Red God, White Walkers, and Green Men: Religion in Game of Thrones

To begin, a joke I heard years ago, that went something like this:

The Pope is awoken one morning by his assistant: “Your Holiness, there are amazing events happening in the world this morning! But [because this is a joke] there’s good news and bad news. Which do you want first?”

The Pope says “I’m an old man, I don’t know if I can handle the bad news, you’d better give me the good news first.”

“Jesus Christ has returned to earth, your Holiness. And he’s calling on the phone and wants to speak with you.”

“My God! That’s amazing! How could any bad news matter when something so wondrous has happened?”

“He’s calling from Salt Lake City.”

Of course, the humor comes from the fact that, in this world, we can’t know which religion—if any—is true. We have our reasons—some might say “rationalizations”—for believing what we do, but it appears to be the case that we won’t know conclusively until after we die (if then).

In fantasy literature, the world often works very differently. Often, we see the gods or God, it’s a given of the world that one or more divine beings exists, has certain characteristics, powers, what have you. Very often in fantasy, this straightforward narrative is one of good and evil: all the good people are on the side of the good God or gods, evil people follow a Satanic figure. It’s baked into the genre’s DNA, where Tolkien has Sauron (the heir to a more direct Satanic parallel, Morgoth) on one side and Gandalf and the wizards standing as the representatives of the gods, who do not interfere directly, with the “good” people.

What I want to examine is religion in George R.R. Martin’s A Song of Ice and Fire novels or—equally—the HBO series Game of Thrones. For my purposes, I think they’re identical, despite some plot differences. Spoiler alert: I'm assuming you've read and watched everything there is to read or watch that's out as of now.

One point of interest from the start is that we have many religions in Martin’s world. We first see the divide between the North of Westeros, which follows “The Old Gods,” and the southern lands, which worship The Seven. Gradually, however, our view expands even further, to include R’hllor, the Red God, the Drowned God of the Iron Men, the Many-Faced God… I think I’m forgetting some, but you get the idea.

Perhaps the most interesting of these, to my view, is the Red God, because R’hllor seems to be the one most clearly throwing around supernatural intervention, an evident sign of power, if not truth. As readers/viewers, we repeatedly see supernatural acts from R’hllor, from the murder of Renly Baratheon to the (repeated) resurrection of Beric Dondarrion and Catelyn Stark (in the books, anyway), and—as many fans hope—perhaps Jon Snow (I just had to throw that in there). The Red God may be able to take credit for killing Joffrey, Balon Greyjoy, and Robb Stark (Melisandre says so), but regardless, we have clear evidence for at least some of the Red God’s, uh, miracles.

That said, these “miracles” are clearly complicated, as we can see by readers’ and viewers’ reactions: Renly’s murder is fairly horrific, but probably nothing compares, in viewers’ minds, to Season 5’s burning-to-death of Shireen. People were, rightfully I think, horrified by Stannis’s willingness and Melisandre’s eagerness to not only kill his daughter, but to do so in such a horrible way.

Here’s the thing that seems often to be overlooked in all this: the religious aspect. I’ve seen, in several instances, that people see Stannis’s decision as one motivated by ambition. Truthfully, I think that misses the point. I think in his mind, this is a righteous—albeit heart-breaking—decision.

Consider, for a moment, the Old Testament story of Abraham and Isaac. Abraham has apparently spoken with God, has seen a miracle (his wife giving birth at a very advanced age), and has promises from God. And then, in the midst of all these good times, God tells Abraham to sacrifice his miracle child to God. Human sacrifice: God asks for it, and we’re supposed to believe that Abraham is a good man because he’s willing to do it (of course, God is apparently a good God because he doesn’t make Abraham go through with it, but that’s kind of splitting hairs, isn’t it?). Maybe I’m overstating things, but I think many Christians are willing to uncomplicated this story and see it as a positive, that Abraham has such faith. Shouldn’t we all be more like Abraham? And to me, this seems like a direct parallel with Stannis (particularly in the HBO version).

Yet when we see it on screen, I think our very-human reaction is: no. No, we shouldn’t be like Stannis or Abraham. Any God who would demand the sacrifice of one’s own child—or, really, any innocent (and for some of us, just any) human being—is not a good God and should not be obeyed. But here’s the thing: Stannis has—apparently—seen the truth of the Red God’s existence and power. And how many times have we heard the story of Azor Ahai, who created his magic sword by thrusting it into his beloved wife’s breast? I mean, this is the guy that Stannis is supposed to be the rebirth of, and he’s the religion’s hero. While it’s hard not to blame Stannis here, there’s also a clear logic behind what he’s done. In his mind, he is the rightful king (which, assuming you ignore the Targaryens, is basically true), he’s seen the power of the Red God (i.e. this is a god who apparently exists), and he—and we the readers and viewers—have seen the evil forces north of the wall that appear to exist in direct opposition to the Red God (ice vs. fire).

So what really complicates things is not simply that the Red God seems to be a nasty bastard (even if he might be on the side of good), but that Stannis does not, in fact, win. In the story of Azor Ahai, we can, perhaps, overlook the fact that he killed his wife, both because it’s a legend that happened a long time ago and because, well, he saves the world. Would we look differently at Stannis if sacrificing his daughter to the Red God had led to victory, both over the Boltons and, ultimately, over the White Walkers? I think we would have to, horrific as it was to watch Shireen’s death. We might not like to think that the ends justify the means, but I do suspect that we judge Stannis even more harshly because he failed. He committed an inhuman act, and for what? For nothing, apparently.

So where does that leave the R’hllor? What are we to make of this religion? Is it simply that Melisandre, interpreting the Red God’s wishes, got it wrong?  A side note here: the books play out somewhat differently. Melisandre does not travel south with Stannis, Shireen is not burned to death, and we only see the outcome of the battle between Stannis and the Bolton’s through a note from Ramsay Bolton. But we do have textual reasons to believe that Melisandre, there too, got some things fundamentally wrong.

Either way, the question remains: what should we make of this religion. Is R’hllor—are His followers—basically “good”? Or, despite the religion’s claims, are “good” and “evil” actually far less clear-cut in Martin’s world?

 ***

It’s worth taking some time to look at the other religions in Martin’s world, although the Red God has been my focus here.

Let’s start with The Seven. At the end of the day, the religion of The Seven seems to be pretty vanilla, and pretty much a strictly human phenomenon. We see no direct evidence of supernatural forces at work, only very human ones. The religion itself seems very much centered on humans as they are: The Seven themselves are basically archetypes of kinds or classes of people, so you have a different aspect of God to pray to depending on what you’re going through in life or what you need at the moment. It’s fairly comfortable that way. It’s also very responsive, in its form, to society. When times are good and society is stable, the religion supports the status quo (and is supported by it). The monarch and the Septon seem routinely to be hand in glove. As the war for control of Westeros goes on, however, and the conditions for everyday folk gets worse and worse, the religion mirrors this discontent as well as the accompanying distrust of the nobility. The movement to a simpler, more fundamental religion—and also a harsher religion of retribution against the nobility—comes as conditions become increasingly desperate for the common folk.

However, there’s little evidence that the religion of The Seven is true. No miracles, not even a narrative that acknowledges (the way that R’hllor apparently does) the evil and danger of the White Walkers.

Then there’s the Old Gods of the North. These are, admittedly, a bit sketchy still. We know they’re tied to the Children of the Forest, as well as to the men of the North. The story seems to be that the Children of the Forest fought alongside humans against the Others back in the day, so  this old religion seems at least to be on the right side (but then, it’s the Starks’ religion, so of course it is). Like the Starks themselves, the religion seems to be harsh but perhaps not so harsh as R’hllor’s religion—kin-slaying and slavery, for instance, are both bad, while hospitality and guest rights are good. There seems to be magic and power associated with the Old Gods, but we haven’t seen much definitive. Arguably, the direwolf pups that the Starks find are uncanny, there are the dreams that Bran and Rickon have of their father’s death, there’s Jojen Reed and his greensight, and there’s the apparent destiny that Bran has up north of the Wall with the Children of the Forest. But yeah, there’s a lot we don’t know, but it seems promising, doesn’t it?

Then there’s the Many-Faced God, the death-worshipping cult. Well, okay, I suppose it’s a religion, not a mere cult. “Death-worshipping” pretty much says it all. In their closest followers, they require the death of self: they must give up their old life and identity. They deliver death, to those who ask for it and, apparently, those who deserve it. Sometimes. The criteria aren’t really clear, but what is clear is that it’s awfully authoritarian—obedience appears to be prized above all in the religion’s followers. Their metaphysics actually seem to be pretty laissez-faire: our god is actually worshipped by everyone, just by different names. They’re all pretty much the same, even though people are too dumb to realize it. It’s still pretty murky how this religion works, fundamentally, and whether they’re “good,” “evil,” or, as I suspect, fundamentally indifferent. I mean, sure, the victory of the White Walkers and the undead might be right up their alley: if they win, everybody dies. On the other hand, they might have some kind of qualms about un-death. Who knows?

To me, the religion of the Many-Faced God seems, similarly to the religion of The Seven, to be answering to human concerns more than divine ones. Stay with me here and recall that the religion started in the slave pits of Volantis, as a direct response to those conditions. If I’m remembering correctly, it began as a sort of passive response (death as a gift to the oppressed) and morphed into something more like revolution and retribution. Either way, though, to me it speaks more of answering a human need (and obsession) rather than being divinely ordained in some way. Granted, there does seem to be something magical, something supernatural, about what they do. It’s unclear, of course, whether that’s an act of God or “simply” magic. In the HBO version, it should be noted, the magic seems to be inherent in the faces: once the face is prepared, Arya can just steal one and become someone else, no blessing needed.

***

The point of all this, for me, has been to try to get at the metaphysics of the world George R.R. Martin has created. What is its fundamental nature, what is true about this world? As we try to answer this question, it seems to me that the yardstick to use is, likely as not, how well a religion matches up to “the real war.” That is to say, White Walkers and their Wights against living creatures. Do they speak to that narrative, which seems to be fundamental to the world? Or, like the politics that obsess so much of the plot, are they simply human constructions that ignore this most fundamental of realities?

On this basis, I tend to discount The Seven, The Drowned God, and the Many-Faced God. R’hllor, of course, does answer this fundamental reality. Its narrative, in fact, is all about the Red God and his chosen hero standing against the darkness and the cold. So one possibility is that, in fact, these are basically the good guys. This is troubling on a number of levels, isn’t it? The actions of His followers too often seem to leave a bad taste in one’s mouth. Burning people alive? Killing your own wife (or daughter)? That whole business (in the books) with Lady Stoneheart / Catelyn Stark and what she does to Brienne in the name of righteous vengeance? Are we supposed to be okay with that, coming from the “good” God? Or are we supposed to write these things off as simply the failings of imperfect human beings to understand the will of R’hllor?

My suspicion is that neither is the case. These are not “merely” human failings, nor is R’hllor “good.” My suspicion is that what we have is an elemental opposition: fire and ice, light and dark, life and death (sort of). They are not, strictly speaking, “good” and “evil.” They are in conflict, eternal conflict, just as the Red God’s religion declares, but I suspect that the Red God is only incidentally on “our” side. Humans, I would bet, are mere pawns, not important to R’hllor except to the extent that they serve His interests. In that context, by the way, it may not even be that Melisandre is “wrong” about Stannis, so much as it served the Red God’s interests at one point to support him… until it didn’t.

My working hypothesis is that the Old Gods, the ways of the Children of the Forest, represent a third way, a life-centered way. There’s a natural alliance of sorts between followers of the Old Gods and R’hllor, in that they share an enemy, but the religion of the Old Gods seems to strike a different balance: it is harsh, as it needs to be to prepare the living to face both the hardships of life in a world where winter can last decades and to face the ultimate evil (from the perspective of the living), the Others; however, it is also a life-affirming religion that centers on guest-rights and hospitality, on kinship, and against slavery (though, you know, feudalism’s okay).

From a metafictional standpoint, it would be no surprise if, in the end, the way of the Starks turns out to be the “right” way, would it? Despite their flaws, they seem to be “the good guys” in the story, the ones (mostly) that we identify with and hope survive. And, in the end, I suspect they are the ones who will turn out to have been most rooted in the “best” and most true religion. 

Your thoughts on any and all of this would be most welcome. What am I missing here?

Fantasy Football

I've been playing fantasy football for 15 years now, and as any of you who play fantasy football know, this is the first week of playoffs. I'm in three leagues this year, one was a total disaster (I blame the fact that my internet went out in a storm right as the draft started). In the other two, I've had very good seasons. In one league--the league I've been playing in for 15 years, the league I've never won the championship of--I finished the regular season in first place, with the most total points 2049, more than 100 more than the next highest. And thanks to 0 TD days from Ben Roethlisberger and Aaron Rodgers, I appear destined to lose in the first round of the playoffs.

In the other league, thanks to the fact that it has two divisions, I didn't get a bye in the first round of the playoffs despite having the highest point total--2746, almost 200 more than the next highest--and the 2nd best record. I crushed the league's commissioner last week, and then we play each other again this week and it looks I'm going to lose in that league too. I'll have to blame Aaron Rodgers yet again.

It's unbelievable bad luck, though, that on paper I should have such good teams and then they both crap out in the first round of the playoffs. I guess I should just be glad that there's no money riding on any of these leagues. And the pro team that I root for did win today, in pretty convincing fashion, so that's something too.

NaNoWriMo Reflections

As readers may or may not be aware, November is National Novel Writing Month (NaNoWriMo). The basic idea is writing 50,000 words of a novel in one month. This is technically my third year doing NaNoWriMo, but really my second. The first time around, I reached my 50k goal, was enjoying my novel... and haven't touched it since. I'd gotten to a tricky part in the plot and had no idea where it was going. Plus it was the end of the month. So that just sort of fell apart.

This year, I have once again reached my 50k target, on a different novel, and here early in Holidailies seemed like a good time to reflect on this year's project.

1) There's something beautiful about just getting started. I decided to write a fantasy novel this year. I've had some of the ideas for this novel and for the larger world for a solid decade or two. I've wanted to write it, but I've also avoided writing it, because I wanted it to be perfect. I wanted to outline the plot, I wanted to spend more time creating the details of the world. And the truth is: I could probably have spent the next 50 years putting off writing this novel, assuming I live that long. So yes: there's something beautiful about just getting started.

2) Going along with #1, once you get started, it's wonderful the way that imagination fills in the details between the broad strokes of what you already knew. Part of this magic, though, I think, came from the devotion that I gave the work, the way that kept my focus on the novel. Part of my normal daily pattern is to listen to podcasts. I love podcasts! I listen to them while walking the dog, working out, driving, just about anything that might be "down time." Instead, for most of the month, I refrained from listening to podcasts, and instead thought about my novel. And one result, particularly during the first half of the month, was that I was able to very efficient with my writing time, because I already knew most or all of what I wanted to write when I sat down to write--the plot, the characters, the scenes, even in some cases the particular words I wanted to use. That was the magic of focusing my attention so thoroughly on one end.

3) All the trackers and stuff are really motivating. There's just something about having a website where I go and log my progress, a website that tells me what my average per day is, a website that's visible to other people (who, granted, don't actually care whether I finish or not)... it really helps keep me focused. Reinforcing this point: in the four days since, I haven't written a word on my novel. Which is unfortunate, because I'm pretty sure that 50k only puts me about a quarter of the way through. So, I would need three more months of that level of focus to finish the novel. ::Sigh::

4) The community is and is not motivating. In past years, the on-line community has been more active. This year, not so much. And yet, I got through. On the other hand, I did benefit from a real-life writing group that met a few Sundays throughout the month. And that was helpful both for the way that it scheduled a block of time and, I don't know, kind of gave me permission to spend three hours writing on a Sunday.

All in all, it was a good month. Now I've just got to get myself sorted out to finish what I've started. By the way, in case it isn't obvious, even when I get to, say, 200k, that's just going to be 200k of a rough--very rough, no doubt--draft. Then it will be time to re-write, write some more... so yeah. It's a big commitment writing a doorstopper of a fantasy novel. Wish me luck!

Book Review: The City & The City

In The City & The City, China Miéville gives us a murder-mystery that gets shelved under "Fantasy" only because of its location: the twin cities of Besźel and Ul Qoma, which occupy the same space and yet exist as foreign entities to one another. Heck, maybe it's not even fantasy, per se: the mechanism of this divide is never really explained and may simply be a distinction that the citizens of each city make in their minds. In an almost Orwellian act of double-think, the citizens of each city must, from a young age, learn to ignore the other city and its citizens, to simultaneously see them (for instance, to avoid car accidents or tripping over homeless people) and un-see them. It's an interesting premise with, of course, real-world application. After all, even if the training isn't so formal, aren't we all conditioned to see certain aspects of our own world, our own culture, and of the cultures of others, and to be almost unable to see other aspects? 


The action centers around Tyador Borlú, the Besźel Extreme Crime Squad detective who ends up investigating the murder of a graduate student who was apparently murdered in Ul Qoma and dumped in Besźel. Ordinarily, such a crime would fall under the purview of Breach, the name for both the laws against Besźel and Ul Qoma interacting and for the secret police who enforce those laws, but it happens that for technical reasons the crime does not, in fact, involve Breach, so Borlú finds himself working with his counterparts in Ul Qoma and on the edges of his city's laws to try to find justice for the murdered girl and to find out the truth that she died for--truths that are at the heart of the workings of Miéville's fictional world and which could threaten the status quo in a number of ways.


Overall, I found the novel to be an enjoyable read, a mystery that kept me in suspense well into the novel, in part because it's not a simple "whodunit" sort of mystery but instead involves a fairly complex skein of interests and motivations that illuminate the whole of this society. At the same time that I enjoyed the novel, I also felt like it could have gone deeper than it did, could have explored its own premise more deeply than it did. Perhaps that perception on my part is symptomatic of the fact that I listened to it as an audiobook, thus letting it pass through me more easily than it might have if it had been fully masticated and digested in dead tree format. If so, I would love to read a brilliant essay or review showing me my own shortcomings in this regard, because the novel did seem to have, philosophically speaking, more potential than payoff.

Book Review: Under Heaven

A number of my Goodreads friends, including an author I really like, are very high on Guy Gavriel Kay's work, so I've been meaning to check out his work. I picked up Under Heaven both because it stands alone and because it was the only GGK work available as an audiobook (which seem like the only kind I can find time to finish right now!). There were some elements that I really liked about Under Heaven, but on the whole I found it to be uneven work.

The story, set in a fantasy China (Kitai), revolves around the three oldest children of a renowned general. Our central figure, Shen Tai, the second son, has taken upon himself the task of living in a haunted valley where his father won an important victory, and burying some of the thousands of dead from both sides. He plans to spend the entire two year mourning period burying the dead, and his time is drawing to a close as the novel opens. During his time in this valley, which borders Kitai and one of its long-time enemies, both empires have honored Shen Tai's work by sending regular supplies to him. At the start of the novel, he is honored beyond such utilitarian aid when the Empress of the Taguran empire bestows upon him an extravagant gift of 250 Sardian horses, in a world where even one or two such horses would be a princely gift. At the same time, Shen Tai survives an assassination attempt. In other words, his life just got a whole lot more complicated.

All that happens early in the novel, so I don't feel like I'm spoiling anything. To talk about the roles of his older brother and younger sister, I would have to start spoiling, so instead I'll get to the review.

The good: I loved the sense of culture in the novel. Our characters live in a poetic culture: they quote poetry, they write poetry, and as he follows them, Kay's prose frequently rises to the poetic. I appreciated the sense of a culture that Kay establishes, their ways of seeing the world. Much of the plot revolves around court intrigue and the political implications of this gift--it both elevates Shen Tai and puts him in a difficult position as others try to manipulate or eliminate him to claim the gift for their own purposes.

The less-good: The pacing was very uneven. At times, Shen Tai's story moved awfully slowly (his sister's story moved along a bit better). Related to this, Kay shifted perspectives at times from a novelistic perspective written in the present tense to a world-historic perspective from some time in the future, distancing us from the action. This played a big role in making the ending of the novel feel rushed. What also happened, though, is that it seemed like the promise of the novel was revoked by the end. We tend to assume that our protagonists will make the decisions and play the roles that are decisive in the plot, but in a number of ways this wasn't the case in Under Heaven. Shen Tai's story--as well as his sister's--gets swept aside in the rush of larger events, and it's the decisions of others that make the difference. Our protagonists all become fairly passive at the crucial juncture, which is unsatisfying. We want to see our characters solve their own problems rather than having them resolved for them.

All in all, I'm glad I read Under Heaven, but it's not overly impressive. I haven't yet fallen in love with Kay's work.

Book Review: The Lies of Locke Lamora

With his debut novel, Lynch offered up a fairly slick caper-fantasy. Our setting is the gritty city of Camorr, a fantasy version of Venice, ruled by its Duke on the one hand and its crime boss, "Capa" Barsavi on the other. Barsavi has brought a certain equilibrium to the city through his "secret peace" that ensures that the nobility allow a certain amount of crime to go unpunished while the criminals avoid getting too greedy. Locke Lamora is a natural-born liar and thief, molded by his mentor, the false priest Father Chains, to be the Thorn of Camorr, pulling off long cons that break the Secret Peace and target the wealthy. And technically, Father Chains is an actual priest, but his patron god is the unacknowledged 13th god, patron of thieves, not the god that he professes to the public, but that's beside the point just now.

Lynch weaves together two basic timelines, a "present" story and a past story showing how Locke and the other Gentleman Bastards--Jean, the brothers Calo and Galdo, and the group's apprentice member, Bug--grew up together under Chains's tutelage and became the characters we see before us. The Gentleman Bastards are running a big con against a wealthy noble, but all this is hampered by other happenings in the city: the mysterious Grey King has entered the scene and seems intent on displacing Capa Barsavi. Locke and his Bastards are inevitably drawn into this struggle and forced to play both sides while looking for a way out.

The novel seemed to me to invite comparison with Steven Brust's Vlad Taltos series, and while The Lies of Locke Lamora kept my interest, neither the novel as a whole nor the characters seemed quite up to that standard. Locke is supposed to be some kind of thieving genius, but far too often he seemed over-matched and a bit passive. He doesn't have the panache of Vlad (nor of most other Brust characters) nor, ultimately, the same genius. Or self-control. But then, I do need to be careful: despite obvious points of comparison, I should remind myself that Lynch is not trying to create a clone of Brust's protagonist and I should work more to appreciate Locke for who he is.

One thing I'll give Lynch credit for (big-time spoiler alert--skip to the next paragraph if you're skittish about such things): he doesn't seem to hold his characters sacred. I mean, it's a bloodbath as he kills off the majority of the Gentleman Bastards. Not knowing initially that this was the first in a series, I half-suspected that this was a one-off with Locke dying at the end. That wouldn't have been a bad thing, per se, and it's to Lynch's credit that he raised the stakes that high, that he was able to generate that kind of dramatic tension.

One thing worth mentioning is the language: it's very contemporary and very coarse. I was ambivalent about it: at times, it felt jarringly modern in a fantasy setting; at times, it felt jarring just because I got tired of hearing the f-word so much (and I did hear it: I was listening to the audiobook version). At the same time, it's not as though I don't hear the same language in films without batting an eye, and I've said all such words at one time or another, so it's not a squeamishness on my part. One nit to pick is that I would have liked to have had more of a sense of language differentiation: a big part of the story revolves around disguises, but I felt like everyone talked with roughly the same level of diction, no class differences or even personal quirks. There was at times some creative swearing, but that was more Lynch showing off than anything particularly individual to a character or class.

In the end, I enjoyed it enough to see it through to the end and I enjoyed it enough to pick up the next novel in the series, but it won't go down as one of my favorites or as a novel I'd class among the best that the fantasy genre has to offer.

Book Review: The Name of the Wind

I'd heard a lot of buzz for this novel as it was read by one of the book clubs I follow on Goodreads. Other than that, I didn't know much about it when I saw that I could check it out as an audiobook from my library. So, I did, and passed quite a few hours in the world Rotfuss created, with his hero/narrator, Kvothe.

There were a lot of things that I liked about this novel. First, I liked Kvothe. He's a hero rather in the mold of an Orson Scott Card hero: brilliant from a young age, destined for greatness, with a solid core of goodness. At the same time, Rothfuss avoids Card's preachiness and over-narration, while also giving him a bit of a darker streak that isn't (as it necessarily would be in a Card novel) mended.

The overall story is a bildungsroman, which is a snooty way of saying it's a coming-of-age story. [Warning: Lots of Spoilers Ahead] It's framed like this: our hero Kvothe is a legend in his own time--he's done great deeds that are known throughout the world--but he has, at what's still a relatively young age, retired from the world to a life of anonymity. A man known as Chronicler, who's made it his life work to seek out legends and suss out the truth of them, has found where Kvothe is hiding and seeks to get him to tell his true story, to reveal the man behind the legend. Oh yeah, and the sleepy little village where Kvothe hides begins early in the novel to be attacked by strange, dark forces.

All this, though, is a framing device. Although we get occasional "interludes" set in the present, the bulk of this novel deals with Kvothe's early life among the Edema Ruh (read: gypsies), the loss of his family, his hard life alone on the streets of a nasty city, and his entry into a university devoted to the study of magic in its various forms.

All in all, it was an engaging story. Many of the characters teetered on the edge of being flat and a bit generic--certainly, none of them has the vividness that Kvothe gets, though we do get hints of individuality and interest, at least from some of them.

A few things bothered me. First, although I like the idea of all the very literary things Rothfuss is doing--the framing narrative, his poetic opening that's echoed in the ending, some of his asides about "fairy stories" (read: simplistic fantasy), none of them quite seemed to click for me. One problem with the framing narrative is that, naturally enough, it lowers the tension on the main story being told. We know that Kvothe survives and thrives, because he's telling his own story and throughout the novel he hasn't yet done most of the things that will make him legendary. Indeed, all the suspense is in the "present" story, where we have sinister forces very active in the world and where we have what we soon enough realize is a broken hero: why has he withdrawn from the world, why has he apparently lost a good bit of his power and ability, and will he rise to the new threat (the one that actually does have suspense and interest on its side)?

The story that is the focus of the novel isn't nearly wrapped up. This isn't a surprise, really, given what we're told in the framing story, but it's still unsatisfying. It just kind of stops. Because the narrator is tired and it's time to stop for the night. Are some plot threads wrapped up? Sure. He calls the name of the wind, he avoids being expelled, and he even gets promoted to a higher level of student. But in so many other ways, it didn't seem like the right end to the story. Rothfuss has a poetic bit about a silence in three parts--the same thing he used to open the book, though it's a bit different by the end (of course). It serves to offer a sort of formal closure, the sort of thing that might work well enough in a song (appropriate enough, since Kvothe is, among other things, a musician), but the overall unsatisfying point at which he's left off the story can't be smoothed over by a formal trick--it just didn't work for me.

Still, the plot, the characters, and the telling of the novel were all good enough that I will be listening to the next book of the series before too long.

Book Review: House of Chains by Steven Erikson

House of Chains is the fourth novel in Steven Erikson’s monumental epic fantasy series The Malazan Book of the Fallen. The tenth and final novel of the series has just been published and I’m in the process of re-reading the eight that I had already read so that I can finish the last two novels with what has come before firmly in my gray matter. I realized after reading House of Chains that I never reviewed it—indeed, I never reviewed any of the subsequent novels. This was not because I didn’t read them or didn’t like them—in fact, I have a hard time not gushing about the series, at least what I’ve read of it, and what I’ve read of it gives me full confidence that Erikson will have pulled off the ending that his masterpiece deserves. If anything, I suspect my lack of reviews had to do with feeling a bit unequal to the task. 

The novel starts, chronologically, earlier than the previous novels, and with characters wholly unfamiliar, focused on three members of a savage tribe of a giant people. These are a people to whom killing, plunder, and rape are the meat of existence. They are horrendous in their savagery. Yet Erikson is fascinatingly subtle not only in the nuances of this culture but especially in the subtlety and nuance of the characterization, particularly between our central character, Karsa Orlong (who, I’ll tell you now, figures large not only in this novel but in future installments) and Bairoth Gild. I remember being struck by the absolute mastery Erikson exhibits in the drawing of these two characters, each of whom both underestimates and otherwise subtly misunderstands the other, while also absolutely understanding the other in a way that even the other himself does not. There’s something so absolutely authentic about this and at the same time so amazing to see portrayed so well. It’s brilliant.

The action of the story moves gradually from there to show us events from some of the other earlier novels from a different perspective, even while House of Chains is following its own plot. In the process, certain earlier events are clarified and the overall action is taken forward beyond what had been reached in any of the previous novels. Specifically, we see Felisin as Shai’ik reborn, preparing the Army of the Apocalypse for battle with the Malazans as her sister, Tavore, leads that army across through the continent of Seven Cities to put down the rebellion.

I don’t want to offer spoilers, so I’ll keep my comments brief and just say that it’s quite a ride. We see a number of characters we’ve known from previous books: Fiddler, Kalam, Crockus/Cutter, Apsalar, Gessler, Stormy and the rest of the Coast Guard, Felisin and Heboric, the villainous Korbolo Dom and Kamist Reloe, Pearl and Lostara Yil, Iskaral Pust and Morgara, plus cameos by some others (and I’m probably missing some!). Many of these characters see more development here, as we get further inside their heads. 

I’ve said it before, but it bears repeating (probably in every review of every book of this series): I think Erikson understands epic fantasy in the way that is perhaps most true to life: big events require large casts. A big decision that any writer has to make involves the point-of-view character. It's important to have someone in this role who is actually going to be present at all important events, a convention which in the past has led to fictional heroes who are virtually the center of the universe--other characters may exist and earn our interest, but everything really hangs on what so-and-so does. One way to get around this limitation, common in epic fantasy today, is shifting perspectives. This is great, allowing for a larger scope without unrealistic expectations on one character being present for everything and rather more multi-polar storytelling. Erikson (and I don't mean to imply that he's the only one doing this) goes one better--not only do we have a large cast of point-of-view characters, none of them really manages to assume paramount imortance. A question like "who's the main character" loses meaning in The Malazan Book of the Fallen series.

As a result, character development may well be spread out over the course of several novels. That’s going to be hard for some readers to either follow or approve, but I think it’s brilliant for the realism it brings (into a world where many characters have reality-bending magic and power). All of these characters are woven together in such a way that they’re all (well, pretty much all) necessary for the resolution of the plot. And the payoff with these characters is, to me, greater for the fact that we’ve lived with some of these characters so long.

Also, I’m finding that there was an awful lot that I picked up on a second read-through. This is dense writing. I’m a pretty good reader, if I do say so myself, but there was a lot that only really made sense on a second read, because now I had the perspective of having read the first 8 books in the series, so I could see some of the things that were setting up things to come, could sort out some of the larger story that can seem tangential to the main storyline because it’s more relevant to the over-arching story than to the particular novel. Which is to say, I suppose, that you should plan on reading this whole series twice if you really want to appreciate it—and it probably wouldn’t hurt to give it more re-reads than that.