Book Review: Gardens of the Moon
by: Steven Erickson
Alright.
So, this was a fairly quick read.
Kind of. I have a feeling I could (should?) have spent twice as long on it, re-reading things and flipping back pages to tie them in with other things but sadly, that’s not how I read. I just plow through. So much of the depth here was maybe wasted on me. Also: So, much of the depth here was maybe wasted on me. Both are true, thus both were typed.
And depth is what this book does, with a Capital Every Single Letter. So far the series feels, like the classic Dune books, to be more the story of a world than of any particular characters – and it lacks Dune’s focus on particular characters. Instead we get a huge cast of dozens with very little focus given to most, although a few get several chapters.
Many of them are painted in broad strokes… and vague as fuck but still kind of specific broad strokes if that makes any sense. “This guy is a <vague> semi-god dude with <vague, implied> motivations” and “This guy is a <vague> ex-noble guy who gets in way over his head but is still somehow cocky and stuff works for him” and “There is this guy we’re only going to mention once or twice, but he’s a total badass, you’ll probably see him in another book” type stuff.
Very Elric-ish. However, I found this much, much more entertaining than the Elric stuff. The more I think on it… the more I find in common with the Elric school of fantasy writing. Magic is crazy. There are some things kind of laid out about it to make it look like it has rules and structure but, when it really gets down to it, shit just happens. WTF? What just happened? Crazy, crazy, weird old magic just happened. Suck it up man. No, there was no need to foreshadow what just happened because there was nothing to foreshadow. CRAZY JUST IS MAN.
Or something like that.
Almost every character is a huge canvas of mottled gray, even the villains, and that’s OK. A couple of the characters that get a lot of face time wind up “just” being instruments of the gods, so you’re (or just me) left to wonder if anything that happened to them mattered much as aspects of character development, or if it was all just plot.
Dialogue. Dialogue is weird. Broken. Bizarre. Angular. More WTFs. I think there is a strong intersection between the dialogue & the magic system in that I can see them springing fully-partially-formed from the same mind.
The character development and magic anti-structure here is the antithesis of stuff like Sanderson’s… where the characters feel as human as me and the magic systems make almost as much sense as math.
All that may sound negative but. But. The book was a good read, and I’m quite interested to see where all this is going, even if just because there is so goddam much of it just…going…everywhere.
Old gods who we know or care nothing about reborn, wandering around in people’s dreams then doing nothing. Time traveling eventual-lich-things. Dragons. Aliens. Funky troll things. People being reborn as puppets and deformed skeleton babies. Bargains with gods. People manhandled by god-dogs and then not killed for no reason. Dimensions inside swords that chain gods to a giant wagon (this is true). An overweight female semi-lead (Yes, this is rare enough to warrant appearing in this string of fantasica-imagino-orgy-splodings)! A multi-racial human cast & world! Swords that have vast powers that are never explained and simultaneously never do anything and then go away! Other swords that are so powerful they make people sad…oh wait I mentioned that one already with the wagon bit. Invisible assassins getting outmaneuvered by even-more-super-invisible assassins! Word of Recall! Dragons fighting body hopping tusked gods! Landmines!
The bits with the gods & humans meddling with each other reminds me a little, thematically (maybe? I suck at literary analysis words) of Saberhagen’s first Swords trilogy. Except that what is going on here is about forty times more complex, of course.
THREE AND A HALF STARS
Because I will keep reading.
OH OH OH and I almost forgot, frequently characters have crazy retro-fantasy names like Whiskeyjack and Sorry and Anomander Rake and Tattersail and Hairlock and Fiddler (I guess they have fiddles there?) and Caladan Brood… and then you’ve got people like Kruppe and Crokus.
So basically, yeah, to everything you just said. I finished Gardens of the Moon and I was thoroughly confused. Usually I’m good at casting characters in my head, but other than the few people that really get a lot of screen time, that’s hard to do. So many things are vague as hell. The plot is byzantine. The dialogue indecipherable in some places. And yet, a month later I’m on book 5.
*kanye shrug*
It does get a little better farther in, I think.
I agree. I’m a chunk of the way into book 2 now. I do love a rich history of madness, and that seems here in truckloads.
I think the indecipherable dialogue is starting to grow on me. Much of it still doesn’t make sense… but there’s something oddly compelling to me about something that doesn’t make sense that seems like it should. Like the books are a rambling epic poem where things don’t exactly have to make sense. Of course, I still wanna know what the hell is going on!