Posted by Bill Capossere

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Reading Steven Erikson’s newest Malazan novel, No Life Forsaken, I found myself drifting through layers of familiarity: The still-relatively-fresh-in-the-mind familiarity of the book’s direct predecessor, 2021’s The God Is Not Willing, the events of which are occasionally alluded to, albeit minimally; the hazier “I think I recognize that name and maybe remember they did X or possibly Y” familiarity that arises when characters and plot points from 2016’s Fall of Light, the second in his ongoing prequel trilogy, pop up; and then the even more tenuous sense of recognition that comes with returning to the setting and storyline of a run of Malazan books from the early 2000s.

As one might gather from all that, this is not the place to start with reading Erikson. But, as much as that foggy sense of recollection sometimes acted as a minor barrier to the reading experience, there’s something wonderfully appropriate about sifting through these layers of reading history, given that Erikson’s non-writing career is archaeology. This is a background that permeates his series. I’m hard pressed to come up with any other set of books that makes more overt references to deep time or to objects of archeological or anthropological study: cave art, skeletons, potsherds, statues, ruins, totemic items, the connection between environment and culture, detailed rock strata, and the like. I’d also struggle to name one that so frequently makes the point that what we think of as “known history” is more often wreathed in obscuring mist and cloud, thanks to the wide stretch of time which separates it from us, our tendency to mythologize, our biases, the gaps in physical evidence, and more. All of which is here in this novel in, well … spades, if we’re waxing archeological.

Those layers of familiarity arise because, despite No Life Forsaken being billed as a sequel, it actually has very little direct connection with its precursor. Instead, we move to an entirely different continent and a (nearly) entirely different set of characters. The novel is less a follow-up to The God Is Not Willing and more a return to the setting and storyline of those decades-ago Malazan books that detailed the Malazan Empire’s conquest of the Seven Cities continent (and its subsequent defeat of an attempted uprising).

Now, roughly two decades later, rebellion is threatening to break out again, in a spree of violence not just against the Empire but amongst and within the many sects and cults that thrive in Seven Cities. One of the most powerful of these is the worshipers of Va’Shaik (the Goddess Sha’ik reborn, personification of the Apocalypse). As Va’Shaik’s followers prepare to attack the Malazans, and also purge their own people of non-believers or wrong-believers, the Malazan High Fist, Jalan Arenfall, based in the city of G’danisban, hopes to halt the uprising before it truly starts. Meanwhile, the Emperor’s agent, Adjunct Inkaras, has just arrived, ostensibly to determine just how close the continent is to boiling over, but also, in the way of nervous emperors throughout history, to decide if Arenfall himself is a threat that needs to be eliminated.

Other characters include the goddess Va’Shaik herself, her High Priestess Shamalle, and—despite his avowed atheism—her appointed Inquisitor Bornu Blatt; a squad of typically crazy Malazan marines; several Elder Gods and Azanathai (there’s the Fall of Light reference); a number of assassins; a High Priest of the cult of Karsa who is mostly ignored by his fiercely reluctant god; a not-small number of dead people who don’t stay dead; and a mysterious mage who might be this fascinating and beloved character from arlier books, or possibly that equally fascinating if less beloved character from earlier books, or maybe just someone else entirely (thus the “mysterious”).

In terms of plotlines, we have several, including but not limited to:

• Arenfall trying to nip the rebellion in the bud while also forestalling being assassinated by his own Emperor.
• Inkaras evaluating the dual threats of an uprising and a too-competent general, while being torn between his personal views and his official role as hand of the Emperor.
• Va’Shaik awakening to her power and attempting to wrestle her religion back from its corrupt and bloodthirsty officials even as she mulls a new apocalypse.
• Bornu Blatt journeying, as Va’Shaik’s agent of reform, to the various temples and experiencing a series of perilous adventures along the way even as he picks up a wildly assorted found family.
• The marines preparing for rebellion and also trying to figure out what to do about G’danisban’s undercity being flooded by rising seas, which will inevitably lead to a crisis for refugees.
• The meddling of various gods, including one who is mightily annoyed at being manipulated by a mere mortal and is thus considering flooding “the entire world,” or rather, most of it, believing “a cleansing is long overdue.”

A lot is clearly happening here, and honestly, it may be a bit too much plot for too little book. As entertaining as it is—and it absolutely does entertain, via its battles, assassin wars, and trademark laugh-out-loud banter—at under five hundred pages, I’m not sure No Life Forsaken gives its storylines and characters, with the exception of Bornu Blatt and to a lesser extent Arenfall, enough time to breathe, to fully take up residence in the reader’s mind. Some plot points and character shifts, whether in origination or resolution, feel rushed, which left me at the end missing the days of the 1,000 to 1,200-page Malazan tomes of yore, with their slow accretion of plot and character details: I enjoyed spending time with these characters, but didn’t have a sense of truly knowing them; I enjoyed the sprightly nature of the plot but didn’t really feel its effects as much as usual.

But if aspects of the plotting and some individual characters suffer somewhat from the novel’s relative brevity, it’s in the nuanced exploration of human and social complexities that the book truly shines. We are, here, talking about the fourteenth book in this universe (more if one counts novellas), so one wouldn’t expect Erikson to be tossing in a lot of new themes. For the most part, Erikson either delves more deeply into particular topics, expands on them, or takes a somewhat different angle on them. But I confess that, for the first time in a Malazan book, I had the occasional twinge of impatience with revisiting subjects we’ve seen before.

The theme that looms largest in No Life Forsaken is the way organized religion too often corrupts sincere belief and spirituality via greed, violence, hypocrisy, and desire for power, becoming just another tool for oppression. This corrupting influence isn’t limited to the mortal realm, because in this universe—where mortals ascend and gods walk the earth—influence is a two-way street: While the gods can unsurprisingly affect human actions and events, in less typical fashion human acts and beliefs can affect their gods. Erikson dissects this twisting of belief in multiple ways, through action, dialogue, interior monologue, symbol, and the epigraphs at the beginning of chapters (“Woe betide the invisible tyranny of belief,” “We build religions to divide the indivisible”).

Here, for example, is the Invigil in Va’Shaik’s temple in G’danisban eagerly anticipating the aftermath of a successful rebellion:

In the wake would come reorganization within the temples of the goddess. The fate of rival temples and deviant cults would involve more than just crucifixions. Such dens would be scourged … The death of unbelievers was a preface … because only through acceptance would the world beyond death be transformed into an eternal paradise.

For the faithful. The unbelievers, the first sacrifices … would not find the world beyond to be a paradise. No, instead, they would find themselves as lowly slaves, bound to eternal service. This fateful dividing line was precise.

Also foreseeing the coming violence, Va’Shaik’s high priestess Shamalle is more resigned and analytical than gleeful:

What then? … Distinctions of faith and what it all means must be worked out. Consensus reached. But now there are sects within the singular faith, each choosing a different path, and in consequence diverging from one another. Leoman’s frothing fanatics. Va’Shaik’s Dissolutes … inquisitors, in fervent need to police the populace, lest some fool stray into perversion of the faith, or rather, those perversions not sanctioned by the church. Local variants in interpretation of holy text, a sudden burgeoning of beliefs! And then, alas, of nauseatingly common historical precedence, conflict. Fistfights, rude gestures … the flash of knife blades. A riot … texts lit to flame … The Inquisitors crack down, but only on non-inquisitors, of course. This upsets the Army of the Apocalypse, but only initially, because now they have someone to fight with … Meanwhile the Manifest Goddess, Va’Shaik herself, looks on, first in horror, then disappointment, but at last in fullest understanding. Apocalypse, after all, is a seed within us.

Regardless of their differing attitudes toward the bloodshed, both foretell the future correctly—once the revolution commences, the narrator describes how “[t]he acolytes, agents of Invigil Ban Ryk, spread out through the city. Some were true believers, many were not. They simply delighted in the delivery of suffering upon the lives of others … The new world would be announced in screams, smoke, and blood.”

Bornu Blatt adds yet a third perspective, coming from “one devoid of faith,” notwithstanding his role first as Va’Shaik’s scribe and now as her Inquisitor. His stance is one of befuddlement and “exasperation,” as he muses to himself about the incoherence of it all:

You [believers] serve a cause no one can agree on, by rules sundered insensible by clashing interpretations. You claim a single light, yet each and every one of you holds a different candle, which alone you pronounce true. You declare your belief unimpeachable, even as you damn your neighbor’s. And yet, despite all this, a holy army will see itself unified in its purpose, and indeed act so, at least until the day is done, and in the dusk following, why, it rips itself apart.

When adherents aren’t killing non-believers or wrong believers, they’re often presented as taking advantage of their own followers. After exposing one such, Bornu explains that “Melok is a charlatan. And like the best grifter, he understands human nature and exploits it for effect … Imposters and swindlers often thrived within the cozy, slippery realm of religion, with no end of gullible, desperate followers eager to surrender all will to a leader’s whims.” Later, another character upbraids an ancient god:

Can you not even see how the priests performed in the passages within the walls, throwing their voices through the gaping mouths of stone statues, fraudsters one and all? How they cheated all who came in desperate need of divination, dreaming of speaking with dead loved ones, fathers, mother, wives, and daughters … Do you not see the charade, turning worship of you into a damned business enterprise?

Honestly, making money off of religion is the least of evils connected with it here. Beyond hoarding food and wealth, Va’Shaik’s priests and temples condone and encourage slavery and regularly employ torture and assassination. The “Voice of Va’Shaik” buys “slaves to wear out in his bedroom,” one temple official attempts to poison the High Priestess, another the Goddess herself (or at least the body the goddess currently possesses), and an Inquisitor and High Priest use their carriage to gorily trample “false pilgrims” under “the benign eye of the Goddess: the horses’ stamping hoofs pounded into bodies, crushing rib, skulls, limb-bones. Then came the bronze-rimmed wheels.”

A few spoilers for House of Chains and The Bonehunters here: In a tragic callback to those earlier Malazan novels, Va’Shaik (also known as Felisin Younger) recounts how as a young girl she was one of many ritually abused and circumcised by the High Mage Bidithal, one of the leaders of the first Whirlwind rebellion under Sha’ik Reborn. A trauma that haunts both her and this novel.

Bloody war between religions. Internecine battles between sects of the same religion. Ministers who abuse children. Priests who hoard wealth. Scam artists who enrich themselves by selling false hope and pretend miracles. “Holy” words constantly rewritten and reinterpreted for personal political and monetary benefit. I’m thinking Erikson may have something to say about those who dismiss fantasy as “escapist.”

Given all the above, it’s no surprise that some try to counteract religion’s impact, none more extreme than another character from House of Chains and The Bonehunters, brought back here for a brief appearance. Leoman of the Flails was a captain in the army of the original rebellion and bodyguard to the goddess Sha’ik. At one point, he led the Malazan army into a trap where he initiated a firestorm intended to kill both the Malazans and his own army. Here, he explains his thinking to Bornu Blatt when the two meet, hinting as well that perhaps his action needs to be reprised:

Fanaticism breeds in stupidity like maggots in a pile of shit. I saw it, suffered in its midst. I decided I would give them exactly what they deserved, what they wanted, in fact. The great, glorious snuffing out … For a brief moment in the history of humanity, I made the world a little saner … All I could do … My worshippers, well, I may have to gather them again, all in one place. And deliver one more great, glorious, snuffing out.

(Here end spoilers for the earlier novels.)

Others, meanwhile, push back in less extreme fashion. The newly awakened-to-herself Va’Shaik sends out a command that “all temples are instructed to redistribute such alms as they receive to those in greatest need, and to devote excess funds to repair and building projects in the poor quarters,” and also announces a synod which all the High Priests and Priestesses are to attend to more precisely set the direction of the cult. Separately, High Priestess Shamalle’s clear-headed analysis of the cult’s infighting hints perhaps at some hope she might try to enact some reform herself in an attempt to forestall the seemingly inevitable.

But even these glimpses of potential amelioration are undermined. Bornu, perhaps more aware of the rot amongst her worshipers, tells Va’Shaik that he “foresees a schism … which you will probably lose. Not only your place as the repository of faith among your followers, but quite possibly your life itself.” And when he informs another goddess—the Queen of Dreams—what Va’Shaik intends, the goddess replies, “tell her from me, she is a fool … if she would deliver such a message to her congregation, they will probably reject her, in anger, and disperse in furious, bloodthirsty indignation, to find other deities they can bend to their murderous impulses.” Meanwhile, Shamalle’s constant drink- and drug-induced stupor and her apparent flightiness seems to belie any beneficial action from her direction.

But beyond the problem of “bad actors” within religion, Erikson presents a more complex view, with several characters wondering if there is something more fundamental at work here, a flaw in the very foundational idea of religion and the worship of deities. Here is Bornu trying to explain the problem to his Goddess Va’Shaik:

“In standing—or kneeling—before one of greater power, is not faith but euphemistic for hope? The hope that one not be hurt, subjected to suffering, or simply indifferently crushed—as one might crush a tick or louse? Or the hope that one be granted gifts, healing, salvation, or social elevation with all the wealth that might come with that?

“You describe a faith without the mutual recognition of love.”

“One loves a pet dog and the dog in turn loves its owner. That owner has in many respects god-like power over that pet dog. Is the relationship one of equals? No. More akin to a slave and master, I should think.”

And here are Bornu Blatt and Aravath, High Priest of the cult of Karsa Orlong (the god in the title of book one in this series, The God Is Unwilling), discussing their shared experiences as the agent of a god/goddess:

Aravath shrugged. “Is this our purpose, then, to be the mortal vessels of immortal intentions, desires, even discourse such as we are having here? If so, I am discontented … As pieces in a game with unknown rules, I hear the rattle of chains I cannot see.”

“Perhaps this is why Toblakai resists the call to godhood.”

Aravath seemed to rock back slightly. “Master and slave, he recognizes the inherent truth of all worship! … If indeed this is the source of his reluctance, well, can I blame him? Yet how can one avoid the contradiction? If he is to be the god of slaves and ex-slaves, is he not then their master?”

“It may follow that to become an ex-slave is also to win free of worship.”

“The god seeks the divestment of his worshippers, as symbolized among mortals by their escape from slavery. His blessing therefore becomes freedom itself.”

Religion—organized religion—is presented here as not just a poison but a prison and a slave pen. It constricts, constrains, and enslaves a mind meant to quest outward and inward, to question, to push back. And because influence moves both ways in this universe, it places both god and worshiper in the same position: The worshiper is both slave and master, the god is both master and slave. We see this when a character offers admiration to a fellow Azathanai for “manifest [ing] as a statue of stone, to dwell for untold ages in a godly quiet well suited to being comfortably worshipped” and the response is, “The fuckers chained me! … They chained me and then ran away!” (Chains, by the way, are a symbol that run clear throughout the entire series).

If I’ve spent so much time on religion here, it’s because it’s such a driving force of the novel, and of events in the series as a whole. And also because it’s long been a pet peeve of mine that so many fantasy novels for so many decades borrowed a medieval Western European setting (an often idealized one) but so few had anything much to say about religion, the most dominant institution of that time and place. I can think of few if any novels—maybe the Deryni series by Katherine Kurtz (nobody does high church ritual like Kurtz; whether that’s praise or complaint will depend heavily on the individual reader)—that explore the impact of religion, faith, and spirituality as much as the Malazan books. I separate those topics because the series itself makes a distinction between them, with a pronounced difference between the rules and proscriptions and closed-minded/too-certain nature of religion and the more open-minded (as in open to the universe) spirituality, with its acceptance of and connection to the ineffable and its humble recognition of being a small part of something greater.

That said, I don’t want to leave the impression that No Life Forsaken is singularly focused on, or is mostly “about,” religion. As noted, it drives much of the events and discussion, but not to the exclusion of other topics, a few of which I’ll note more (far more) briefly.

One is the notion of injustice, which has of course been a long-running focus of the series, perhaps best summed up by the old Emperor Kellanved in Toll the Hounds: “Acceptable levels of misery and suffering … Acceptable? Who the fuck says any level is acceptable? What sort of mind thinks like that?” Here Erikson shifts the focus somewhat from the usual injustice to a more basic concept of unfairness and one’s reaction to that, an interesting tweak coming fourteen books into the series, but I don’t want to say more than that as it would involve several major spoilers.

The same holds true for another long-running Malazan theme—the impact of trauma. Traumatic events obviously play a role in countless stories, but too often those events drive plot for a while and then fade into the background before disappearing altogether, which of course is not how trauma actually works. Trauma lasts. Trauma reverberates, it echoes, it grows beyond. Trauma affects the victim obviously, but it also ripples outward into the larger world. Here, in true fashion, we see its effect twenty years later and how far its tendrils extend. And also in true fashion, we see that people not only react in different ways to trauma, but some of those ways are more palatable to the reader than others. We all respond to the stories of recovery and rejuvenation, the idea that we rebuild from the ashes. But sometimes the ashes are scattered on the wind (there’s a reason there’s so much fire imagery throughout this book). Not every story gets a happy ending, and that’s all I’ll say about that.

The way trauma’s echoes keep going can be generalized to past actions. Epic fantasy has an advantage here: The timescale of the Malazan series is measured in hundreds of thousands of years, not just in the setting but even in some of the characters, more than a few of whom are either immortal, nearly immortal, undead, or just plain dead but still pretty gregarious. Legacy—both personal and communal, for both good and for ill—plays out against a backdrop of days, months, years, decades, centuries, and millennia. Erikson takes Faulkner’s oft-quoted, “The past is never dead. It’s not even past,” and extends it well beyond Faulkner’s vision, embodying it literally at times, and says “hold my beer.” This is a novel, after all, where you can get these kinds of conversations:

“Best let bygones be bygones, Kanyn. That was long ago.”

“Not to my mind at all!”

“Really? How about half a million years, you idiot.”

“Really,” Paucity echoed.

“Give or take.”

The legacy of Bidithal’s molestation, of Felisin’s trauma, of the Malazan Empire’s conquest of Seven Cities, of Karsa Orlong’s rampage of rape and killing through a small village, of an ancient war, of small deeds of kindness and major atrocities: All of these continue to play out whether they occurred twenty years ago, twenty thousand years ago, or, well, half a million years ago. And we don’t even have to stay with the same characters to see this. Karsa (much to some fans’ dismay) hasn’t yet even appeared in this quartet of novels supposedly focusing on his actions after the events of the mainline series; but the consequences of his actions in those earlier books loom large even in his absence. Perhaps then, we should all consider a bit more deeply our own actions.

Finally, I want to note that, despite this being the fourteenth Malazan novel, not counting several novellas and Ian C. Esslemont’s ten books set in the same world—and despite, as mentioned above, the reader experiencing some moments of been-there-done-that (for instance, I’m not sure how much longer we can stretch out a particular character’s sense of mystery)—Erikson has done an admirable job of keeping things fresh. In his Kharkanas trilogy, it helped to set the story several hundred thousand years earlier—so in technically the same world, but really not so much. Those books are also written in a very different style or tone than the main Malazan cycle, further distinguishing them. Another method he employs, and one which we see here in No Life Forsaken, is to simply introduce an entirely new cast of main characters, rather than deploy the usual sequel method of following the same small group of main characters while changing up the secondary cast.

But perhaps the most interesting way things stay fresh is that this world refuses to be static. This is no “return to the status quo,” there-and-back-again quest sort of epic fantasy. Political systems change. Technology advances. Magic evolves. Once upon a time there was Elder magic. Then there was the warren magic system (I use that word in its most basic sense, not in the Brandon Sanderson style of literal systems of magic with rules and explanations). Now we have the runt system, still being felt out as it’s so new. The Malazan army used to have high mages and a few cadre mages and now “marines are mages” as a matter of course. It’s a sort of best-of-both-worlds scenario: A return to the familiar and unfamiliar at once. Maybe that’s why, some 13,000 to 15,000 pages in, I’m still eager to see what comes next, with book three in this latest tetralogy.

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