Posts tagged Review

It is with great disappointment — but conversely, great personal relief — to report that I was unable to finish Gardens of the Moon by Steven Erikson. Given the glowing reviews and endorsements, I expected this to be a great book. What I found instead was a turgid, impenetrable mess. That’s fine if your name is Thomas Pynchon and there’s a compelling artistic reason for your book to be challenging. As a fan of V and Crying of Lot 49, I can say that I enjoy a good literary challenge. But Erikson tries to pass off bad writing as genre-expanding and boundary-pushing — when in fact it is simply bad.

There are three elements that make a good fantasy novel: 1) compelling characters, 2) a great story and 3) a believable and fully realized world, be it our own or one of the author’s imagination. Without these three elements working in concert together, a fantasy novel is a failure. This is why there are so few authors in the genre who reach classic status with a wide range of fans — George R.R. Martin, Robert Jordan, J.R.R. Tolkien, Robin Hobb, even Terry Brooks.

Gardens of the Moon is the first novel in what I can only imagine is a long and tedious series by Steven Erikson, a former archeologist turned dungeon master turned fantasy writer. Erikson is concerned with creating a world that features a deep and complex history, which is perhaps the book’s only positive attribute. Created with a friend as the basis for a GURPS campaign, a lot of thought was put into the design of the world, but it’s not enough to make a good book.

Erikson’s characters are flat, lack personality and serve as pawns in the Byzantine plot. There is no protagonist, but unlike say George R.R. Martin’s Song of Ice and Fire books where any single character is interesting enough to be considered a protagonist, this is not the case here. Their feelings and motivations are largely a mystery to the audience. And the naming convention is inconsistent — some have silly names like Tattersail and Whiskeyjack, while others have long and complicated fantasy names. There are a lot of them, none of them ever properly introduced of fleshed out.

In regards to story, there is none that can be easily articulated. There is a girl who is possessed by a god who is BAD NEWS, but her motivations are unclear, a young captain who conscripted by a major Imperial political figure to hunt her down, a squad of disgraced veteran soldiers, a female mage, thieves and assassins, a giant talking crow, a one-armed general, a power mad high mage, gods, ascendants, demons and slew of other fantasy creatures. However, I cannot describe what they’re doing exactly.

Imagine, if you will, a human being in the far-flung future. This person stumbles on an ancient novel describing the Vietnam War — a novel written in 1967 that assumes the reader already knows the politics involved. But this future reader has never heard of the United States of America, the Soviet Union, Vietnam, Cambodia, etc. He or she might be able to work out that President Johnson was the leader of a nation called the United States, that the U.S. army fights for him, but is unfamiliar with the concepts of democracy or communism, and because the book assumes the reader already knows it, is incapable of grasping the ideological struggle at the heart of the conflict.

Gardens of the Moon is just like that — there are battles galore, but it doesn’t bother to explain the complicated politics and social systems that are the genesis of the conflict. Erikson either assumes you already know, or that you can work it out on your own. Of course, with great works of speculative fiction, a reader can work it all out if given the right hints by the author (see China Mieville, Jeff Vandermeer, Frank Herbert, etc.). This is not the case here.

Finally, my first red flag on Steven Erikson was the condescending and self-involved interviews with him scattered around online. He seemed wrapped up in himself and his own greatness — a problem many writers suffer from, I will admit — but I got the sense that he was dismissive of readers who don’t “get” his books, almost as if it’s a character flaw on their part. I decided to give Gardens of the Moon a chance anyway — and I believe I gave it a very fair chance. My Kindle says I’ve finished 50% of it. But there are other books to read and so many hours left in a person’s life. I decided not to waste any more time on it.