races of the world to their own ends, as pawns in a global chess game the complexity of which blows past such better known political games as the ones found in the Dune books. But it also becomes clear that the pawns have wills of their own, and armies begin to come together for some sort of great last battle without being sure on which side they will fight. There are probably more plot threads in this novel than in any of the other Malazan books, and the reader can see them beginning to twist into a single strand by the end of this book, remembering that this really is only the halfway point for the entirety that Erikson wanted to publish.

The result is perhaps the most difficult read in the first nine books of the series. Erikson's author's note at the beginning of Dust of Dreams offers apologies for how unlike the rest of the series this book is. Never before has one of his novels ended in a cliffhanger fashion, but Dust of Dreams lurches upon about the biggest precipice one can imagine for a series of books (unfortunately, revealing the nature of the cliff would constitute a far bigger spoiler than I dare commit to the Internet). Erikson's note also apologizes for the ungainly size of the novel, coming in at around 1300 pages. But Erikson's note also hits the right chords in its request for forbearance—he has a story he wants to tell, to bring the events of the previous books into a thoughtful and satisfying conclusion. He also jokes that trying to publish the volume as a single book would break the bookbinding process. And while the ending is different than we've come to expect, I find that the story is just as wittily written, the characters just as delightful, and the dialog just as provocative as what has gone before. But no longer can I entertain the possibility that the book can be read on its own; Erikson dredges up characters and circumstances from all of the earlier books in the process of pulling together the threads of his tapestry.

Nonetheless the series, and especially Dust of Dreams, remains a fascinating example of world-building and a magnificent act of storytelling. I've literally no idea how things are going to end up. And for all its power and craft, it's very difficult to recommend Dust of Dreams, just because it is the huge ninth volume of a ten-volume series. If one has not been reading until now, it marks a huge investment to get to this point. I honestly feel it's worth the investment, and I envy anyone taking up the gauntlet to discover these characters and Erikson's vision for the first time.

Bauchelain and Korbal Broach

I have not been shy about my enjoyment of the Malazan Book of the Fallen, a series by Steven Erikson. The world he has set the series in is incredibly dense and multi-layered, but the difficulty this could present to the reader is mitigated by the utterly accessible characters who are the center of the novels. The crisis in each book often has national, if not international importance, but instead of allowing the reader to be overwhelmed and perhaps numb to what happens, the point of view is always based on the characters we have spent hundreds of pages getting to know as individuals. And so the horrors of war, the nobility of sacrifice, the depths that make us human are thrown into sharp relief and exploited with deft hands. This is not to say that the books have no humor in them, but it is the humor of a well-loved friend or of witnessing people who have spent lifetimes together, alternating between despising one another and also knowing they would be completely lost without each other.

As Erikson has published the novels of the series, he also published some novellas in small press. While the novelettes thus far have nothing to do with the events in the novels, they remain poignant with the examination of humanity in alternately horrible and hysterical conditions. He doesn't much rely on the Malazan setting to tell stories that feel like they have been ripped from the pages of classic Weird Tales; instead they are set in a generically fantastic milieu, with only allusions to Malazan to portray their bigger setting without getting in the way. The focus is not national, but intensely local, even personal. And Erikson relies even more on the comedy of people interacting with the unknown to make the novels at once some of the funniest things I have read in a while and also some of the most suspenseful.

Meet Emancipor Reese, a man in his 60s or early 70s, whom friends have nicknamed Mancy the Luckless. It seems that any person who hires Reese does not live long enough to appreciate his hard-working nature, usually ending up dead within a few weeks of the hiring, usually in some horrible way, and in no way associated with Reese other than coincidence. As one might imagine, having a string of dead employers is difficult on one trying to find steady employment, and it is awfully suspicious to boot. And Reese is hard-suffering, trying to support his termagant wife and the children he is not sure are even his. So he finds himself answering a poster he found in his town square, describing two men looking for a manservant. Reese interviews with Bauchelain, a somewhat foppish intellectual that speaks in riddles that Reese, in a drunken state, thinks he can understand. When asked if he is willing to travel, Reese instantly agrees, anything to get away from his family while also ensuring that they will be well cared for in his absence. Reese doesn't meet his second employer, Korbal Broach, until days after he has been hired.

It turns out that Bauchelain is a magician of some sort, specializing in working with demons and preferring to do research rather than actually perform any spells. What Korbal Broach does is not clear to Reese, especially because he never really meets him. Ultimately we discover that Korbal Broach is, among other things, a necromancer, working with the dead (the more recent the better). In fact he is something of a savant, enjoying research and experimentation much like Bauchelain, but not quite so rigorous in his practice. And when Reese sobers up, he is more disgusted with where his luck has found him work than appalled at what his employers do. In fact he is a very human, supremely cynical witness to their activities but also unwilling to break his contract with them. His best method for dealing with their activities is to drown his sorrows in more alcohol and light narcotics, which somehow only further endears him to his employers that much more deeply.

The three novellas in this book describe the conditions of the three coming together and then two examples of their adventures. Erikson's style is nearly staccato—using chapters that are sometimes only a page-long as he jumps from character to character, participants and witnesses to the chaos that Bauchelain and Korbal Broach always seem to find themselves mired in. By far, the best story in the book is "The Lees of Laughter's End," wherein the three travelers find themselves aboard what appears to be a sturdy ship but soon discover that the ship, and its crew, are not quite everything they seem. Recent repairs to the ship have been made with nails made from the melting of artifacts stolen from graves, so each contains a little bit of the soul of the owner of the grave they were taken from. A reptilian monster lives in the bowels of the ship, leading to some unexpected interaction with the ghosts from the nails. The crew is captained by four soldiers on the run from a country from whom they stole mysterious artifacts, which now reside in the main hold. The watch upon the top of the main mast either suffers from multiple personalities or is possessed by the ghost of her mother. And then Korbal Broach looses his pet on board the ship while performing a fishing experiment off the keel, attracting all sorts of unwanted attention. Bauchelain struggles to respond to the disasters that simultaneously befall the ship, but accidentally takes a supernaturally aphrodisiac and must first work off its effects. And through it all, the stoic, cynical Reese just tries to survive. I found myself laughing merrily as chaos piled on top of chaos and the all-too-human characters try to respond to issues that are way beyond their pay grade. Of particular delight are the three characters who all share the same name, whose genders are not entirely clear (even to themselves), and who are drafted to see what's going on in the bowels of the ship.

Just describing what happens in the story should be indicative of the humor that lies underneath it. Any one of the supernatural events is suspenseful, but when Erikson continues to pile them all upon one another, the sheer weight of them all makes them more and more funny. And the shifting viewpoints of the chapters just add to the chaos and sharpens the comedy. Erikson even includes the viewpoint of the strange Cthuloid aggregation that is one of the terrors the crew must face, and it turns out that it is severely conflicted about what its lot in life (or unlife) as well. Erikson's craftiness is most clear when you can take a step back and realize that crewmen are dying, some of them horribly, and yet you can't deny the humor that pervades the scene of destruction.

I really recommend this book, not just for anyone interested in the entire series. Erikson has crafted something that feels firmly grounded in the great pulp tradition of Weird Tales and the planetary romances of Moore and Kuttner, but then taken it further and poked at the boundaries of what that type of writing can contain. And while the Malazan Book of the Fallen is a powerful and thought-provoking read, Bauchelain and Korbal Broach distills what makes those novels so great and concentrates it into 100-page stories that require no other knowledge of the world on which they are set.

Home from San Diego

Mrs. Speculator and I just recently returned from our regular sojourn to San Diego and Comic-con, about which I will be writing more in the next few days. But in the meantime, I went through a number of books and movies, about which I'd like to say a few words apiece. So, allow me this space to do a little catching up, and then I'll get to subjects with a little more depth. (Mrs. Speculator and I have begun watching reruns of Alfred Hitchcock Presents and I can't help but hear his voice in my head for these introductory remarks. I'll work on getting my wit as sharp as his in his own introductions.)

Reaper's Gale by Steven Erikson: This is the seventh book in The Malazan Book of the Fallen, and it works much like the other books in the series: a cast of hundreds, if not thousands, are given separate threads which are slowly and sometimes not gently pulled together into a huge tapestry. Unlike the earlier novels, however, the gods begin taking a much more active role in the affairs of this world, and the various races can no longer ignore the activity surrounding them and their affairs. This novel returns to the country of Letheras, where we last saw an immortal Tiste Edur take the emperor's crown and watched as a single motley fool worked to overthrow the whole system for its economic corruption. As we return, the emperor remains immortal, but suffering from his immortality: Erikson twists the fairly standard trope so that the emperor actually does die, but returns to life after each death, a process that has driven him to the border of sanity and perhaps beyond.
The titular heroes of the series, the Malazan, find themselves far from home and their commander ordering them to invade Letheras, despite their relatively small forces.

Once again, the strength of the novel is the tremendous characterizations and the interaction between those characters. The plot feels like it meanders until all is resolved, and the reader is witness to world-changing events yet again. The scope is magnificent and daring, and the book moves really quickly, and like an avalanche, captures the ubsuspecting reader (but only if you devote more than five minutes a day to the book--my own personal weakness this time around). My biggest difficulty in finishing Erikson's Malazan books is having to wait to pick up the next one. I still cannot recommend this series, and this book, enough, and I do actually proselytize it in person.

On the Beach by Nevil Shute: This book had been required reading for me, either in junior high school and high school, and most of what I remember about it was how impressed I was supposed to feel upon its completion. It is supposed to be a classic of the atomic age, a bitter parable of man's folly to build weapons that are capable of destroying the world. And perhaps it is a classic, but it has outlived its possibility: the people in the novel are stereotypically the demure and courteous characters of the early 1960s, and worse of the British Empire, who face the impending doom of fall-out from an atomic war with the all-too-familiar stiff upper lip. All the characters remain calm and accepting of their doom, much as I would expect in the very final stages of such a disaster. Perhaps it is a different time, or perhaps I have been biased by disaster movies of the last 30 years, but I have a really hard time thinking communities could remain so calm for half a year as they knew their inescapable death was approaching. Civilization, as the book's epithet claims, goes out with a whimper.

I suppose part of the purpose of such an anticlimactic ending is to point out the ridiculous position that having so many earth-shattering weapons puts humanity in. And I remember the days of the 70s and early 80s, before the Berlin Wall fell, when nuclear destruction was a very real fear in our daily lives. Those times have past, leaving this book a somewhat interesting artifact of a different way of thinking. The characters are generally likable, though not particularly deeply written, and so mostly unknowable. But two of the main characters perform actions that I cannot explain, thus weakening the novel for me overall. I wonder if anyone has considered rewriting On the Beach updating it for modern attitudes and culture.

Wanted, as most of the reviews take time to point out, bears only a passing resemblance to the comic series on which it is based. It was difficult to set this aside as I watched the movie, so much did I enjoy that series, but then the sheer goofiness of the movie just swept me away so that I didn't care. James McAvoy plays Wesley, a middle-class dweeb caught in his unhappy job and unhappy life with no way to escape. That is, until the most improbable of events pulsl him out of that life, much like the stable-boy in the fantasy trope who finds he is hear to the kingdom. Wesley is the son of the world's greatest assassin, a member of a guild who has appointed themselves the world's protectors, "killing one that thousands might live." Instead of a ring or a sword, Wesley's destiny is revealed in the body of Angelina Jolie, who comes to rescue him from the sights of a competing assassin who has set himself up against the fighters for justice. What follows is the first of several ridiculous chases through the movie that forget the laws of physics and materials, including the human body. And yet they are so breath-takingly shot as to be ridiculsously fun, such that you find yourself laughing at the scenes on the screen as well as the audacity to even pretend the stunts could actually happen.

But once the screenwriters set up their characters and world differently from the way the comic series did, the movie really has no other direction to go in than the one it takes. The movie becomes predictable in its sweeping movements, if not in the audacaity with which it tries to carry off its scenes and stunts. The characters which had carried so much potential become awful stereotypes, and sadly predictable as a result, suckign a great deal of the joy out of the movie. Adn yet it is lavishly shot, a gorgeous production, making me think of Crank with a huge special effects budget or Smokin' Aces with a global conspiracy plot. It really is a lot of fun and perhaps advanced the effects craft for forthcoming and better movies, but I can only recommend the movie in that light, or as a matinee to pass time you find yourself unexpectedly trying to fill. It's the fluffiest of cotton candy, which seems to be the movie's goal in the first place, and it's clear everyone in the really strong cast are just having a good time.

The Mummy: Tomb of the Dragon Emperor is also a cotton candy movie, but it really doesn't have anything to offer. It isn't particularly fun as it mocks itself and winks at its viewers metafictionally in a sad effort to replace the powerful chemistry between Brendan Fraser and the original lead actress, Rachel Weisz. Her departure drags on this sequel as the usually wonderful Maria Bello just cannot pull off the combination of grace, style, and joie de vivre with which Weisz earlier played the same role. Fraser seems to just go through the motions, searching for a backboard off of which to play. The now-adult son, played by Luke Ford, is annoying in the stilted father-son conflict that doesn't seem to have any basis beyond the imagination of the screenwriters, or at least doesn't really show in the film itself. Even the effects, the strong point of the first Mummy remake, feel pretty dated and bland.

Unfortunately, Michelle Yeoh is scintillatingly beautiful when she shows up, serving as a stark indication of what the movie could have been had they really tried. Jet Li is dramatically underused and ridiculous in his appearance, never really getting a chance to show any ability to act. When I think of these movies in the future, I'll be trying very hard to remember how much fun the first movie was and the potential it showed for the action genre, potential that has seriously been misplaced. I am going to work very hard to forget that the second and third movies, especially the third, was ever made.

The Bonehunters

I have mentioned in previous entries to this blog my general metaphor of novels and movies as tapestries. The first book I remember reading that helped me to come to the metaphor was Tigana by Guy Gavriel Kay. In that novel, there are two different narratives taking place, each with its distinctive voice and narrator and only tangentially related. The crisis of the story takes place as the two narratives, or "threads" if you will, come together and the characters we have come to know so well finally interact.

I'm pretty sure that novels have used this type of story-telling in the past, but nothing leaps to mind. I'm reminded of the epics of the Renaissance, where entire stanzas would be devoted to a wide range of characters who would move in and out of each other's lives, and the point-of-view would bounce back and forth between those characters. But novels seemed to have been generally devoted to a single point-of-view for most of their existence; if other characters took primacy in the novel, it was only momentary and acted as something like an intermission from what was going on in the main character's story. That pause was far hardly more than a scene at a time and it never went so far as to become a parallel narrative. Perhaps the origin of the many threads in those epics is why I find them occurring more frequently in epic fantasy--those two genres have so very much in common beyond their names.

Steven Erikson is in the midst of writing a truly epic fantasy, The Malazan Book of the Fallen, of which the sixth novel, The Bonehunters, has recently been published in paperback. The book itself is massive, with over 1200 pages of story, but it truly only is a chapter in monumental epic. And it being near the middle of the planned ten-book saga, it provides a crux on which the series turns, for after this volume, nothing in the Malazan world will be the same...as it was in the first five books.

How to describe a crucial but dependent novel in such a saga? Erikson's story must have close to 100 characters that are named and from whose point of view part of the story is told. Of course some of them are more important than others, but this novel shows that while the reader has a suspicion who those important characters might be, those suspicions are often incorrect. And whether or not those characters are critical to the ultimate goal of the novel or overall saga, Erikson defines each of them with care and art. Each character has a voice and a history of their own. I imagine folders with reams of paper providing long and detailed notes about each character. And the reader's reaction to each character is rarely neutral, so deft is Erikson's portrayal.

Erikson is also deft with his plot. I'm pretty sure he knows where he is going with his saga, but the ride to the end of each novel is never smooth. There are twists and turns galore, unexpected events in the face of the most certain outcome. So Erikson's tapestry is not just wide and long, it is very deep. The first five novels seem to deal with events fairly unrelated to each other but for the reoccurence of certain characters, but as this one begins, those books are tied together, presaging nothing so mundane as a continent-spanning war of empire, but a battle among the deities of the Malazan world themselves. And those deities are named and characters in the novels also, not escaping Erikson's fine attention to detail and characterization by being passed off as merely incarnations of some force; they are more Greek, having their own personalities and squabbles.

Unlike the first five novels, The Bonehunters has two set pieces--one at the middle and one at the end. The first one is daring and rather inventive in the genre of epic fantasy. Of course the books are about wars and Erikson takes a good bit of time to describe the actions of his armies, but in this specific set piece, it is not a battle but its aftermath as the soldiers attempt to escape a ravaged city that forms the central narrative. And it is in this portion, some 200 pages long by my count, that one can observe Erikson's astonishing attention to detail and story-telling arts. Trapped beneath a burning city, the soldiers find a band of children they are determined to rescue as well as saving themselves. Their subterranean escape is harrowing, and Erikson's style and language reflects the claustrophobic nightmare that they all were suffering. The later set piece, involving a battle at the docks of a city, are brutally honest but not a gore-fest, concentrating more on the thoughts of the soldiers as they fight. It is accurate, and it is sad for its verisimilitude.

If I had not promised myself to review all the books I read, I would have gladly skipped this one with a perfunctory wave. But Erikson has become one of my favorite comtemporary authors, and I eagerly await each installment of this saga. The series is not for everyone, however; it is long and dirty and sometimes hard to read. But I find it equally difficult to put down. I recommend The Bonehunters to fans of literary fiction and epic fantasy. But that recommendation comes with the warning that you really need to read the other five novels first.