House of Chains by Steven Erikson

Although House of Chains is the fourth book in Steven Erikson’s The Malazan Book of the Fallen series, it turns out to be essentially a direct sequel to the second book, Deadhouse Gates, just as the third book Memories of Ice was a sequel to the first, Gardens of the Moon. The Malazan Empire has sent a new army to Seven Cities to put down the rebellion that started in Deadhouse Gates, but waiting at the oasis in the center of the Holy Desert of Raraku is Sha’ik Reborn, leader of the armies of the Whirlwind Goddess. The scene is set for a decisive battle between the inexperienced Malazan army and the fractious rebels, but as is always the case in the Malazan series, nothing in this conflict is quite what it appears to be. I talked at length in my review of Deadhouse Gates about what I felt were that novel’s failings, but to quickly summarize, I didn’t like the way the rebels seemed demonized and the Malazan forces, for the most part, were lionized. Much of the plot, meanwhile, seemed repetitive, aimless, and contrived. I thought House of Chains was a far stronger novel, both on its own merits and considered within the context of the larger series. This time we see both sides of the Seven Cities conflict, and there is a return of that feeling Erikson conjured so successfully in Gardens of the Moon, the feeling that everyone on both sides are caught up in larger machinations, a situation spiraling out of anyone’s control, even the Empress or the Whirlwind Goddess. While this novel didn’t provoke me to re-examine my complaints about the way Deadhouse Gates handled the characters not associated with Coltaine, it at least gave them much more interesting things to do. For example, several times in House of Chains, Fiddler wonders what he was thinking when he rejoined the army, and all I could say was, “That’s what I’ve been wondering since you did it originally in Deadhouse.” But at least now instead of wandering around the landscape on a quest that comes to nothing, Fiddler and other veterans do the hard work of forging their army of recruits into a force that has a prayer of successfully engaging the rebel army in Raraku. Kalam has less to do, but what we do see of him is likewise satisfying (although there is a clumsy reset of his settling down at the end of Deadhouse Gates). As with pretty much every Malazan novel since the first one, there are elements and characters that are there pretty much just as setup for future novels. In this case, for example, Crokus and Apsalar are (literally) given something to do that is unrelated to the Seven Cities rebellion and never really goes anywhere, although I’m sure future books will build off it. New characters Trull Sengar and Onrack are given more time but likewise are essentially a prologue for a later book. Theoretically, the novel is centered on Adjunct Tavore and Felisin. They lead the opposing armies, their familial connection puts a personal spin on the conflict, and their final reunion at the end seems like it ought to be the climax of the novel. However, at least for me, there was no fire behind all that smoke. In a novel with dozens of viewpoint characters, we never get Tavore’s viewpoint and only a few scenes from Felisin’s eyes. Presumably this was intended to increase suspense: the reader sees these important characters through the eyes of their lieutenants and other advisers and has to guess at their intentions. Unfortunately I felt this left them mere ciphers. I complained in my Deadhouse Gates review that we never got to know Felisin before her traumatic experience in the mines, and now we don’t get to see much of how she’s been twisted by the Whirlwind Goddess. Meanwhile we never learn anything about Tavore. For instance, in the middle of the novel, Tavore is given news about the Genabackis campagin that includes some surprising revelations about her brother that surely were emotionally wrenching: Tavore had been told of, first, her brother’s heroism, then his death…She had made harrowing sacrifices, after all, to resurrect the family’s honour. Yet all along, Ganoes was no renegade…There had been no dishonour. Thus, the sacrifice of young Felisin might have, in the end, proved… unnecessary. Surely Tavore’s reaction will shine a lot of light on her character. right? Alas, we are stuck in Gamet’s perspective: The Adjunct’s expression revealed nothing. Great. I get that she’s stoic, and I understand what Erikson did with T’amber and it is indeed nifty, but this is just not enough for me. For one thing, despite what Gamet thinks, I wasn’t convinced all of this was news to Tavore. Did she really not know about the Empress’ scheme with Dujek? But more generally, it’s one thing to establish (and it had been long established by this point in the novel) that she controls her expression, maybe to a fault, but at some point I need to know what, if anything, she’s feeling. The canonical Eight Deadly Words are “I don’t care what happens to these people” but while I did care somewhat, I just don’t know Tavore at all. Felisin, despite being in a much more interesting situation that she was throughout her lengthy sections of Deadhouse, likewise remains elusive. However, while I said the novel was theoretically centered on those two characters, one of the story’s ironies is that neither the Adjunct or Sha’ik turn out to have much control over events. The various characters who are given a lot of time are much more interesting and fleshed out, from veterans of past novels like Fiddler, Kalam, and Heboric Light Touch to newcomers like Gamet, L’oric, and Felisin Younger. The character with the most time of all, however, is one I wouldn’t have expected going into the story. Putting the usual shifting viewpoints on hold, for its first seventy thousand words House of Chains has a single viewpoint character: Karsa Orlong. Karsa is a warrior from a tribe of Teblor, a race superior to humans in size and strength. More importantly, he is a barbarian in every sense of the word. Raised on stories of heroic warriors of the past, most recently his grandfather, Karsa desperately wants to follow in their footsteps. That this involves killing warriors from other tribes and raping their women doesn’t bother him in the least. Karsa is bold, even reckless, and decides to venture with two friends on the most audacious journey he can think of: going to the edge of the known world and back. Of course, the suffocating ignorance of his people is such that the farthest anyone has ever gone is to the edge of the valley system the Teblor tribes call home. There’s a human farm just outside these valleys and Karsa intends to raid it, though he’ll have to carve a bloody trail through several other Teblor tribes before he can reach it. Much to Karsa’s dismay, the journey sees him pulled into the vast world that lies beyond those little Teblor valleys, shattering almost everything he was taught about his people, his heroes, and his gods in the process. Many fantasy novels begin with a narrator with very limited horizons journeying to and then past the limits of their knowledge, discovering more and more about their world along with the reader. Erikson chose not to do this in Gardens of the Moon, and because by this point the reader knows far more about the world than Karsa does, there’s no need to encumber the narrative with exposition as Karsa slowly learns his real place in the world. Instead, the focus is on Karsa’s reexamination of his culture and its values. He slowly starts to reconsider his willingness to slaughter anyone in his path, but instead of simply adopting the “civilized” values held by those outside the valleys (not to mention those reading the novel), Karsa remains deeply skeptical about civilization because he is horrified by the idea of giving up any freedom. As usual, Erikson infuses the novel’s title with multiple associations. The first chains Karsa encounters are literal chains shackling slaves, both human and Teblor; the most direct coercion civilization has to offer. Meanwhile, Karsa becomes involved with the House of Chains most directly alluded to by the title, the association led by the Crippled God, no stranger to chains himself. No matter one’s social status, from the lowliest slave to the gods themselves, civilization means surrendering freedom for security, an unacceptable choice for someone of Karsa’s background even if he now recognizes his previous life was nasty, brutish, and quite likely to be short. This is an interesting new perspective on the Malazan series’ long running theme of civilization trying to impose order on a chaotic world, but it isn’t the only one offered. “Possession and control, the two are like insatiable hungers for some people. Oh, no doubt the Malazans have thought up countless justifications for their wars of expansion,” Torvald Nom says to Karsa at one point, summing up Karsa’s feelings. But his list of the “countless justifications” for Malazan conquest ends up sounding pretty persuasive: It’s well known that Seven Cities was a rat’s warren of feuds and civil wars, leaving most of the population suffering and miserable and starving under the heels of fat warlords and corrupt priest-kings. And that, with the Malazan conquest, the thugs ended up spiked to the city walls or on the run. And the wilder tribes no longer sweep down out of the hills to deliver mayhem on their more civilized kin. And the tyranny of the priesthoods was shattered, putting an end to human sacrifice and extortion. And of course the merchants have never been richer, or safer on these roads. So, all in all, this land is rife for rebellion. Torvald goes on to condemn civilization for incorporating rather than suppressing the hatreds of the people it is supposed to be restraining. Whether or not the Malazan Empire is as well-intentioned as it claims to be, for Torvald, the reaction of Seven Cities to Malazan paternalism just shows that “hatred is a most pernicious weed, finding root in any kind of soil. It feeds on itself.” While Torvald describes this process as the manifestation of hatred, there’s a parallel with one of the fundamental principles of Erikson’s world, articulated by countless characters in every book so far: power attracts power. Every action invites a reaction. The unveiling of power risks prompting a convergence of powers, something which tends to happen at the climax of each book. What’s so remarkable about Erikson’s worldbuilding is that virtually everyone has taken this concept to heart, and the result is a world of gods, ascendants, and mages whose first instinct is to conceal their power. The Whirlwind Goddess violates this unwritten rule with her ostentatious display of strength, and the result is mages and ascendants circle like vultures looking to co-opt or outright steal her power (and wiser heads roll their eyes at her foolishness). While this is (hard as it is to believe given how much prose the four books contain) not even halfway through the Malazan series, I want to mention that so far at least I think Erikson is doing an admirable job handling the difficulties of long-form fantasy, a difficult discipline for anyone, especially considering no one lives long enough to get very much practice. Although these are doorstop-class fantasy novels, they aren’t ever-increasing in length, and Erikson’s unusual partitioning of novels established right from the second book that he was going to leave out characters rather than stringing them along in padding segments. While there are some sections I consider overwritten (some of the Felisin scenes in Deadhouse, the dream sequences in Memories of Ice), if anything this tendency seems to be on the decline. I do wonder how well people who read the books as they came out without any catch up are able to cope with the vast cast and their complicated allegiances and schemes. When I was watching Lost, I noted that, all other things being equal, people watching a season all at once on DVD seemed to have a more favorable opinion of the show than those watching week by week. I suspect there may be a similar phenomenon with a series like this. Reading them all at once as I am doing (more or less), I’m less inclined to be impatient or frustrated with Erikson’s choices and better able to see the series’ broad patterns and themes. Unfortunately, while a season of a TV show takes between ten and twenty-some hours to watch, it takes a lot longer to read a series like this. We’ll see if I’m still as sanguine as the series continues, but I can say that even if the whole thing goes off the rails starting in book five, the first four books are worthy of any fantasy reader’s time.