“You despair because like a child you thought that Truth alone could save the World…”
“But it is strength that saves, Brother, not Truth…”
“And strength burns brightest upon Lies!”
Yes, the last book in the series was split in two parts even if it was written and meant as one. The second part is titled “The Unholy Consult”, not “The Holy Apocalypse”. I made that up. And no, I only have read the first part. The Unholy Consult is next.
These are then, again, some scattered, always incomplete thoughts about the first half.
This book has defeated me on many levels. When I started, over a year ago from the very beginning, the intention was to read carefully and slowly. I’d rather stop and go back than miss something, and this seemed to have worked well, up and including The White-Luck Warrior. One aspect of this whole saga is that it’s very consistent and uniform. And when I speak about these things I often make comparisons to Malazan, because Malazan is instead so much more uneven, variable even in writing quality. But that’s not directly a flaw. Malazan varies in tone, sometimes it’s humorous or satirical and sometimes it’s savage and dramatic. It’s so much more sprawling. On the other hand all Bakker writes is obsessively focused and sharp. It never strays, and it never falters. The writing feels, line after line, like the Narindar: directed from the outside.
The distinction works as a whole. Erikson always resented the label of “grimdark.” While I’ve not yet read The Crippled God, I think he wrote the book to defy all those expectations, of writing a nihilistic bloodbath. Because Malazan is intrinsically “humanist.” The journey through bleakness is necessary to come out as human, renewed. It clings on hope. But Bakker instead is the opposite. It’s inhuman. The eye looking from outside the human. The zero point of Dunyain absolute. If grimdark is derogatory and exaggerated for Malazan, it’s understated and reductive in the case of Bakker’s work. There is nothing left standing after Bakker. If as an author he was able to climb over Tolkien’s shoulders, to look from above, it won’t be possible to repeat the same with Bakker himself, because the path was meant to be walked once. Then it is gone. The Holy Apocalypse.
This overall uniformity of quality and sharp focus are probably the most evident aspect of this work. Yet, it is an apparent contradiction with how much the first two books in this second series shrug away most of the philosophy, most of the high concepts, to focus more on ground (and underground) level introspection. It became more an aggressive engagement with Tolkien’s Silmarillion, toying and subverting tropes. But again, despite the uniformity, this third book changes everything. From the first pages and all the way to the end, it’s a mad rush on acids. If I was able to follow and match the writing up to this point, at least within my very limited perception, I felt like I lost all control here. I had to start accepting to keep reading while leaving things behind. Feeding on minor cues, offering glimpses of profundity. The head on a pole was the most evident, but then the pile grows larger. But at every step I was on awe of the little, minuscule things. The fraction I was collecting was always staggering, impossible. Line by line, this book opens upon chasms. Impossible to track. Impossible to encompass. Bigger and more meaningful that I can embrace and contain as a reader.
And so the small things. There are many points, scattered through all the book, where the micro details of introspection become unbelievable in their authenticity. It’s like watching a movie by professional actors who honed their skills to perfection, versus a movie done with people who’ve never been on a stage, but people who play on screen their own life. And you feel and understand that the visceral truth of what they do could never be replicated by an actor. They are as they are. The same here, where the writing acquires an otherworldly reality in the passages that are the least meaningful when it comes to plot and story. This one quoted here because I’ve just read it:
There is something ominous about the way the old Wizard collects himself from the ground.
Suddenly she fears the vacant expression on his face as much their captors.
The soul that is perpetually beset often loses patience with life…
There is a sense of finality, with another 400 pages or so left, that becomes metaphysical. Achamian has had enough. Beyond care, beyond survival. Achamian is as usual a point of view of the reader. It means the story ends here. It ENDS HERE. No matter what. After all the impossible journey through six books, it ends here.
He is done with madness, Mimara can tell. He would quit his ancient contest with the Whore, even at the cost of his life.
Were he alone, she knows, this would all end in salt and incineration.
“Let it all burn.”
What appears as different perspectives fuse into one. He becomes a concept, through the Judging Eye.
This is the Apocalypse made Holy. And the silence that follows.
Though leading to a number of things that I don’t quite accept. Maybe because of my lack of understanding, or maybe bias. It doesn’t really matter. The scene with the Scylvendi doesn’t quite work. It doesn’t work because, as Achamian, I was ready to hug the guy despite everything. Bakker can’t have that, so he makes that scene another ordeal, but it doesn’t work because of this disconnect. Due to his writing I was actually doubtful that this type of encounter would happen. It was predictable, but it’s Bakker, it might as well not happen. So when it does happen you’re carried away by that elation, and it causes such a sharp disconnect with where the scene would have the reader dragged to. That the Scylvendi are exactly as we left them is also quite unlikely. It’s as if they were simply paused in the twenty years gap, when in comparison everything else, especially in this book, really does feel the passage of time.
Something similar with my dearest character, Theliopa, and second favorite in this book, “Survivor.” Again, take it as bias or limited understanding, but I don’t quite accept, logically, what happens here. Theliopa becomes more than a doll in a corner, she looms close to Kelmomas and for the first time she becomes a threat. She is in control. These scenes and themes echo Dune Messiah, and as usual what Bakker reuses he also sharpens. The idea of a threat exposed, known by both parties (same as also the reciprocal concealment between the Gods and No-God, also from Dune Messiah). But this doesn’t last long, and in the shape of the story it seems her function shrinks to become a misdirection for Kellhus, much like the assassination of Maithanet in the previous book. Theliopa gets brushed away so easily, so to create the possibility that just the same could happen for Kellhus, later in the book. Is it really all she amounts to? A minor trick? I don’t accept this not because her function isn’t more, but because it doesn’t feel coherent. She’s too smart to not do anything. It makes sense she behaves as passive, but she’s also supposed to be smarter in the wider context. She’s too easily wrapped up even if there are reasons for this. It’s simply too partial, feeling incomplete. Then, when the story gets to repeat itself with Kellhus, I couldn’t quite follow. We have something like three different points of view, and the idea is they contradict each other for obvious reasons. But I couldn’t fully understand what happens. I got confused by the spinning sword, by a tear that seems to be like a chorae, but then may be just metaphor. Theliopa was crushed by mere debris, Kellhus just dances around it. Before interference happens. The Narindar makes a funny surprised face when Kelmomas interferes, which already on its own is quite weird. He was inhuman, moving like a robot. I’d have expected that when the program fails he’d rather start moving as if following a wrong map, or simply freeze. But he makes a surprised or shocked face as if he was able to feel the moment. As an act of consciousness. Was this part in favor of understanding, to make simply Kelmomas aware?
And again, “this is the end.” There’s a thematic link between Achamian above, and here Kelmomas. As it happened again and again, Kelmomas is defeated. Every time he thinks being ahead, and he plays the game, only to realize he missed giant pieces of the puzzle. He constantly miscalculates the miscalculation. His own plans go wrong only to turn out in his favor out of luck, even if outside his control. But like Achamian, when the context shifts the World shifts. This is the end. It’s over. The story demands more, but the story ends here.
Kelmomas suffered only a peculiar numbness, a curious sense of having outgrown not so much his mother or his old life as existence altogether.
It was a stupid game anyway.
No matter how silly and outlandish, delusions of predestination affect us all.
The Game. It had been the Game all along!
Play was all that remained.
All that mattered.
The story ends here, for sure, in the case of Survivor. And it’s a perfect circle, closing the function of the Dunyain. Closing what started in the first book. At some random point while reading I thought about the few pages at the very end of book two. One of those things that didn’t really lead anywhere else, but still worked fine. You read that scene at the end of the book, and expect to see some kind of fall over in the third, but then that book is preoccupied about different stuff, so it all goes away. My mind goes back to that point, only to shrug. What was that about? It’s kind of funny when it dawned on me. I made the connection, long after the fact, and the first thing I thought was: “well, the timing is all wrong anyway.” And then it dawned on me that the timing worked perfectly. Because there’s a twenty year gap. When Achamian and Mimara arrive, Ishual is destroyed. The Consult has been active, they were, right at the end of book two. Precisely in that scene. They met the oddity that was Kellhus, who could see through the skin spies. They learned of the Dunyain. Just like Achamian, they started looking. And eventually they found what they wanted, having more practical manners of interrogation than stumbling through dreams. Unless I’ve misinterpreted, and unless that link was immediately obvious. For me it arrived late and out of happenstance.
We see what was already obvious: that the Absolute was just another delusion. The innocence of Survivor’s gaze is endearing. Him and the child are essentially one and the same, but for Survivor it’s the end. He faces the Judging Eye with curiosity, and knowledge destroys him. As it should (with one important caveat). He understands that the closed loop that the Dunyain wanted to seize and become, is slave to another, bigger loop. The context opens, the picture is revealed as incomplete. The knowledge is impossible. And he decides that it is over. It’s a perfect circle for what Dunyain are thematically, but for me it is another part that doesn’t make sense logically, like Theliopa’s death. This is another zero point, it doesn’t quite follow that suicide is the natural answer, rather than simple inaction (and the scene at the end of the book, where Achamian accuses Mimara of having killed Survivor, and her reply that the Eye offered the Absolute… makes no sense to me. I don’t understand a single thing about that dialogue. I don’t understand what it was meant to reveal, and how it’s different than what Achamian was saying). It is neat thematically, but it’s not enough to sustain it logically from my point of view. While the Dunyain have failed, the true reason is still missing. Survivor’s whole journey, from the beginning to its end in this book is the best part of it all. It works thematically, it’s deep and condensed even if understated. It’s intimate despite the inhuman logic that strips of all emotion. It’s extremely emotional because it’s empty of rhetoric. No explanation is given, a choice is made. And that’s as “holy” as it can be. Once again, the story ends here. Another fracture of reality. It ends in silence, no matter my protests.
There’s also a problem that may well be my own understanding, but it’s so plain that I cannot see even the possibility of another angle to look at it. Within a few pages we get a contrasting description of Kellhus haloed hands, from the same point of view:
And as they said, haloes framed his head and hands, the ghosts of golden plates… markless.
Golden discs shimmered about a head and hands noxious for their Mark.
What am I missing here? These “miraculous” hands are one of those hanging questions without even a tentative answer. Without even hypothesis. It would make sense they are without mark, since they indicate an exception. The hands are “holy” and so made distinct. But then why a few pages later they are instead described as noxious? A mistake? Me again missing something obvious? (unless the distinction is between the haloes and actual hands, but it seems weird)
In the end, this is a story about kids. Not because they provide any sort of relevant answer, but because they become a burden. When Survivor decides to kill himself, he knows that Mimara will take care of the kid. He understands his world is gone, that it was all a fraud, so he simply chooses a time and place to be done with it because he has nothing more in himself. If Achamian doesn’t stop and incinerates everything, it is only because he’s right next to Mimara. These ties are more inconvenient that meaningful. The same ties that Survivor himself exploited in order to manipulate the outcome. The one inner Dunyain loop.
And he hung upon his terror as a smile breaking, understanding at last that fatherhood, more than anything else, was mummery, the will to be a father needed, not the father you happened to be.
It’s probable my interpretation as a whole is completely wrong, but past this point nothing matters. We aren’t moving toward answers, we’re moving toward annihilation. The Holy Apocalypse. For Erikson the journey through despair is a pleading to the reader, to give answers. A cycle that goes from ancient gods to modern ones, only to then turn inward. But it’s a story of emancipation. To become responsible without moving the blame to higher powers. To be self moving souls like Dunyain. But in Bakker’s case nothing is left standing. Tolkien, fantasy, literature in general, philosophy, human culture and humanity as a whole. All is seized to be destroyed. This can only happen because of Bakker’s dedication. Because he loves philosophy, because he loves Tolkien. Because of a complete dedication and study. There are two paths of interpretation: thinking he mocks out of love, and thinking he mocks to elevate himself. As a sense of superiority.
But nothing is left standing. Bakker makes everything naked and ashamed. Everyone is a fraud. Tolkien is debased, fantasy is debased, philosophy is debased. But, as a reader, you come to Bakker as a disciple kneeling in front of a wise man. A great philosopher that gives important answers. This is how I read Proyas/Kellhus. The reader kneeling, begging to be fucked over, because there’s power in the author and reader relationship. And so Bakker mocks and debases himself. Himself as a philosopher, himself as a writer. He then mocks and debases the reader. The reader who’s just another fool. Nothing is left standing. The culling is so complete to be Holy.
In a way, it works like Wittgenstein’s ladder. You climb it to reach a vantage point. To reach a state of understanding. And you do reach it. Only to realize that it’s all gone. They you hold nothing in your hands. That the ladder itself is gone. That you can’t do anything with what you understood.
In contrast to all this highly conceptual ground, I have no idea what to make of the perspective of the last book (or second part of last book). At this point I guess I miraculously dodged spoilers, but in general I HAVE NO IDEA where this story might go. Not so much that it is unpredictable, but in the sense that I cannot even shape one single possibility. I have no idea. But I do feel like I was reading the third book, even more so. The number of big, unanswered questions have piled up so high that the remaining 400 or so pages aren’t even remotely enough. It doesn’t matter. The story has ended several times already within the confines of the book I’m closing now. But if we care about “trivialities”, the whole layer of metaphysics and plot is hanging in the void. Book three closed with Kellhus either going mad or seeing further than his father. As he explained, he expected his father to eventually align with the Consult. But what is Kellhus doing here? The sections early about the head on the pole seemed to indicate that Kellhus is actually doing what he blamed his father would do: to use the No-God, to wage war against the Heavens. Because at this point, even the Consult isn’t enough. The Heaven is only a space of hungry gods, it was made clear that there’s nothing worth saving there. So the immediate answer, to close the World against the Outside, would make the most logical sense. But the story ends here: what is worth saving ON THIS SIDE?
Cnaiür urs Skiötha was the murderer who cast himself into his victims, who choked and shrieked with them …
To better suckle upon the fact of his own dread power…
To make the World’s throat a surrogate for his own…
In many ways, all Cnaiur does through the first three books is seeking his own death, without finding it. He challenges the World to be up to the task, and the World comes short.
Why? When there are so many monsters?
The Consult is not enough. The world has already ended. Bring on the Holy Apocalypse.
When the World goes mad, you shout louder.
Instead he heard the voice, uttered through a hundred thousand Sranc throats, flaring like bright-burning coals packed into his skull.
You and me. We are Sranc.
