When I returned from genre-reading hiatus in the mid-2010s, Malazan was inescapable. Tell someone you read fantasy and they would inevitably ask about one of three things: Kingkiller, Malazan, or Brandon Sanderson. At the time, I’d read none of the three (apart from Sanderson’s Wheel of Time co-authorship), but a decade later, I finally decided to give Gardens of the Moon by Steven Erikson a try.
Gardens of the Moon is a lengthy and notoriously difficult opening to a sprawling, ten-book series. The Malazan Empire for which the series is named has traversed the seas to conquer most of the Northern half of the continent on which the book is set. But one city remains free, and the Empress cannot abide the fact. Complicating the attempted conquest are perceived threats by some respected military leaders who predated the Empress’ rise to power. What’s more, there are meddling gods getting involved through multiple avenues, and almost every major setting faces intramural squabbles with potentially deadly consequences.
Gardens of the Moon is infamous for dropping the reader into the middle of the action with precious little exposition, but upon reading, I find that reputation overblown. There’s a kernel of truth to it, however, and it’s at least a cousin to a complaint I often make about epic fantasy that I’ll repeat here. But first, the lack of exposition complaint itself: it is true, but in a limited context. When the gods are meddling, readers are rarely given any clear exposition of their ultimate aims, leaving plot-shaking actions opaque and unpredictable. But on the human side of affairs, the exposition is not all that far out of step with genre standards. The primary perspective character is the stereotypical young man gaining new position, and he’s given plenty of instruction as to the geopolitics and personal politics behind it. And each time the story moves to a new setting, the reader is given plenty of scenes to establish the basic context. There are certainly aspects that are difficult to follow, but it’s not all in media res all the time.
In my eyes, the biggest challenge to the reader—and also the novel’s biggest weakness—is the lightning-fast onboarding of perspective characters. I’ve often complained that fantasy writers learned the wrong lessons from the sprawling epics of the 90s, forgetting that The Eye of the World has just three distinct POVs outside the prologue. Gardens of the Moon has more than thirty. Now several of those are extremely short segments designed to show major characters or events from a different perspective; it’s not like they’re not all characters the reader is expected to remember. But it still leaves a grand total of zero characters getting 20% of the page time or more.
It’s not impossible to attach emotionally when in the midst of so much head-hopping, but it is challenging, and Gardens of the Moon doesn’t quite pull it off. While series fans wax poetic about the lovable characters, the opening book simply doesn’t spend enough time with any given perspective to really generate that investment. This is a common problem with long series that have ensemble casts, and it’s exacerbated with the book’s plot focus. There are certainly flashes of personality that shine through, but the first three-quarters of the book are mostly about introducing the major players and getting them to the places they need to be for the big finish. There’s just not enough to generate real attachment.
While this weakness could’ve been enough to sink the book entirely, Gardens of the Moon is redeemed in significant part by its readability and the climactic convergence. I tend to expect chunky mass-market paperbacks to go pretty slowly, and I consistently found myself making more progress than expected. Even in the first half of the novel when there isn’t much character hook, the reading process stays pretty smooth. If a writer is going to demand this much patience from a reader, it helps to have a style that goes down easily.
And while the book would have been better with more for the reader to latch onto in the first half, it does come together for a pretty thrilling big finish. There are a couple moments that suffer from the flaws in the buildup—reveals that one character is secretly another character in disguise feel anticlimactic when the reader barely remembers either one, as do some of the conflicts between godlike beings whose motivations remain generally opaque to the reader—but the most significant and memorable characters all have big moments that deliver plenty of excitement and tie up a lot of long-running plot threads. It’s a finish that raises the level of the book as a whole.
Of course, in a ten-book series, there are bound to be plenty of plot threads still open, and Gardens of the Moon indeed closes with some key characters gazing into the distance at conflicts that will surely be taken up in subsequent books. But there’s enough closure to justify reading one book, even if it’s a book designed to set up nine more.
Overall, Gardens of the Moon suffers a lot from trying to bring in too many perspective characters before giving the reader a reason to care about them, but it reads smoothly and comes together for a high-quality finish. If I were at the life stage where I had few other series in progress and had access to a limited supply of books, I’d dive straight into the sequel, expecting that the improvement in the second half of the series-opener would continue into subsequent books. But in the current reading landscape, with a ravening TBR that only ever seems to get longer, the opening book doesn’t do enough to send the second atop the stack.
Recommended if you like: growing into a series over multiple books, sprawling epics.
Can I use it for Bingo? It’s surely hard mode for Gods and Pantheons, though I’m not sure I have a sense of exactly how many pantheons there are, and it’s a Book in Parts.
Overall rating: 14 of Tar Vol’s 20. Four stars on Goodreads.