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A review by thepurplebookwyrm
Gardens of the Moon by Steven Erikson
dark
mysterious
tense
medium-paced
- Plot- or character-driven? Plot
- Strong character development? It's complicated
- Loveable characters? No
- Diverse cast of characters? It's complicated
- Flaws of characters a main focus? It's complicated
3.25
Reading vlog: https://youtu.be/d4fAamkop3M?si=23OsmFaB-4JjqZSx.
Here's an extremely belated review of Gardens of the Moon (and bits of Deadhouse Gates, technically).
Writing, structure and pacing:
I found Erikson’s prose decent to good, overall. It did the job, felt eloquent or even somewhat inspired at times – I did write a couple of quotes down in my reading log – and that's about it.
I did have an issue with the pacing of Gardens of the Moon, as I generally do when stories coast along at a rather leisurely pace only to go 'balls to the wall wild' with action in their final sections. I’m not saying that never works for me, but it seems it’s just not my preference, especially with stories that don’t really do it for me on other fronts...
The book also tended to have chapters on the longer side of things, which I wasn’t a big fan of either, especially, once again, since I wasn’t particularly invested in the plot in any case. Every chapter, additionally, featured several different points of view, a narrative choice I normally like. But here, unfortunately, the transitions between them weren’t always the smoothest.
Character work:
The character work, such as it was in the pages I read, was fine overall. It was decent to good in a couple of instances, and alright to kinda bad in some others. Paran, for instance, did not make sense to me in terms of character motivations, or rather the shifting thereof... and no, I didn’t find the “but mayhaps godly manipulations murr” excuse good enough. Another character just up and changed her mind about something that had been established as pretty fundamental to her identify, and worldview, before she died, and I just couldn’t quite buy it. Then again, when you have so many different characters, right out of the gate, and all vying for screen-time in every single chapter, it isn’t so surprising that you wouldn’t devote enough time to properly fleshing all of them out, especially if you also have to introduce, then juggle 10 different world-building elements…
I’m not a character-driven reader, no, but the fact I didn’t really care about any character, nor even find most of them particularly interesting at the outset, didn’t help. I did like Tattersail (outside of the 'instalovy' schtick with Paran)… and Crone, the old as fuck magical Raven, was based. Yes, my favourite Malazan character is a bird, make of that what you will. #SheWasTheRealMVP
A point of firmer criticism, that mildly overlaps with world-building: the fact this story features old, and I mean extremely old, think ancient, beings, some of them godlike, with ‘speaking roles’… actually broke my immersion a little. Convincingly portraying non-human animal minds is difficult to pull off. Portraying alien, eldritch or godlike minds, is extremely difficult to pull off. It can be done, but holy shit is it rare – in my limited experience. It’s all the harder to do when you have them sit down for a fireside chat and speak like what essentially amounts to a slightly odd or aloof human being – yes, looking right at you, Anomander Rake. That kind of character, in my humble opinion, should (most of the time) be spoken of, observed by others, not spoken to.
Theming elements:
I honestly didn’t read enough of the greater story to have any strong opinions regarding the series’ overarching theming. What threads, or crumbs I picked up seemed to be concerned with the rise and fall of empires, and civilisation; its nature, its pitfalls, etc… The nature of power, or godhood – in a, ahem, rather JRPG-reminiscent sense – might’ve also been bopping about in there.
None of these crumbs were bad as such, but what I managed to gather on my… uhm, reading plate, shall we say, didn’t particularly engage or appeal to me, given my personal theming preferences, or the way these were peppered throughout the pages I read. Perhaps it would all eventually amount to something I could in fact appreciate to some extent, but: a) doubt, and b) life’s too short, and there are too many other books out there to justify expending this much effort to get to something my brain could only potentially vibe with in these ones.
World-building:
I didn’t hate what bits of world-building I got in the bits of Malazan I read. In fact, those are the bits I liked the most, by far. The problem is, I didn’t get enough of them to compensate for my utter lack of interest in the broader story, and what I got, wasn’t delivered in a way that really worked for me.
What I read of Malazan, in my opionion, suffered from conflating complexity, with depth, and from conflating quantity, with quality. It’s basically a version of the ‘too many things, too soon’ problem, in my book. I am not saying there is no depth to the world-building as a whole, but from the little research I’ve done into the series, it does seem like there won’t be as much depth of information, and immersion in this series as I’d like, as I’d need for this series to become a new favourite, or to simply, once again, justify expending additional effort to continue reading it.
On the positive side of things: I found the magic intriguing, though not mind-blowingly fascinating either. The sketches I got of theological and mythological world-building were decently compelling as well. The 'Tiste Andii' did have that cool factor to them, but they also just screamed... drow elves to my visual brain. There were giant bug mounts, neat, and a book, or series, always gets a point, from me, for having solid corvid representation. The shamanic, Neanderthal-esque undead dudes were kinda neat as well.
But that brings me to another issue: the temporal scope of this story. It is huge; this isn’t intrinsically a problem, but it kinda breaks for me when expressed through actual, living characters who are either absurdly old, in an unconvincing fashion, or who seem to have an awareness and understanding of the past that strains credibility. Although I guess if you can talk to creatures that were bopping about 50k years ago, that would in fact help with fleshing out your history books, sure. I also had an issue with the narrative distance in Gardens of the Moon: it felt like it was trying to go both for a mythical or actual fictional history vibe à la Silmarillion or Fire and Blood, and a more intimate, immediate character-focused story vibe, à la LotR or the main series of ASOIAF. And it failed to satisfyingly reach either for me.
I didn’t find the story’s linguistic world-building particularly good. It wasn’t terrible, but there’s nothing for it, I was bugged by that one, singular city-state named Dharujistan. And as a friend pointed out to me, a weirdly high number of characters in Gardens of the Moon (and Deadhouse Gates) had janky object names, for some reason. I also found the books’ epigraphs majorly wasted in terms of world-building potential. They were just way too opaque, and self-referential for first-time readers.
And finally, just a small thing I noticed: there was a rather strange dissonance between the stated to be more or less sex-egalitarian world of Malazan, and the still kinda gendered perceptions of a lot of its characters, especially when it came to lustful observations. Something just didn’t quite add up for me there, given my understanding of things like patriarchy, gender, feminist theory, etc… I’m sure this won’t bother most readers, and I want to be clear this isn’t something I found offensive, or problematic, just more so something that I felt didn’t really make sense from a greater world-building perspective.
Additional remarks:
There’s nothing for it: the RPG origins of, and influences on Gardens of the Moon (and presumably the rest of the series) were very obvious to me past a certain point. When I got to that duel between Anomader Rake and that Demon Prince thing, I didn’t feel 'ze epicness'... I giggled, because it felt like reading a Dark Souls boss encounter, and whilst that shit is epic when you play it, it, somehow, just does not work for me in novel format. I was also reminded of Final Fantasy XVI and the Elder Scrolls, which is why I maintain: this story would work a thousand times better, for my brain, as an actual RPG. Or even a graphic novel, maybe.
Ultimately, I just found myself thoroughly disinterested in the story’s plot, and characters, and not engaged enough by its world-building, or theming. Malazan, or rather the bits of it I tried, bounced right off of me; the vibratory harmonisation between text and brain that makes a story click for me never occurred, and I must thus, alas, DNF the series.
Here's an extremely belated review of Gardens of the Moon (and bits of Deadhouse Gates, technically).
Writing, structure and pacing:
I found Erikson’s prose decent to good, overall. It did the job, felt eloquent or even somewhat inspired at times – I did write a couple of quotes down in my reading log – and that's about it.
I did have an issue with the pacing of Gardens of the Moon, as I generally do when stories coast along at a rather leisurely pace only to go 'balls to the wall wild' with action in their final sections. I’m not saying that never works for me, but it seems it’s just not my preference, especially with stories that don’t really do it for me on other fronts...
The book also tended to have chapters on the longer side of things, which I wasn’t a big fan of either, especially, once again, since I wasn’t particularly invested in the plot in any case. Every chapter, additionally, featured several different points of view, a narrative choice I normally like. But here, unfortunately, the transitions between them weren’t always the smoothest.
Character work:
The character work, such as it was in the pages I read, was fine overall. It was decent to good in a couple of instances, and alright to kinda bad in some others. Paran, for instance, did not make sense to me in terms of character motivations, or rather the shifting thereof... and no, I didn’t find the “but mayhaps godly manipulations murr” excuse good enough. Another character just up and changed her mind about something that had been established as pretty fundamental to her identify, and worldview, before she died, and I just couldn’t quite buy it. Then again, when you have so many different characters, right out of the gate, and all vying for screen-time in every single chapter, it isn’t so surprising that you wouldn’t devote enough time to properly fleshing all of them out, especially if you also have to introduce, then juggle 10 different world-building elements…
I’m not a character-driven reader, no, but the fact I didn’t really care about any character, nor even find most of them particularly interesting at the outset, didn’t help. I did like Tattersail (outside of the 'instalovy' schtick with Paran)… and Crone, the old as fuck magical Raven, was based. Yes, my favourite Malazan character is a bird, make of that what you will. #SheWasTheRealMVP
A point of firmer criticism, that mildly overlaps with world-building: the fact this story features old, and I mean extremely old, think ancient, beings, some of them godlike, with ‘speaking roles’… actually broke my immersion a little. Convincingly portraying non-human animal minds is difficult to pull off. Portraying alien, eldritch or godlike minds, is extremely difficult to pull off. It can be done, but holy shit is it rare – in my limited experience. It’s all the harder to do when you have them sit down for a fireside chat and speak like what essentially amounts to a slightly odd or aloof human being – yes, looking right at you, Anomander Rake. That kind of character, in my humble opinion, should (most of the time) be spoken of, observed by others, not spoken to.
Theming elements:
I honestly didn’t read enough of the greater story to have any strong opinions regarding the series’ overarching theming. What threads, or crumbs I picked up seemed to be concerned with the rise and fall of empires, and civilisation; its nature, its pitfalls, etc… The nature of power, or godhood – in a, ahem, rather JRPG-reminiscent sense – might’ve also been bopping about in there.
None of these crumbs were bad as such, but what I managed to gather on my… uhm, reading plate, shall we say, didn’t particularly engage or appeal to me, given my personal theming preferences, or the way these were peppered throughout the pages I read. Perhaps it would all eventually amount to something I could in fact appreciate to some extent, but: a) doubt, and b) life’s too short, and there are too many other books out there to justify expending this much effort to get to something my brain could only potentially vibe with in these ones.
World-building:
I didn’t hate what bits of world-building I got in the bits of Malazan I read. In fact, those are the bits I liked the most, by far. The problem is, I didn’t get enough of them to compensate for my utter lack of interest in the broader story, and what I got, wasn’t delivered in a way that really worked for me.
What I read of Malazan, in my opionion, suffered from conflating complexity, with depth, and from conflating quantity, with quality. It’s basically a version of the ‘too many things, too soon’ problem, in my book. I am not saying there is no depth to the world-building as a whole, but from the little research I’ve done into the series, it does seem like there won’t be as much depth of information, and immersion in this series as I’d like, as I’d need for this series to become a new favourite, or to simply, once again, justify expending additional effort to continue reading it.
On the positive side of things: I found the magic intriguing, though not mind-blowingly fascinating either. The sketches I got of theological and mythological world-building were decently compelling as well. The 'Tiste Andii' did have that cool factor to them, but they also just screamed... drow elves to my visual brain. There were giant bug mounts, neat, and a book, or series, always gets a point, from me, for having solid corvid representation. The shamanic, Neanderthal-esque undead dudes were kinda neat as well.
But that brings me to another issue: the temporal scope of this story. It is huge; this isn’t intrinsically a problem, but it kinda breaks for me when expressed through actual, living characters who are either absurdly old, in an unconvincing fashion, or who seem to have an awareness and understanding of the past that strains credibility. Although I guess if you can talk to creatures that were bopping about 50k years ago, that would in fact help with fleshing out your history books, sure. I also had an issue with the narrative distance in Gardens of the Moon: it felt like it was trying to go both for a mythical or actual fictional history vibe à la Silmarillion or Fire and Blood, and a more intimate, immediate character-focused story vibe, à la LotR or the main series of ASOIAF. And it failed to satisfyingly reach either for me.
I didn’t find the story’s linguistic world-building particularly good. It wasn’t terrible, but there’s nothing for it, I was bugged by that one, singular city-state named Dharujistan. And as a friend pointed out to me, a weirdly high number of characters in Gardens of the Moon (and Deadhouse Gates) had janky object names, for some reason. I also found the books’ epigraphs majorly wasted in terms of world-building potential. They were just way too opaque, and self-referential for first-time readers.
And finally, just a small thing I noticed: there was a rather strange dissonance between the stated to be more or less sex-egalitarian world of Malazan, and the still kinda gendered perceptions of a lot of its characters, especially when it came to lustful observations. Something just didn’t quite add up for me there, given my understanding of things like patriarchy, gender, feminist theory, etc… I’m sure this won’t bother most readers, and I want to be clear this isn’t something I found offensive, or problematic, just more so something that I felt didn’t really make sense from a greater world-building perspective.
Additional remarks:
There’s nothing for it: the RPG origins of, and influences on Gardens of the Moon (and presumably the rest of the series) were very obvious to me past a certain point. When I got to that duel between Anomader Rake and that Demon Prince thing, I didn’t feel 'ze epicness'... I giggled, because it felt like reading a Dark Souls boss encounter, and whilst that shit is epic when you play it, it, somehow, just does not work for me in novel format. I was also reminded of Final Fantasy XVI and the Elder Scrolls, which is why I maintain: this story would work a thousand times better, for my brain, as an actual RPG. Or even a graphic novel, maybe.
Ultimately, I just found myself thoroughly disinterested in the story’s plot, and characters, and not engaged enough by its world-building, or theming. Malazan, or rather the bits of it I tried, bounced right off of me; the vibratory harmonisation between text and brain that makes a story click for me never occurred, and I must thus, alas, DNF the series.
Content Warnings
Minor: Gore and Violence