Because of the sprawling and untidy nature of Steven Erikson’s The Malazan Book of the Fallen, neat discussion of any of the individual volumes cheats the scope of the whole. Although each novel stands on it own (sort of) as an discrete episode, the narrative focus remains on the sweep of history and the resolution of the various braided plot threads. After weeks of internal debate, I’ve decided that the most comfortable way I can approach Erikson’s work is to look at the narrative threads and not the volumes themselves. The Book of the Fallen is one enormous plot with a great many subplots and a single great theme: human nature and the power of compassion.
If you’re reading Erikson (or planning to) you should know that, an archaeologist, he cut his teeth as a short story writer, which means that every word is weighted and deliberate. In other words, there are no short cuts. There may be boring passages or aspects of his stories that don’t appeal to you, but none of it is skippable if you want to understand the whole thing.
In full disclosure, I’m only halfway through the series, currently reading Midnight Tides. I backed up and reread the first four books to make sure I caught most of what I was supposed to catch. These are books that, although harsh, are deeply rewarding, powerfully humane, and especially fruitful on a second or third read, mostly because they’re so packed you won’t get it all the first time through no matter how carefully or slowly you go. Tonight, the first plot thread I want to explore is the supremely tragic sister act, Felisin and Tavore Paran.
Some plot is essential, so here’s the “Previously On….” recap:
Ganoes Paran, eldest child of a noble family, joins the Malazan military as an officer. Bad idea. The troops hate nobles, mostly because nobles are entitled, coddled, dictatorial and condescending. And they tend to ignore advice from veterans and generally get their troops killed. But Ganoes isn’t a typical noble; for one thing he’s always dreamed of being a soldier. For another, he gets killed right away.
And then he’s brought back from the gates of Hood, god of death (don’t forget Hood — he turns up a lot, and a great many of the better epithets in MBOF revolve around Hood and his anatomy) through the intervention of another god, Oponn. The twins of luck — the lady who pulls (you out of a jam) and the lord who pushes (you off a cliff). Ganoes spends the rest of the first book trying to free himself from Oponn while also trying to accomplish his mission despite the fact that he’s been set up to fail and then die. He does neither.
All of which happens on another continent far from House Paran; to his family and the empire in general, it seems that Ganoes is a traitor and has vanished. His disappearance and disgrace coincides with the Empress Laseen’s order to “cull” the nobility of Unta.
Deadhouse Gates opens with the Cull, and it’s awful. Legitimately awful. For one thing, it’s the final day of a festival:
The Thirsting Hour was coming to a close and the priest staggered in its wake, blind, deaf and silent. Honoring his god on this day, the servant of Hood, Lord of Death, had joined his companions in stripping naked and smearing himself in the blood of executed murderers, blood that was stored in giant amphorae lining the walls of the temple’s nave. The brothers had then moved in procession out onto the streets of Unta to greet the god’s sprites, enjoining the mortal dance that marked the Season of Rot’s last day.
The guards lining the Round parted to let the priest pass, then parted further for the spinning, buzzing cloud that trailed him….Pestilence came with the Season of Rot, and the Season had come an unprecedented three times in the past ten years. (1, pp. 1-2)
A festival of death, and the perfect day for the Cull, a perfect introduction to the sisters Paran: the elder Tavore, newly-minted Adjunct to the Empress, and the younger Felisin, condemned to hard labor in the mines on yet another continent. Felisin is fourteen.
The Cull has been ordered by the Empress to expunge the moral rot within the nobility. Culling serves as a release valve by inciting the commoners’ violence and then directing them toward the nobility. Those who weren’t murdered outright were arrested. Only a few of the nobles chained with Felisin survive the march from their jail; most of them are torn to pieces by the crowd. The Paran family is particularly vulnerable, given that the son and heir, Ganoes, apparently betrayed the Empire before he vamoosed. In order to save herself, the elder sister Tavore takes up the role of Adjunct, operating as the will of the Empress. She oversees the arrest and disposal of her little sister Felisin, and even watches as she is marched to the ship, “Not many of us are going to make it to the slave ships,” Baudin, one of Felisin’s companions, prophesies. “This parade down Colonnade Avenue is going to be one long bloodbath” (1, p. 8). He’s right.
The scene is one of the very few where Felisin and Tavore see each other. Tavore watches her sister in the chained line pass without reaction; Felisin’s sibling resentment gives way to something more malevolent and hard — hatred, a hatred that will determine everything that she does.
Tor.com has a terrific reader board in their Malazan Reread of the Fallen, which features commentary from a dedicated and knowledgeable fanbase. You can spend hours in it. And most of the readers at Tor really don’t like Felisin, whose viewpoint we follow through several books.
They have reason to dislike her; she’s fifteen and the youngest daughter of a rich family. She’s self-centered and privileged, and the world revolves around her. Did I mention that she’s fifteen? Within the span of a week, she’s ripped away from everything she knows, put in chains, and sent into slavery in a place where everyone is worked to death. Quickly she figures out how to trade on her one valuable (in her circumstances) commodity — her body, and uses sex to score more food for herself and her unlikely companions, the mysterious and thuggish Baudin and a heavily-tattooed elderly handless former-priest, Heboric. From the first, Heboric, transported not for the crime of nobility but for having authored a history that was inconvenient to the Empress, tries to wise Felisin up and remind her that she’s not quite as abandoned as she thinks she is, but she ignores both men, instead attaching herself to a brutal crime boss and becoming addicted to the drugs that dull her misery.
Heboric is right, of course; Felisin is far from abandoned, and her guardians manage their escape on the same night the Uprising, the Seven Cities rebellion against the Malazan Empire, begins. Plans go awry and the three are left to make their way across the desert toward any kind of safety or sanctuary. An old ex-priest of a dying cult, a killer who is much more than that and a young woman whose heart is dead to everything except thoughts of revenge against her sister. The progress of the three as they are driven from extremity to extremity, surviving murder attempts, thirst and starvation, attacks by everything from ghosts to bloodflies (and they’re every bit as gruesome as the name implies) accomplishes one thing — it strips Felisin of humanity; there is nothing she would not do to survive.
Not far into their journey but low on rations, Heboric collapses from thirst and Felisin argues with Baudin to let him die, saying “Those are your rations you’re giving him. Not mine” (1, p. 241). Privation makes her brutal:
He [Baudin] removed his pack, then skidded back down the slope. Something in the able economy of his movements filled her with sudden dread. Calls me plump, eyes me like a piece of flesh — not to use like Beneth did, but more as if he’s eyeing his next meal. Heart hammering, she watched for the first move, a hungry flash in his small, bestial eyes.
Instead he crouched down beside Heboric, pulling the unconscious man onto his back. He leaned close to listen for breath, then sat back, sighing.
“He’s dead?” Felisin asked. “You do the skinning—I won’t eat tattooed skin no matter how hungry I am” (1, 245).
It gets worse.
All this excruciating suffering raises the stakes to an almost unbearable level. Baudin, despite Felisin’s fears and opinion, remains with her, her suffering bodyguard, protecting her until he is burned alive in an attack. Heboric goes through similar, nearly unimaginable trials and metamorphoses until he emerges, remade for another purpose (too far afield to discuss tonight).
You see, Felisin is being made ready; she being emptied of her life and her self in order to be reborn as Sha’ik, the prophet of the Whirlwind goddess in whose name the Uprising has begun. When she arrives at the place where Sha’ik’s assassinated body lies, watched over by two men, one a giant whom we will come to love and fear and the other a true believer in the Whirlwind, she accepts the mission and the role, and she becomes Sha’ik Reborn, possessed by the goddess, and the leader of the Uprising, nursing a murderous hate for her sister Tavore and the empire she serves.
So that’s Felisin.
Tavore is the middle child in the Paran family, plain where both Felisin and Ganoes are attractive. She speaks little and Erikson doesn’t give us her viewpoint. We as readers see her from the same vantage as her servants and soldiers — distant, uncommunicative, mysterious.
Throughout her life, Tavore has lived in Ganoes’ shadow, quiet and serious, always taking the harder way. When she took the role of Adjunct, all the characters assume that she’s cut all ties to her family. She can’t save her parents, and rather than see her sister executed, as all the nobleborn children have been killed, she sends her to the mines, with a bodyguard and a plan to have her rescued and brought to safety. Of course, Felisin does everything she can to alienate the bodyguard and, out of foolishness and spite, doesn’t recognize the rescue attempt. It all goes wrong and Felisin goes missing. Tavore sets out to find her, even as she carries out her duties as Adjunct to the Empress.
Those duties include landing on Seven Cities with an untested army and putting down the Whirlwind Rebellion. Reinforcements are called back, her forces are outnumbered, and her mission is, not to put too blunt a point on it, impossible. So she sets out to do the impossible — march her small army across the desolate continent to the holy desert of Raruku, where Sha’ik and her armies wait.
One clue to Tavore’s character comes in House of Chains when we’re privy to a memory of Tavore at age nine, playing with her brother’s toy armies and reprising a battle that was considered unwinnable. Quiet, methodical, determined — Tavore as a child trying to win the unwinnable.
You see where this is going. Felisin, possessed by the goddess and waiting in the whirlwind, dreaming of destroying her sister, making it all intensely private and personal. She cares little for what the armies will do if only she can face Tavore. Tavore, outnumbered, marching in the shadows of greater soldiers who fell in greater battles, lacking support and even the confidence of her commander.
Through her mission, even though she knows that Felisin has been lost, Tavore still looks for her sister. She dispatches two trusted assassins, Pearl and Lostara Yil, a pair driven by equal parts antipathy and lust, to follow Felisin’s trail across the desert — to the place of Sha’ik’s death and into the Whirlwind itself. (As is proper in fantasy, the Whirlwind is both figurative and literal.)
The Imperial army arrives along the only road it can travel, takes the only approach it can and prepares for slaughter. Of course, things happen to upend everyone’s expectations, but outlining them here is rather beside the point. In front of her army, Tavore advances alone to challenge Sha’ik in single battle. Sha’ik takes the challenge. Tavore has no idea her sister, her face obscured by her armor, is before her.
One of the drawbacks to waiting for an attack is that allies get on each others’ nerves. Alliances weaken, rivalries rise, and intrigue grows. Through the months waiting for the Imperial army, Sha’ik’s forces are riven by factionalism and betrayal. One of the traitors has been waiting for his chance, and when it comes, he takes it—against the goddess herself, the goddess blind with revenge and hate, the goddess possessing Felisin.
Oh, there was power there. Bitter with age, bilious with malice. And whatever fuelled it bore the sour taste of betrayal. A heart-piercing, very personal betrayal. Something that should have healed, that should have numbed beneath thick, tough scar tissue. Spiteful pleasure had kept the wound open, had fed its festering heat, until hate was all that was left. …
Step by step, we walk the most horrendous paths. Stride tottering along the edge of an unsuspected abyss. Companions see nothing amiss. The world seems a normal place. Step by step, no different from anyone else—not from the outside. Not even from the inside. Apart from that tautness, that whisper of panic. That vague confusion that threatens your balance.
Felisin, who was Sha’ik, had come to comprehend this.
For she had walked that same path.
Hatred, sweet as nectar.
I have walked into the abyss.
I am as mad as that goddess. And this is why she chose me, for we are kindred souls… (2, p. 972)
When the goddess is murdered right before the critical scene, Felisin is returned to herself. And without the hatred fueling her, Felisin watches her sister Tavore approach. Despite everything, forgetting the sword in her hand, she reaches out for her sister….
Tavore, it’s all right—
A thundering clang, a reverberation jolting up her right arm, and the sword’s enervating weight was suddenly gone from her hand.
Then something punched into her chest….
Through the visor’s slit, she stared up at her sister, a figure standing behind a web of black, twisted iron wire that now rested cool over her eyes, tickling her lashes.
A figure who now stepped closer. To set one boot down hard on her chest — a weight that, now that it had arrived, seemed eternal — and dragged the sword free.
Blood.
Of course. This is how you break an unbreakable chain.
By dying.
I just wanted to know, Tavore, why you did it. And why you did not love me, when I loved you. I — I think that’s what I wanted to know.
The boot lifted from her chest. But she could still feel its weight.
Heavy. So very heavy.
Oh, Mother, look at us now. (2, p. 985)
As if this isn’t Shakespearean enough, Lostara Yil and Pearl arrive just in time to see Tavore cut down her enemy. Their quest to find Felisin fails at almost the exact time that Felisin finds herself, and all a minute too late. Tavore, startled at their appearance, asks if they’ve lost Felisin’s trail. Lostara Yil is devastated at the news she has to deliver, but Pearl saves her by answering that Felisin is dead and she died quickly. (She’s lying at their feet.) In a final mercy, Pearl distracts Tavore’s commanders who want to take Sha’ik’s body as a trophy and spirits it away. To the outrage of the commanders, he buries Felisin in an obscure grave so that Tavore will never know she marched across an entire continent to kill her own sister.
The tragedy of Felisin’s life and death lies in her willful misunderstanding. Despite evidence and witnesses, including Heboric and Baudin, as well as others, Felisin chooses her own hurt and resentment over recognition that her sister Tavore has done as much as she could to protect her; her hurt is the hurt of a disappointed child, a hurt that leaves her open to possession and exploitation. Her death reverberates; Tavore will not forgive herself for her failure. The reasons for her death, though, are born in childhood resentment and sibling rivalry. In Erikson, wars bloom from the smallest and most intimate of seeds.
References
1. Steven Erikson, Deadhouse Gates. NY: Tor, 2000.
2. Steven Erikson, House of Chains. NY: Tor, 2002.