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Permission. Title: Gardens of the Moon
Series: Malazan Book of the Fallen #1
Author: Steven Erikson
Rating: 5 of 5 Stars
Genre: Fantasy
Pages: 688
Format: Kindle Digital edition
The Malazan Empire, now ruled by Empress Laseen, is on the path of
expansion through total war. The last Free City on the continent of
Genabackis, Darujhistan, is the next city in the sights of the Empire.
Wracked from within by politics and threatened without by armies and
mages, Darujhistan doesn't stand a chance.
Enter Rake, Lord of Moonspawn, a floating city, sorcerer supreme.
Having allied with the Crimson Guard, might mercenaries and mages, Rake
allies with the lords of Darujhistan to fight the Empire, but for his
own reasons.
To counter this threat, Laseen has set into motion several plans, one
of which is to find and unleash an ancient terror, a Jahgut Tyrant, a
veritable god of power. Laseen means to pit the Tyrant against Rake and
then to take down the weakened winner.
Enter the Bridgeburners. Loyal servants to the Empire and the old
Emperor, who Laseen assassinated to become Empress. The Bridgeburners
are meant for extinction, as Laseen can't have anyone around who isn't
loyal to her. But the survivors are crafty, powerful and full of tricks
of their own. They are meant to take Darujhistan and die, but they have
other plans, plans of their own.
Unfortunately for everyone, there is a veritable cornucopia of gods,
ancient powers and beings so old and so powerful that they might as well
be gods. When humans can become gods, gods can become extinct and power
is all, nobody can predict what will result.
(For clarity's sake, I read this in
June 2008 and again in December 2009.
That link contains both my reviews in one review as Goodreads didn't
have a re-read option and when importing to Booklikes I didn't feel like
going through my 2000+ reviews and fixing "little" things like that.)
That synopsis barely scratches the surface of this book. In the
forward Erikson tells us straight out that he will not be spoon feeding
his readers anything and that he purposefully wrote things so as to make
the readers work for connections. There are no obvious connections or
explanations, there is Unexplained History of both nations and
individuals and you are forced to hold on for your life or be thrown off
the ride.
And what a ride this is! With this 3rd read I feel like I've finally
got a little bit of a handle on this world. Since I have read the whole
series, now I can begin to cobble it together. It helped that this time
around I wasn't expecting all the threads started here to ever be
finished or to connect. I have also finally accepted that this is
The Book of the Fallen, which
means that this is about people dying, not people winning or overcoming
insurmountable odds. And even if they do win and overcome those odds,
odds are they are still going to die.
At just under 700 pages, I believe this is the shortest of this
decalogy. In one way it is the hardest of the books, as you have to sink
or swim in terms of the world. Everything is new and unfamiliar and you
simply don't know what is going on. In another way I found it the
easiest of the books, as the action is relatively straight forward, the
plot only slightly convoluted and the scope is kept pretty focused. When
reading this for the first time you simply don't know how big the world
is that Erikson has created nor do you know that the various narrators
are only telling you what "they" know. Semi-unreliable not because
they're trying to lie to you but because they have a very limited
knowledge. Everything you learn in
Gardens of the Moon is not necessarily true.
I added the "favorite" tag because this is the 3rd time I've read
this and I still enjoyed the heck out of it while reading. It was a joy
to read Erikson's prose, because while he is not sparse in his writings,
nor is he turgid and bloviated. He walked that razor thin line of not
writing to much or to little.
One thing to note. The kindle edition that I read had several
noticeable OCR errors. There was a character named Coll, whose name came
out as Coil more than a handful of times. Same for a guy named Toc the
Younger. He became Toe the Younger half the time. I checked my hardcover
and those errors were not there. I also don't know if those errors
exist in the current kindle edition. I bought these when they first came
out and promptly de-drm'd them and stuck them in calibre, so any
updates would not have touched them. A potential issue if you're buying
digital copies.
