Malazan: Midnight Tides by: Steven Erikson

 

Steven Erikson’s writing style is incredibly analytic: he is an archeologist and his writing style reflects that background.  Malazan: Book of the Fallen has taken its time to setup two distinct scenarios occurring contemporaneously with Gardens of the Moon and Memories of Ice encompassing the first while Deadhouse Gates and House of Chains encompassing the second.  Midnight Tides is the fifth book in the sequence and introduces yet a third plotline for readers to follow, set years before the beginning of Gardens of the Moon with only the Crippled God and Trull from House of Chains appearing as real connections to the series proper, though knowing how interconnected Erikson’s writing is, this book shouldn’t be discounted.  For the first time since Gardens of the Moon there was difficulty in reading this tome of a novel, as the new characters while not uninteresting, make reading frustrating.  With Memories of Ice and House of Chains especially, attachments were formed to all of these characters and not getting to experience really any of those characters becomes a letdown for starting this book.  Starting is perhaps the most difficult part of getting through Midnight Tides, especially if you go in knowing that the characters you have grown attached to are nowhere to be seen.

 

The Crippled God’s segments of Midnight Tides are perhaps where Erikson succeeds the most in crafting an interesting villain.  Once again this being is giving others power to change events on a massive scale for seemingly his own means.  As the closest thing this series has to a “main” antagonist/villain, he is an interesting sort of character where you never quite know what he is trying to do.  Is he trying to take over the world?  How does he relate to the other gods we’ve met up to this point?  Is he really that evil?  He only gets like three or four scenes, but they are the best scenes in the novel overall as Erikson really gets into just what makes this god tick and how he has been planning his ascension for centuries.  He’s a villain in the sense of the magnificent bastard, who’s always one step ahead and possibly never actually being able to lose, having something succeed even when everything seems to go wrong.  He allows himself some mortal agents, tricking them with power into doing his bidding in the novel.  Erikson has this novel mostly devoted to the Tiste Edur and a treaty they intend to create with a tribe essentially mimicking portions of North American history, using the Edur and Lethereii as two parties attempting to live together, but of course things fall apart.  The inspiration does not seem to be from one specific Native American tribe, instead focusing more on the colonialism aspect and those horrors to great effect.  Midnight Tides is essentially a book where things fall apart: parties betray one another and the entire alliance ends up failing.  Erikson’s themes are essentially that of a race falling to conservative values, the Tiste Edur not being adaptable and essentially go onto a conquest, barely succeeding while the rest of the world moves on.  Being a pocket of the world seems to be what Midnight Tides is mostly looking at things that are going on to flesh out the world.

 

There is also an incredibly important return for the Crimson Guard, a force of characters who were introduced in previous books as background figures, and who get fleshed out in Return of the Crimson Guard.  The most important character, going forward at least, is Bugg, who is one of those Erikson characters who readers will either love or hate.  Early in reading the book I thought Bugg might be revealed to somehow be related to Kruppe as their mannerisms and idioms are incredibly similar, though Bugg eventually develops.  Bugg as a character is one whom I personally like and feels like the central figure of the book, even if he is not the one doing a lot of things.  He is the one who appears in the book’s epilogue and seems to be where this book will feed back into the rest of the series in future installments and is perhaps the most interesting character here.  Overall, Midnight Tides is a novel that your enjoyment is going to come down to how much you can tolerate Steven Erikson.  If you have gotten this far in Malazan Book of the Fallen and not been enjoying yourself, this is most likely not where you’re going to start.  It is a commitment of a book that is more confusing than even Gardens of the Moon if only because of how many characters are introduced, however, structurally it is a better book than that one.  Erikson is a great storyteller and there is genuine amounts of sucking you into the plot, even if it isn’t the perfect follow up and left me frustrated.  8/10.