Books read this week: Memories of Ice 7/10 (Steven Erikson), House of Chains 7/10 (Steven Erikson), The Complete Short Stories of Saki 5/10 (H.H. Munro)
Memories of Ice and House of Chains are the third and fourth books in Erikson's Malazan Book of the Fallen series, which I'm really beginning to get into. I won't try and summarise the plot, partly because the plots of these books are enormously complex (they're not short books, and, unlike Tolkien, very little of each volume is dedicated to digressions on the pipe-smoking habits of the lesser spotted tree elf), and also because really the plot isn't the point of these books (I only read them a couple of days ago, and I've already forgotten most of the salient details). The books are written to give an atmosphere; a sense of a world with magical warrens and ancient undead armies and mysterious glacier-controlling hippies that are long extinct. A world where gods can be killed. Erikson does this very successfully, although he does not manage anything quite so memorable or interesting as Coltaine's Chain of Dogs in Deadhouse Gates (the second book in the series). But this might just be cultural bias: to the English I think a heroic defeat, a glorious last stand or a magnificent fighting retreat is always inherently more interesting and memorable than a victory; Dunkirk, Crete, Corunna; the charge of the Light Brigade and Gordon at Khartoum. Erikson does fall into a familar trap for fantasy writers however, and ignores the effects of disease upon the army; in every war fought before about 1900 casualties from disease dramatically outweighed casualties in combat. During a large conflict a general could expect to lose between a quarter and a half of his army every year, without even coming within sight of the enemy; and yet here this is ignored: the general sets out with 10,000 soldiers, and arrives months later with 10,000 soldiers. I'll admit, dysentery isn't very glamorous, but it's effect upon combat operations before modern medicine shouldn't be underestimated. Although I guess in a fantasy series one can always say "a wizard did it".
One of the more interesting things about the Malazan Book of the Fallen, as a series, is the approach it takes to gods; like I said above, gods can die: moreover, gods can sign contracts, and they can be cheated. This is an intriguing approach to take as it runs totally against the prevailing monotheistic framework in Western society; there are, of course, many differences between Christianity, Islam and Judaism, but they do share a common belief in a deity who is both omnipotent and omniscient: not a being that can be comprehended by the human mind, let alone outwitted. Of course, it is a concept familiar from the polytheistic religions of antiquity, and the folk tales of the middle ages are rife with men and women who can trick the devil out of his due (the classic tale of the old woman hiking up her skirts and frightening off the devil is a personal favourite of mine), just not one encountered very often in modern Western literature* (I can't claim any deep knowledge of Hinduism, the Sikh faith or the various religions of Africa, China and Japan, let alone their popular folktales, so I don't know if it's an idea seen in that part of the world). Another question that naturally arises here (although not one that Erikson answers) is if a being is not omniscient and omnipotent, just far more knowledgeable and powerful than an ordinary human being, why should we call it a god? Obviously the natural answer is that when a being that can split continents with it's bare hands asks you to call it a god it's quite dangerous not to, but the underlying philosophical question of the necessary and sufficient conditions for godhood remain.
The Complete Short Stories of Saki are an interesting study of British high society in the years immediately preceding the Great War. The stories are very much set in that Evelyn Waugh/Jeeves and Wooster/Downton Abbey world of shooting parties, London clubs and unspeakable maiden aunts. Much like Downton Abbey, it shows that there was a considerable proportion of the upper classes in the Edwardian era who had absolutely nothing better to do with their time than come up with increasingly extreme and witty ways in which to be extremely unpleasant to each other - it is like Liasions Dangereuse in that regard. Pretty much every story Saki ever wrote was either a description of a mean-spirited or cruel practical joke, or a condemnation of the suffragettes. The sheer misanthropy of the collection, taken as a whole, is quite shocking, as is the reactionary, bullying nature of most of the interactions: basically, what we have here is an book of stories where every main character is a slightly wittier variation on Jeremy Clarkson. There are individual stories here which I would consider both extremely misogynistic and anti-semitic, were they not embedded within a collection of such deep and abiding misanthropy: Munro does not appear to like women or Jewish people, but he's also hateful towards men and Christians and Muslims. One gets the feeling that Munro has just as sharp a wit as Wilde's, but he lacks the outsider's view that Wilde had (Wilde was a socialist, after all), and so his work has an undercurrent of bullying meanness which is absent from Wilde.
* Goethe's Faust is the exception that proves the rule here, I feel.
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