Malazan Ascendancy – Gardens of the Moon pre-Reread

Editors Note: I started chronicling my reread of Gardens of the Moon at another blog, but have decided to bring it over to and continue under the Gestalt Mash banner. For those who don’t know, I’m a huge fan of the series, as you may be able to tell via the interviews I’ve conducted with Steven Erikson and Ian Cameron Esslemont. I’ve conducted a ton of interviews with authors, but these are among my personal favorites. For the next couple of weeks I will be reposting the content from the previous site and then move on (I’m not even out of the first chapter yet!) to new material — basically it means that combined with my Playin’ with Ice and Fire duties, I’m halfway to ascension just by association!

Gardens of the Moon is a novel that I pulled a 90-degrees on. Not a 180, as I’ve always liked the book ever since I first read it several years ago. Though I never considered it less than just below masterworks in the so called Epic Fantasy genre.  For many years now, I’ve felt l that I owed Gardens of the Moon an apology. It is the book that allowed me to take the above “so called” off. While over the last several years many rushed to the banners of Fantasy armed with their own manifestos and cute &/or dirty sub-genre names, the “epic” label started – for me – to become more about setting. It became a noun and no longer a descriptor. At least no longer one that could claim any semblance of veracity. It was something to recognize and no longer chase. “Epic” is a term that we should never feel comfortable with. We should never be assured in our knowledge of what it quantifies. It should always be evolving, always claiming new heights and revealing new depths.

One of my favorite review blurbs ever was from Salon:

“Give me the evocation of a rich, complex and yet ultimately unknowable other world, with a compelling suggestion of intricate history and mythology and lore. Give me mystery amid the grand narrative. Give me a world in which every sea hides a crumbled Atlantis, every ruin has a tale to tell, every mattock blade is a silent legacy of struggles unknown. Give me, in other words, the fantasy work of Steven Erikson. Erikson is a master of lost and forgotten epochs, a weaver of ancient epics on a scale that would approach absurdity if it wasn’t so much fun.”

I love it all, but the bolded is the part that I always recall and go back to considering when I gauge a reading experience. We are talking adventure shit. We are talking finding something lost; something that we don’t know but still have a palatable fascination with. We don’t even have to find it, or know what ‘it’ is, we just have to know something is missing. That we don’t know if it is important is importance itself. We are talking about a book that doesn’t pull punches for 499 pages to artificially engineer relevance for  its one interesting thought or concept on the 500th. Gardens of the Moon is a puncher’s chance realized. The chance that a book involving magic swords, gods, dragons, fictional empires, assassin guilds, and demons would be embraced by my “so called” ( now properly used) progressive speculative fictional mind was a long shot at best. It’s now become a series of books that I recently called the only one worth listed retail price.

Gardens of the Moon has become one of my favorite rereads. While fans and critics alike can and will point to continuity issues and plot holes as it relates to the following books and series mythology, and even internally within the novel itself, these instances of “Gotism” are to me charming discussion points for fans to share or for the lone reader to ponder. It’s perfectly understandable that such exists given the nature (or purpose) of the origins of the novel, not to mention how much earlier it was written than the second novel, Deadhouse Gates. If I have to accept some leaps in this initial novel to get the story I’m now getting in the series, I have to take the stance that it all turned out well.

Admittedly, these are just excuses. Not all satisfying ones either.

It doesn’t matter. Rationally, anyone can create a list of oddities within Gardens to make it the book in the series fans feel the need to apologize for –  thus the series to apologize for and claim as a guilty pleasure. Fuck that. I will read the list, understand it, even agree point-by-point, and still won’t care. Do you remember when fights used to break out in school during lunch and everybody just started running toward it? Nobody remembers or gives a shit about what happened in first period or who answered the question right in second. Everyone just talks about who was beating that ass.

We are still talking about Gardens of the Moon.