The Bodhisattva

Title: Night of Knives
Pages: 304
Publisher: Bantam
Series/Related Titles: Malazan Book of the Fallen

Kind of old news but I’m trying to rail against the direction that I see Fantasy/Science Fiction review blogs going. There seems to be a real conscious effort to be more about breaking news -the first up the hill and get the links out - then there is to give thoughtful, personal , unique outlook on books. Certainly the two can and or done well simultaneously by some but I fear we start going down a path much like I view the comic field and in particular the Wizard publication. Comic fans used to read Wizard and not only read about forthcoming projects but would get solid opinion pieces on past notable or topical works that require more than rudimentary levels of thought and more importantly accountable reflection. Getting the word out is cool - lets try to include some of our own though!

With this in mind, Night of Knives is a really intriguing book to me because I have gone back and forth on it and some of the baggage that comes with it is rather unique making it a book that while not a book I’d describe as a top shelf book in the given year it was released is a book I find myself rereading. Among the characteristics Night of Knives can claim is that it’s a prequel, a prequel whose source material was written by a different writer (in published form, the author apparently is much credited for the blueprint from the beginning), a shared-world piece in as high profile a series epic fantasy has seen in the last few years.

For the uninitiated the book is an extension of Steven Erikson’s Malazan Book of the Fallen sequence (see my early ode to the series here). The review will probably make little sense to those who aren’t familiar with the series, but I digress as attempting to encapsulate the series would be a book in itself (one I wouldn’t mind researching/writing at that) so to those who haven’t read it (and for some reason haven’t stopped reading this blog post) it is quite simply a major work in the Epic Fantasy pathos, a work that I have often described as something equivalent to taking all the Shared-world, RPG-styled, PNP, game based books, adding them up, and then retroactively adding editorial and creative evolution that didn’t really occur over the last twenty years and what you have is this era’s answer to sword and sorcery but with the day-time dramatics that epic fantasy inserted into our medium over the same time period. In short, it’s a hell of a lot of fun and utilizing a portion of fantasy that I’d thought had told all the stories it could.

I mentioned some words that have stigmas attached to them which in some eyes would be in fact extra separate stigmas in a genre that suffers from a stigma as it is. One of these us ‘prequel’ the term itself in has come to almost have a negative connotation due to some films. The dangers of a prequel or a story that tells of previous events in an established setting that aren’t called such is that not only is the work going to be compared to the source material, the biggest risk is satisfying events that have been interpreted, imagined, and rendered in thousands of different way by thousands of different minds. One of the prequels comes to mind is The First King of Shannara by Terry Brooks a prequel that took elements that occurred in previous books and tied them together. Interestingly enough this was actually one of my favorite entries in a much maligned line. Some absolutely hate it which admittedly occurs whether a book is a prequel or not but I surmise that essentially semi-retconing gaps filled in by the reader in an unsatisfactory way had a lot to do with it.

Now let me deviate for a moment…

NOTE: I’m not a big spoiler warning advocate but if you haven’t read the book or the Erikson books you may want to stop now. I’m going to mention what most functional people would have gotten rather quickly in the series but for the wide-eyed - you are warned!

Erikson’s Malazan work features perhaps the largest relevant cast I have read in fiction. Through the first eight books, finding new favorite characters chapter after chapter two have risen to the top for me as the most intriguing. Erikson‘s lynchpin is military company of humans (and it’s descendants) that keeps the series grounded amidst a real high magic, high wonder, incredibly expansive environment but the two I choose are the characters that catch that human quality to me are two ascended gods: Shadowthrone and Cotillion. This duo I count already amongst the most intriguing in recent time. They are the Pullo and Vorenus if they achieved godhood; Odysseus Roddenberrys striving to go where no man has gone before. Two hustlers with a long view who took over an island, carved out an empire, gave up what most would describe as the pinnacle of what mortals could achieve, and ascended to godhood - and damn it not by accident, they planned it!. So much of the series is fist raising and screaming “don’t fuck with humanity”, and these two go beyond simply that, the traverse the path of “Gods, you don’t want me to fuck with you”. These two are you and your buddy when you were teenagers, you were all friends but you and this kid saw eye to eye, an unspoken understanding between adolescent minds ready to take on the world they don’t understand completely but walk a path to achieve that goal.

Back on track…

Among other things Ian Esslemont’s first published entry into the Malazan mythos, Night of Knives, chronicles the long crawl to the first step for this duo: achieving the mantle of immortality. The aura of this event is established in Erikson’s novels; their assassinations the subject of rumor, intrigue and multiple truths To most they are simply dead victims of an internal coup, to some they are travelers of planes, to some they have taken on almost mythic quality, and some know they are now part of the pantheon playing the same game they always have: their own, and they cheat. The choice of title and its relation to The Night of Long Knives I think speaks easily enough for itself and plays out in the other plot threads of the novels that will give readers a view of even more last first steps . Through the eyes of Temper you will see a soldier’s and a friend’s reflection on one Dassem Ultor ,a character we know in the Malazan universe as the former First Sword of the Empire, two men who (or may not) even make the god nervous with their proximity. We also see Kiska a girl who is always trying to follow destiny and they both guide us through a night deemed Shadow Moon. It is again apt that it takes place on Malaz city, ending where it began where it ended and our two guides offers us distinct, even opposing looks. One young, a female, finding her path, and wanting to be noticed, the other a veteran, trying to hide his tracks, but whether rushing in or away, neither can avoid a convergence and fail to be drawn into what is not a chapter of the Malazan experience, it is the prologue best served after or the half-told epilogue and in this I may have underestimated the book it is the echo and what echoes depending on how you approach the book on a given read and the books is not stagnant after you read it, the more books you read by Erikson the more pertinent the read becomes.

It is unavoidable to compare the two writers and in this Esslemont and Erikson are much like the Kiska and Temper in that they offer us unique perspectives to what we are all drawn to. The choice of - aside from flashbacks - having a book that takes place in one locale and over the course of one night is - in prolonged hindsight - exquisite. In a strange way what is a but unbalanced in terms of pacing and stretching adds to the atmosphere of the novel, this is one hectic night and I haven’t event mentioned the overlapping of shadow and reality, not to mention a forthcoming storm of magical, alien-like wave riders! It feels like surplus, but it is the moment that I think Esslemont captures correctly, acts that we known are grandiose are given the mundane feeling such events feel like when they actually occur and not remarked on later. It’s a mess, and it reads like one.

In various opportunities and forums I have always remarked that my view of Night of Knives is that it was a potentially great short story made into a slightly above average novel and now I wonder if the standard was unassailable to begin with. The best it could have been was being one of the great stories never told becoming a good story revealed, the revelation obviously not the draw in the first place but enactment of, the connection of the dots we the reader created ourselves.

I wonder if vanity has concealed a good book from me and further I wonder if Ammanas and Dancer…I mean Erikson and Esslemont have hoodwinked me, push and pull.

* _{Night of Knives was also reviewed at Fantasybookspot.com by Valashain}