The Crippled God

Three million words later, it's over.

It's been seven months of my life. Mr Erikson, I salute you. ( )

Remember the Fallen!

This was the perfect ending to the Malazan Book of the Fallen and I was very happy to see that Steven Erikson has returned to the writing style of the earliest books. I hope he continues to write in this world since I for one am not quite ready to leave yet. ( )

BUAA IT'S OVER! I DONT WANT IT TO BE OVER!!!!!!!!! BOOKS LIKE THIS MAKE ME WANT TO CREATE A MEMORY ERRASER MACHINE THAT WILL ALLOW ME TO READ IT OVER AND OVER AGAIN FOR THE FIRST TIME!!!!!!!! ( )

I really wanted to end the series on four or five stars, but three is all we get. (I am not avoiding spoilers here, fyi.)

It's workmanlike. It wraps things up. It explains almost everyone's motivations that were previously hidden, and we get a number of genuinely touching final scenes for characters that were genuinely pleasant. Even the woman who was raped to death (because women are vindictive shrews who hate one another) is brought back to life with no memory of all that unpleasantness.

But it's clearly a rush job, in pagecount at least. Major characters, who had been heavily implied to be critical to the conclusion of all this, do little or nothing. I would have preferred 75% less "Karsa Orlong treks across the plains bantering wittily with his companions" in Toll the Hounds in exchange for 75% more "Karsa Orlong does anything in general except finally get consensually laid, hug someone, and hit something." Icarium is a non-factor. The invasion of Darkness is maybe sort of interesting except it's really not super clear why we give a shit about the Tiste Liosan or what they're after other than being assholes.

And there were some serious, confusing copyediting issues and/or name conflations that drove me batty. Ublala Pung is not a Teblor. He's never been called a Teblor. The only people called Teblor are Karsa Orlong's particular pocket of tribes on the other freaking continent. Likewise the army that arrives is described as Teblor. Now, had there not been the aforementioned confusion, I would assume that this is literally Karsa's tribe come to kick ass. But I don't think they are. I think they are the Tarthenal exiles from Lether - context certainly suggests this is so. They could be fairly called Toblakai, I guess. But NOT TEBLOR. Jesus. Likewise, the Sister of Cold Nights was a particular character, and giving another character that title confuses the fuck out of me.

So yeah, I think this was a rush job on a bunch of levels. I will probably write a long wrap-up of the series on my own blog, because I have some overall thoughts that are less directly connected to any given book, but this one was just... acceptable. Barely. ( )

http://speculiction.blogspot.com/2011/10/review-of-malazan-book-of-fallen-by.htm... ( )