What you find below has been written, partially, back in June 2021. I had the idea of doing some kind of “live” commentary of Erikson’s “Fall of Light”. The idea was to break down a bulkier review into a leaner ongoing, hopefully more regular commentary, but it ended up adding too much overhead rather than less as it was intended. Reading, thinking, writing notes, then later picking it up again, reading and then arranging the notes… My constant reading delays are mostly due to pacing in a way I can then write about the books. I feel this sort of commitment that I don’t quite enjoy. So the idea of breaking up a whole “review” into smaller pieces had some merits, but it doesn’t work all that well. I have a backlog of things I should write about, Bakker’s chapter is not over, but even in that case I was exhausted writing the lengthy commentary about my dismay to the last book, I needed a break, and after a break it’s almost impossible to get back into that type of mental space and focus. So who knows when/if it will happen.
As things kept getting stacked I felt the need to get back to Erikson, sooner rather than later. So the idea of resuming this one blog post that was left as an old draft. Pick up Fall of Light again, see what I get out of it… Only to realize that it’s been way too long and this time not only I don’t remember much of the plot, but it’s the tangle of characters that appears as inextricable. And so I take another step back and pick up “Forge of Darkness” from page 1. At this time being already some 130 pages into it, hardcover version.
Let’s see how it goes. I can try doing something monthly, but I really have no idea how it will turn out in practice. Also, the more I write here, the more I get disappointed about how I write.
—
This blog-site being in limbo isn’t surprising, and I don’t expect anything to change, at least for a few more months. I guess this can serve as a quick recap.
I’m still quite active, about things, but feel a lot more dulled. Virus-stuff takes a big chunk of my attention and also made me more jaded about everything. Writing on a blog demands effort and time, it was always important for me because it was a way to put down thoughts and move on. But right now I just don’t care about anything anymore, including my own thoughts. Everything feels fleeting. Writing a blog feels redundant.
This book came out in 2016. Back then, I had the idea of writing a commentary page by page, here. Something fast but regular. It didn’t happen, but I read the first 60 pages of the book at least three times, along the years, and have scribbled some notes at the margins. Today Werthead posted on his site the review of the new one. A few weeks ago I updated the wordcount page and found out the book is quite short, even shorter than Gardens of the Moon, and less than half of one of the big Malazan latter ones. I felt a little disappointed. But then I also immediately realized I don’t have any reason to. I have my stuff. I still have so much more of Erikson, probably more than I’ll ever end up reading. And I have this book especially. This is my stuff.
“Length” isn’t meaningless. Thinking so is oversimplification. I like Malazan also because of its “range”, and a smaller book implies smaller scope. Maybe a shrinking of ambition? I have tons of doubts about where Erikson and Malazan could go. I had my doubts about Kharkanas too, even if that ended up my personal favorite. A commercial disappointment that made Erikson switch to the Malazan sequel. Will it work? CAN it work? As Werthead writes in the comments of that review, this book cannot be realistically be sold to a new audience. Whoever decides to start, is going to start from the beginning. But it’s not my job or concern how to sell a thing. What else? How do you continue Malazan? That’s the problem of ambition. Can you even rise the stakes past that point? Or write some smaller scale epilogue, give it time to breath out, tie loose ends. I have no right to say anything about this, I haven’t got to the end.
(Note from the future: many, most, writers have maybe one great book in themselves. There isn’t anything fair about this angle of discussion. Unless the angle is the market and product. Why should we, I, even expect MORE from Erikson? Because he hasn’t died and is a WRITER? A job? As the future closes its doors, I realize even more clearly that the meaningful journey is to the past. If I want to find something that has value, then I walk back.)
The virus stuff caused a certain shake-up. I drifted away from certain communities, I feel a little lost. I lost my themes. As I said, I also stopped caring. I don’t give a shit, about anything. So I’m constantly drifting, between the meaningful and the meaningless. A couple of weeks ago I finished “V.”, by Thomas Pynchon. It was an immense book, full of inexplicable, impossible talent. It’s not even “talent”, because it shows a writer being just complete, and beyond. But also immensely frustrating, because I don’t know enough, I’m not smart enough. Most of the book went right over my head, and the day I finished it I started again from the first page. It’s a new book. I could just keep reading V.
And then I’m reading the first stories of The Savage Dragon, and I’m almost done with Rising Stars by Straczynski. I recently watched the entirety of Line of Duty (bent coppers!), that’s a masterpiece that goes close to The Shield, and whose ending is quite fitting in its imperfection. And whose intention is probably thematically linked to Forge of Darkness here (note from 2025, funny reading this part because I remember almost nothing about it, and I certainly have NO IDEA how Line of Duty could be linked to Forge of Darkness…).
I’ve restarted Dickens’ Black House from the beginning. I read about half the book, what, 10 years ago? In the last few months I started or restarted at least 50 books. I stop at some point, then repeat the process a few years later. I could go on forever, just reading again. Leaving everything in a constant flux of incompleteness (note from 2025: yeah, didn’t go well. Restarted AGAIN in 2022 and stopped at page 350). I’ve picked up the second book in Janny Wurts series, at least three, four times? I want to read more Tad Williams, now that I’ve completed both first books in their respective series, “Memory, Sorrow, and Thorn” and “Otherlands”. Scott Bakker should always be my priority, even when it isn’t. I’m reading light novels, but only if they are as long as Malazan, because in Japan it’s a thing. I started Re:Zero because I was searching through Google for the number zero short story of Shingeki no Kyojin, and instead Google returned me a ludicrous question answered unironically. I’m reading Faulkner (“Mosquitoes”, and I suspect this is Faulkner’s best book), I’m reading Stephenson (both Anthem and Reamde) and I’m reading JR by Gaddis (this type of schizoid reading is especially alive right now in 2025, as right this moment I’m reading Dostoevsky and Gadda). A while ago I finished “The Long Way Down” by Craig Schaefer, another large interlinked series project, urban fantasy and self published. I planned to write a sort of review, but this is how things go. I’ve started Bubblegum, by Adam Levin, and it felt like David F. Wallace in a really good way, but then I felt bad, because I’ve not finished the previous one, The Instructions. I really want to read The Instructions. And I really want to read “XX”. I started “Six of Crows” by Leigh Bardugo, but then it got popular, so I went to “And I Darken”. I’m reading books about old games, to build real time machines. I even picked up the Monster, Bottom’s Dream, a month ago? I’ve made through a few pages. I felt both smart and stupid, and then pathetic.
I’m putting together a new PC to play Factorio.
(some incomprehensible notes here written in 2021, about some other stuff, one mentioning Warhammer… But I really don’t know)
Today I’ve picked up, once again, Forge of Darkness with mixed feelings. I’m still perfectly tuned for this, but as I said I feel dull. The worst part is that these pages are scribbled with notes. Not only I don’t feel as receptive as I was, but I don’t even understand what these notes are supposed to mean. I read the same pages that I’ve now read a few times, and they seem new pages. I said I still feel tuned to this writing, but I cannot quite sink, and grasp. But I don’t care, so this is what it is. It is…
PART 1 (my notes on the pages are in italics, pages numbers from original Bantam UK hardcover edition)
I remember at the time I was looking through forums to read what others thought about the book, trying to take a measure of it before I started myself. Staying out of spoilers isn’t so easy, though, so I read that some readers were disappointed. There was going to be a big battle at the end, but it wasn’t described directly. As if Erikson decided to not give the payoff that readers demanded.
“I just slogged through Fall of Light, way too much philosophizing, not enough convergence. I was looking forward to a badass battle”
Then I read the first two pages, and wondered how you could be disappointed when it was written so plainly.
At the end of page 4, I don’t know if Erikson wrote this at the beginning.
My suspicion here is that this introduction-declaration was written after the book was completed. A way to tie the beginning and the end with a clear intention. Instead of a sort of “this is what I’m going to do”, it would be “this is what I found.” A writing trick.
In any case, it doesn’t matter. This part is a bit ornate in the writing, as most of this prequel series, but far from rhetorical and, especially, far from being opaque. Or subtle. “Stand at a distance, then, and make violence into a dance.” My note: make it entertaining.
Lower on the page: motivation VS truth. The idea is the split between stories and reality. Usually, this is romanticized. Not in the way Erikson means here, but in the universal way. Human beings cannot survive reality, so they fashion convenient stories. These stories form a cocoon of (for) life. An artificial space that is survivable. Erikson is more specific here, because he goes against the war and the art of war. About the morality of the intention behind this process. And so the “rhetorical swagger” is what’s necessary to make the killing possible. A little necessary push to refashion it. A concept that is then encoded, a few lines later, “deftly ritualized”, and so, I’d add, it disappears from perception.
This is my own interpretation and extension, because Erikson here is precise, only talking about the shapes of war. But the concept itself encapsulates modernity, how we feel we can observe and judge, without understanding that we are so deeply embedded within this fictional world that none of us can truly “see.” You can be more careful, more aware of the blindness, but you can’t overcome it. As Bakker would say, it’s darkness that comes before. We come after. We have neither awareness nor control of that context that builds us. The codification happens before conscious thought even surfaces. We are fused with this world, and our consciousness makes no sense separated from it. So how can we possibly judge what we do not see? If then this is true, “necessity” comes fused with the rest, it cannot be critically separated as Erikson does here. Leading to the concept of fatalism, that will return later.
Fall of Light: exhortation to himself. Cannot teach any lesson if you don’t follow it. writing is a monologue, so it’s self-reflection, introspection. The audience is not there. Passive.
(Note from 2025, what I wrote back then stops right here. Not even a true start, not even getting to the end of the FIRST page, quite ironic. So from this point onward it’s all written in the “now”, but based on a mix of notes taken years ago, a month ago, or the day before…)
The introductory page ends with an exhortation, obviously to himself as a writer: “Oh, have done with it, then.”
“The poet who glories in war is a spinner of lies. The poet who delights in visceral detail, for the sole purpose of feeding that lust for blood, has all the depth of a puddle of piss on the ground.”
One of my notes reads: necessity is the system of no-responsibility / a life is fashioned, and so we dance. It’s as if Erikson is rejecting what he’s just trying to begin, as much of the story will have to be a motivation for the war. The high level perspective and moral judgment will have to be seized and collapsed. Brought back to the blood-sodden ground. I think in general this page can be somewhat off-putting to read, because it does take a moral high ground and immediately “preaches” about the spectacle of a “fantasy” book. Fantasies of epic wars. Wars being bad, yeah. Do we need to repeat this? Well, maybe.
“What, in the name of all the gods above and below, are you doing here?”
This is more effective, and again can go all the different ways. You, the reader. You, the writer. You, the character of this story. But to me (and my notes) it speaks to a theme that, hopefully, will return through this commentary I’m writing: stratification. The stratification of the world and the constant switch of perspectives. That single life that is trapped and moved by circumstances. So, in order to understand, we need to move from the god-like fly-by, the judging-eye high level, down, to “incarnate” in a character. Get dirty, get tangled in. To feel that hate and rage, give them names. To feel the world made human, made real. Made broken.
And so… “Choose a cool dusk” in this introduction, becomes the first line of the first chapter: “Stepping out from the tent, Renarr faced the bright morning light, and DID NOT BLINK.” The beginning of a new book is the morning of a new world, we get incarnated into this Renarr, who does not blink. Not averting eyes, not shielding from bright light, not protecting. We take all in. Erikson moved from the abstract intent, to the concrete and incarnate. A voice found, now shaped.
But because we are now incarnate, we are also vulnerable. This world can and will hurt and then kill us. This point of observation has its expensive cost.
Knowing a bit more I wondered if maybe the blinking thing was a reference to Renarr being moved to a position of “daughter dark,” not blinking to the light, and connected to her skin tone proclaiming and revealing more her internal landscape, that in this case could be dissent. But at this point I still don’t know about the metaphysics of these aspects. I merely appreciate that they are subtle, taken for granted by the characters, and left there to simmer. I guess I could complain about this if we get to the end of the whole story and nothing more meaningful comes out of it. But for me things are also more confusing because a few weeks passed since this new re-read, and I know how the chapter ends: “Renarr studied her, and did not blink.”
I wasn’t able to extricate anything quite meaningful from that. Obviously it references back to the beginning of the chapter, but who she’s looking at doesn’t seem representing light, and I just don’t have a working interpretation for it.
Back to the chapter, Renarr is our point of observation to this war camp. The war being a fastidious possibility in the imminent future.
Section in italics from Renarr PoV, “we are awash in lies.” Echoing back the introduction. But this time we are already within the embroidery of characters. The tangle of relationships.
Page 6, my note reads: other realms, the world is layered thus, referring to this part: “By mid-afternoon, when the sun warmed the air enough, mosquitoes would arrive in thick, spinning clouds, thirsty for blood. If soldiers stood arrayed in ranks, facing the enemy, there would be little comfort preceding the clash of weapons.”
The mosquitoes here represent another layer of the world, which is quite typical of Malazan and something I especially like. Those annoying creatures don’t know anything of the world of men, and in this case, of their wars. But still, they are necessarily connected, depending on it. The world is both made whole and fragmented constantly, Erikson often shifts the attention so that you see these layers, rather than cutting them and brushing them off as irrelevant. The world speaks, you only need listen. Listen. Be one with those mosquitoes. Breathe them in, until your lungs are full, and then you die into the world.
It is indeed how Erikson, and many other writers, write. You kill yourself, shut up, die. So that you can be borne into the world, and listen. (which is one reason why I was deeply annoyed at the Nobel given to Han Kang, she was trying to do specifically this, and completely botched it)
Erikson writes as if possessing a character, like a ghost. He’s both a writer, and this character walking through the camp. Superimposed. At the same time the camp exists, and is made. But it is not seen as a blurred, uncertain dreamscape. It is solid, tangible. One page in, and there is a sense of familiarity. You wake up after being unconscious through a whole night, and the world continues uniformly and familiar, as if it never stopped. You’ve always been Renarr.
As she continues walking through the camp, veterans “had known that realm” (of war). My note says: microcosm in the camp, personal experience becomes a realm. Like a warren. Again a stratification, and communication between these parts, whether possible or not.
Then another section in italics, my note saying: VOICE. These are the sections that, I think, feel quite jarring to some readers. The “introspective” sections that are often criticized in Erikson’s writing. It’s not quite the same as standard Malazan, because in this prologue series the style is a lot different again, but these sections specifically I think evoke similar reactions. They feel maybe too articulated to be plausible, but I have a completely different interpretation. As I said, this is Erikson testing. Searching for the internal voice of the character. It’s not a form of internal dialogue, but an actual internal landscape that is translated into a literary one. It’s not plausible in the sense that this is what the character is thinking, word for word, right at that moment. It’s, again, like its own warren. It’s own space that here in the book takes a literary form. Its expression is different from what it is, because it’s meant to be interpreted rather than being simply “read.” I’ll return on this (maybe) when writing some comments about Forge of Darkness, but I think the style here is heavily “Shakespearean.” It’s an internal declamation that is faithful to the internal landscape, but not as plausible, “plain” voice. It’s not an accurate internal thought written down. Instead it is OVERwritten, another superposition. A sublimation of one territory into another. Same as symbolic representation, the symbol you use doesn’t have any direct resemblance to the object represented. The word “apple” does not resemble an apple. It’s a symbol, they are connected, but they are not alike. Here the same happens, but it’s language over language. A symbol representing a symbol. A mold over a landscape.
“The questions seemed banal, like things covered in dust, the dust shaken free, blown into the air by a heavy but meaningless sigh.” Next to this line I wrote: “SANDERSON.” But this is from years ago, and I have no idea what clever thought I thought.
“in the bright light, which rose like another world, a world unlike the night before,” this represents the start of a new, eventful day, but, specifically, a new book. A new world. But also plot-wise the people transformed, as they divide between followers of Light, and followers of Dark.
The whole next section has a line going down, I wrote: observer. More meaningfully, “too solid to be a ghost, but shunned all the same.” This is all contextualized, but I interpreted in a more general and abstracted way. It sometimes (often?) happens that the characters that Erikson “possesses” are then affected by that touch. The writer eye doesn’t just comes in and then leave unnoticed. It’s like these characters feel that abstracted touch, and the connection changes everything. These characters get permanently “dislodged” from their reality. They belong, but not quite. The characters themselves aware of this otherworldly touch.
That’s why, a moment later: “She saw herself observing.” That’s quite delicious, I love second order observations, reminds me of Heinz von Foerster. But this is again another superposition, a ghost-like double Erikson. It’s exquisitely “Malazan”, not just observing directly, but observing the observation. It’s an active, ongoing reflection, an awareness of the story that comments itself. This type of meta-narrative is quite explicit since the first page of the first prequel book, not only in all the winks thrown to the veteran reader, but also as a way to have a heightened attention. It’s as if at some point Erikson embedded the concept of Ormologun and its critic into himself. The story and its critical commentary bundled together as one.
You can as well take everything I wrote up to this point as bullshit, since these pages have a proper, obvious context that doesn’t need any fancy reinterpretation. But there are points of contact and I give myself more freedom to wander around, as I feel more familiar. The double observation, here, happens because Renarr is imagining a scene, same as Erikson is himself doing the same while blending with Renarr. So it becomes a series of thresholds, a dreamworld nested inside another. But then this little brief glimpse Renarr is having is shaken awake. Hunn Raal comes onto the scene, and the presence of others suppresses the internal voice. Attention moves to the outside and you are pressed forward against the transparent glass that is the point of view (the window that is your PoV to the world, focus shifts from the internal loudness, to the external). There are some dry lines of dialogue, some quips and jabs. There is familiarity between these characters, but also some guarded hostility. Again, in all forms of modern entertainment everything is loud and redundant, but I especially like this type of writing where you understand, but something always slips through. You know these characters but they aren’t fully revealed either. There is always something more that leaves you wandering, that draws the attention but without rewarding and satisfying it immediately… Sometimes it can be illusion of complexity, but often it’s meaningful depth. Either way, it always feels great, a pleasure for reading.
The actual encounter with Urusander, following the imagined one, isn’t quite unlike it. He is indeed more busy listening to his own internal voices than to who’s around him. He’s not completely addled in the sense he only raves about what he’s thinking, he does reply in a somewhat coherent way, but his line of thought is “elsewhere.” Which I guess is fitting since he then flees the scene, literally and meaningfully, considering the battle that is ahead. His own is presented again as a Shakespearean monologue than something that makes sense voicing. Something about the veil of representation, surface.
A dialogue continues between Renarr and Serap, more meaningful for what comes later. My note reads: those who see have no power. But this is more my own personal theme than Erikson. I have a whole system built around this: if you want to understand something, then you can’t be part of it. Choice, action imply participation. Understanding instead implies a point of view from the outside. The desire, the tug toward the will to affect something, to change its course, to affect it, even if only positively, is a process that in itself makes understanding impossible. So you surrender one or the other. You can understand something, but you’ll never be able to touch it. Just watch passively. Or you move to be part of it. Enjoy the love and hurt, and whatever else. But you’ll never fully know, then. You’ll never understand. You have accepted being permanently blind, so that you can be part of the world. Contextualized here, with a war ahead, those who sees it for what it is have no power to prevent it, or even change its course. And those who have that power because they are embroiled in it, who have the actual choice, don’t have it at all, because they are trapped within the tangle of circumstances. They are sacrificial victims. Unaware of their own doom (though it’s Sevegg, not Serap, who dies here).
Follows the point of view from the other side, that seems to have a similar function to Renarr, since they are both quite lucid about what is going to happen, neither having real leverage to avert it. Havaral here has a more of an active role, but is still trapped by duty. That part of him that is active is trapped by circumstances just the same. As he moves to meet Hunn Raal, he sees the approach as fatalism itself: “They rode with arrogance, with the air of believing themselves privy to dangerous secrets.”
Reading this in 2025 has a weird effect, because it does feel like the beginning of civil war. The world has gone mad, yet none of us has any power. The more lucidly we are aware, the less power to change it we have.
I guess I’ll stop here. This was supposed to be a quick, brief and to the point commentary, specifically to be the opposite of a more involved review. So I have to find a way, because otherwise this will be the first and last attempt.
As I said, while I’m 35-40 pages into this re-read, with the commentary here stalled at 14, I restarted Forge of Darkness and already 130 pages deep. Forge of Darkness is, by far, my favorite Malazan book. This reread is reconfirming it without any doubt. I know most readers consider it one of the weakest, and that it was not popular in sales, but the much denser prose style is what I adore. That’s the main reason why I like it so much. The prose. That kind of unrelenting Shakespearean heft. It is sometimes quite ridiculous to read, certain dialogues, certain internal monologues. They have too much emphasis, as I already commented above. But it is what I enjoy. This is not a movie. Language is precious. For example I do not like, in the main series, when especially in battle scenes Erikson uses a more cinematographic terse style where this and that “blurs.” This is not a movie. It feels to me out of place. A book is not analogical reality. It shouldn’t represent it “as it is.” That’s why I emphasized the symbolic weight above. Language needs to be precise, honest. But it is a different realm. Separate. Or, if it were the same, two good writers would write the same scene in the same way. And so dialogues need being authentic, but don’t need be the same. The same scene represented in a movie or as theater, won’t use the same language.
From the very first page Forge of Darkness is deliciously dense prose that has meaningful depth. So much more consistent compared to all other Malazan pages that I read (that up to this point means from first book to the prologue of book 7, still haven’t moved past that). I always though Malazan is rougher and more inconsistent, even if it progressively gets better on this. And it’s very, very wasteful. Too many interesting ideas that are crammed in and wasted for what they can be. Malazan moves too fast, is a “blur” sometimes without the necessary weight. Ridiculously, it has no space to breathe properly. Something that instead is completely absent as a problem in Forge of Darkness. Every character that comes on the scene, and every idea, is given space and depth. It forces the reader to pay attention. I guess sometimes it can be too obvious and melodramatic. But I love this dense style. Even Fall of Light feels slightly “off” in comparison, but probably it’s more my own impression as consequence of going back and forth without giving the book enough space. Every character in Forge of Darkness is weird and interesting. There hasn’t been a single page among those 130 that I haven’t relished. A more gothic, bleak (and even more cynical), moody, muted type of book that I did not expect at the time, and I find now even better.
I know these books didn’t sell so well, and it’s the main reason why Erikson prioritized the sequel series. I wish I could be along all those other readers pulling in that direction. But instead I can’t help finding myself pulling in the opposite direction instead. The more “opaque” and unrelenting the prose becomes, the better it feels for me. There is no limit.
