In my ongoing quest to read all of the major fantasy series (leaving aside obvious crap like David Eddings and Terry Goodkind stuff), I recently bought Steven Erikson’s Gardens of the Moon, the first book of his Malazan Book of the Fallen series. (As an aside, I’ve recently being buying books from the UK-based The Book Depository, which is noteworthy mainly for offering free shipping anywhere in the world, not to mention prices that beat any Malaysian retailers. The downside of course is that you need to wait for about a month to get your book. If anyone knows of any online store that can offer better deals for someone residing in Malaysia, do let me know.)

The Malazan books have quite a fanbase and, with all ten books in Erikson’s series now out, plus another four books by the co-creator of their shared world, Ian Cameron Esslemont, seem to be decently successful. Review-wise, however, the verdicts are all over the chart. The most enthusiastic fans rate Erikson’s work more highly even than G.R.R. Martin’s Song of Fire and Ice. Given that these include some very smart people from QT3, I’m not inclined to dismiss their opinions lightly. To the detractors however, his story is an incomprehensible mess, plagued by bland prose, cliched and boring characters and poor storytelling sense. After slogging through all 600+ pages of the first book, I’m sad to say that I have to include myself in the latter camp.

On the face of it, it doesn’t make sense because this book has all the right elements for a fantasy epic. It starts in media res with the huge and powerful Malazan Empire in the midst of conquering the continent of Genebackis. Of the nine Free Cities, only two, Pale and Darujhistan, are left. The Malaz 2nd Army commanded by High Fist Dujek Onearm has long laid siege to Pale and prominent among his troops are the Bridgeburners, an elite unit led by Sergeant Whiskeyjack. Pale’s defenders seem paltry in comparison except that the extremely powerful Anomander Rake, also known as the Son of Darkness, has for mysterious reasons placed himself and his forces in opposition to that of the empire.

How awesome is this guy? For starters, he’s the 4,000 year old leader of a dying race with all the skills and sorcerous powers a lifetime that long entails. He wields a huge, two-handed sword that he wears strapped to his back, without a scabbard to boot, that is powerful enough to slay gods and enslave their souls. And to top it all off, he lives in a floating mountain-sized hunk of rock, inside of which is the last remaining city of his race. It’s called Moon’s Spawn and naturally he parks his house in the sky above Pale just to scare the Malazans. Yeah, you’re the only one to immediately think Death Star. And just to complete the picture, Rake has black skin, eyes that can change color depending on his mood but is usually lilac and silver-colored hair.

To me, the character of Rake is the perfect barometer to determine whether or not you’ll like Gardens of the Moon. If you read all that and can’t wait to read scenes of Rake standing alone against the High Mages of the Empire, or going toe to toe against a Demon Lord, you’ll likely enjoy this book. If, on the other hand, this caused you to roll your eyes and groan at yet another Elric of Melniboné / Drizzt Do’Urden clone, you might want to give this a miss because the whole book seems to be about taking familiar fantasy tropes and taking them to the nth degree. And Rake isn’t even the main character in the book.

Now, there’s nothing inherently wrong with the idea of writing an exaggerated version of high fantasy. This is why I find the Harry Potter and the Wastelands of Time fanfic moderately entertaining. In the Malazan world, mages seem to a dime a dozen and assassin-mages, with all the badassery the term implies, aren’t all that rare either. Gods routinely manifest in the world to meddle in mortal affairs and the appearance of a demon powerful enough to level an entire city doesn’t seem to faze any of the main characters.

What does bother me is that this seems to be done incompetently, with clumsy one-manship and an eye towards the rule of cool regardless of what this does to plot consistency and characterization. For example, spoiler alert here but I have to say it, the book makes much of how the true rulers of Darujhistan are actually a cabal of powerful mages. Then when the Malazan Empire manages to make contact with the city’s assassins guild, the guildmaster turns out to be such an awesome assassin-mage that she proceeds to singlehandedly wipe out almost the entire cabal over the course of a few hours without any prior preparation. She is finally stopped when a teenaged boy knocks her out with a couple of thrown bricks, which was possible because he was exceptionally lucky due to a god’s influence. This sort of writing just kills my suspension of disbelief.

Poor characterization is rife. A sex scene between an army captain and a sorceress happens out of the blue for the reader because Erikson doesn’t bother to write about their developing relationship. We later learn that this was necessary so that the captain could feel properly angsty when the sorceress is killed. The reader is frequently told how awesome the Bridgeburners are, but aside from their resident assassin and mage, we never get to see them actually fight as a unit or learn why they’re so highly regarded. Adjunct Lorn’s internal struggles are minutely described but that plotline is never resolved as she is killed in a semi-random way before anything comes of it.

After reading through pages and pages of arguments on QT3, it seems that even Erikson fans mostly agree that the first book is generally not that good and he improves as a writer later on. But I think it says something about the quality of his prose that I actually found the big scene where the High Mages of the Empire mount an all out sorcerous assault on Moon’s Spawn to be boring. Overall, I found it quite a slog to read through the book and had to force myself to do it. And I read a ton of crap fantasy and science-fiction and have never felt like this before.

To be fair, there are good bits in the book. I quite liked the assassin war on the rooftops of Darujhistan and Kruppe’s dream sequences were intriguing until it became too obvious that Erikson was using him as a deus ex machina. Despite the confusion of being thrown into the Malazan world with almost no exposition, I did myself being curious about what happened in the past and what will come later. Erikson’s fans insist that everything is explained eventually and you’ll see the first book in a new light once you read the later books. This is nearly enough to make me want to buy the next book. Nearly.