Category Archives: The Second Apocalypse


The Great Ordeal –
The Holy Apocalypse –
R. Scott Bakker

“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.

Is Bakker an impostor?

I was going to write this as a goodreads update, but decided to move it here, since it’s relevant to continue “the head on the pole.”

Chapter 4 is rather troubling. Some of it seems disappointing, or dismaying. If the whole cryptic section on the head on the pole was open to suggestive interpretation, this chapter implies the head on the pole is the No-God. At the very least the purpose of the chapter it to lead the reader there. Is it misdirection? I don’t know and I don’t worry about it, because I’m not reading to outsmart Bakker, or anticipate the story and guess it right. I’m only trying to… understand.

The head on the pole being the No-God “flattens” the number of interesting possibilities. It’s kind of plain and not especially surprising or insightful. It is not meaningful. Kellhus has gone mad, he’s now doing what he himself accused his father would have done: side with the No-God and fight the heavens. It doesn’t add to it or solve anything. It only hammers it back to what it was.

But as I was reading, I realized that I was going through similar emotions as Proyas. The interplay goes on so many different layers that I can’t even properly backtrack them again here.

Kellhus/Bakker and Proyas/me as a reader.

Is Kellhus an impostor?
Is Bakker an impostor?

In the same way Proyas is dismayed, but clings desperately to his own faith, he seizes not the present, but the past. He was there. He has seen those days of the holy war. He knows. In the same way, I, as a reader, know what Bakker is writing about. I know what it is and why it’s meaningful. It’s not in the present, but cemented in the past of what I already read before. In the same days of the holy war, but physically as a book.

And yet Serwe burns in Hell.
And yet, for all I’ve done, the world burns.

What is left here?

Sorrow and scrutiny.

There is no recompense… save knowing.

There is a head on a pole behind you.

I decided to take a look across the internet, trying to dodge spoilers. And I glimpsed two important aspects: the first is that this is seen as a rather unique passage in all the books, and that it doesn’t seem like Bakker clarifies it through what’s left for me to read.

This motivated me to write down here what I’m thinking. Through several rereads, across many days, there are layers to my thoughts and so many ideas going in different directions that I have no hope of retrieving from memory and archiving the whole of it. But at least if I write here what I currently have, at least I won’t lose that. I use this blog more for myself than communicating with the outside.

Let’s start from the end: “The living shall not haunt the dead.”

This is something that troubled me because I don’t have much to offer. It felt incongruous with the rest of the scene. But it comes here first because it comes first in the chapter. This is the first line, and it comes attached to a different part, with the men of the Great Ordeal eating Sranc. That line is appended there, so that it then returns to close the section I’m commenting here. But in the case of Sranc, it doesn’t tell me much… These are dead bodies being eaten, echoing what happens inside the section. The living aren’t haunting the dead, maybe the opposite since the sense of the first scene is some men complaining the practice of eating Sranc is changing them from the inside. “The meat.” “What of it?” “My… my soul… It grows more disordered because of it.”

There is more to the meat, but this we’ll see later. The living, here, aren’t haunting the dead, because the dead are dead and the living still living. This “divide” has been a theme in these last few books, and the line is thinning. But at this point there is no crossing over, and if anything those men are complaining something of those Sranc is lingering back, rather. I’m wary of considering the opposite because there are too many implications attached and what I’ve read up to this point isn’t very coherent with the idea going that way.

There is a head on a pole behind you.

While this is probably quite “troubling” for most fist-time Bakker readers, for me it makes instead an anchor. Or maybe it feels like one and I’m being fooled. But the first time I read this passage, for me it was a fixed point. Because I immediately linked it to this blog post.

It is the same concept that is familiar: the darkness that comes before. The head on a pole is yet another “fashioning” of the same concept. So the way I interpret its meaning is: you believe the movement of your thoughts are your own, but there’s something that comes before, here behind, that precedes your thoughts, shapes them and your actions. The key points are that you don’t control what you think you control, and more importantly, you have no perception of it. Same as the practical example in that blog, the “feature” of the head on the pole is to be perpetually just behind you. You cannot turn to see it. You have no direct perception of it.

All of this is reinforced at various points. This inner scene is surrounded by different pieces of the scene between Kellhus and Proyas. Right below the passage Kellhus is described as IMMOVABLE “in the eyes of his Exalt-General.” But he’s also controlling everything. He’s not so much in front of Proyas, but behind him, controlling and shaping each of his thoughts. “Kellhus had ruled Proyas’s heart, became the author of his every belief.”

“Kellhus could have reached out and behind him, manipulated the dark places of his soul.”

This much is quite clear, about the philosophical underpinnings of this “metaphor,” but not quite enough for me to see clearly through it… The following section is a huge problem:

He is here … with you … not so much inside me as speaking with your voice.

“He is”, should exclude this being the God of Gods, this scene is too authoritative to have slips like that. Who’s there? We don’t know. It’s Shakespearean. Who’s there? I am.

“With you.” Yes, it’s the same thing. He’s one with you. You think there’s one where there’s two. Master and manipulated. Kellhus and Proyas, in the example scene. One can be used to decode the other, even if the link may be less direct than this. This scene is not about Proyas, it’s about Kellhus in the Outside.

How does Kellhus reach the Outside? At this point of the book I have no idea. If it’s some kind of trance or meditation, like the Thousandfold Thought, then his consciousness wanders. Also meaning he’s in two places at once. So it started to open possibilities while I read. This, also, could be an anchor for Kellhus. He could either be the head, with the head on the pole behind him. Or he could be the head on the pole. Or, more likely, SEE through the head on the pole, like his anchor point in the Outside. But what to make of all this? I don’t know. It doesn’t coalesces into something usable, just suggestions.

“Not so much inside me as speaking with your voice.” This for me trips all over everything and why it is so confusing. We established there’s a “he.” We then established there’s a “you,” and he’s here with you. But then there’s a third. “Me.” This me, speaks with YOUR voice, and HE’S HERE.

Up to this point we were always playing with a double. Consciousness and preceding darkness. Master and slave. But it splits in three ways and I don’t know what to make of it, beside the fact that all of these three still coincide with the same point. There’s a he who speaks with your voice inside me. But if this voice is inside me, then how can it be other than MY voice? Again, the darkness that precedes. Who’s speaking here in the first place? Kellhus? It sounds incongruous.

But what if instead this is Kellhus talking to himself? It’s still incongruous for the way Kellhus has been shown before, but “you” could simply be self-reference. Your internal monologue that speaks to you as a double. “You’re really an idiot”, saying your internal voice, referring to yourself. Soooo… He’s here with me. Not so much inside me, but speaking with my voice.

I am being controlled. This is my voice, that I hear, but I’m not the one speaking.

We pondered you, says the most crocodilian of the Sons.

“But I have never been here.”

This “surprise” sounds like Kellhus. The further reply, “You said this very thing” is to me so clear that it’s probably misleading and false (more on this, at the very end). I just can’t see alternatives, and alternatives are what’s probably needed to decode the whole thing…

“And what was your reply?” (Kellhus? asks.)

“The living shall not haunt the dead.

And we’re back to the line that caps it all, but that for me means the LEAST. What we know is that this is spoken by one of the “Sons,” likely some kind of lesser gods in this Outside, or something pretending.

What does it mean? You should not be here. Only dead souls crowd the outside, to be eaten by the gods. This is HELL, after all. You should not be here. You are still alive … and there’s a head on a pole behind you. But do the gods know about the head on the pole? This is more likely Kellhus private knowledge. The head is an anchor point to the outside, to peer through? We don’t know.

Other parts here and there are easier to parse, or should be. Again, not because I’m smart, but because I’ve been onboard for a while, and read Bakker explain stuff through his blog. I often can see parallels between the story and the actual philosophy it comes from. So here we go:

“And he sees that these things are meat, here. Love is meat. Hope is meat. Courage. Outrage. Anguish. All these things are meat – seared over fire, sucked clean of grease.”

I immediately recognized this coming from a section of the blog, that I cannot find now. It was too many years ago. I don’t even remember if it was someone else in the comments. But it refers to a video. The concept is still at the foundation of eliminativism a science of human consciousness. There is no magic, it’s all basic science. Therefore the nature of emotions is still inscribed within the “meat.” Using the abstraction that we are just meat. Our brain is meat. Emotions have to be encoded within that same meat, if we accept there isn’t something “more.” The hard problem of consciousness. There are also different versions and I’m not sure the one that we used at the time, but the concept is the same. Even a cursory search through the blog offers some explicit quotes:

They need to understand that thoughts are made of meat. Cognition and communication are biological processes, open to empirical investigation and high dimensional explanations.

But how literally things are encoded here?

You can eat the brain of a wise man, without getting the wiser. Digestion would rather destroy that information, if we want to be literal. Already this is problematic, because this scene is in the Outside. If these are souls, how can they be meat? Maybe the parallel Bakker made isn’t direct at all and I’ve been mislead by prior knowledge, rather than helped?

So let’s stick to what’s written… Which doesn’t help. Because he’s offered that meat, whoever “he” is. The head on the pole cannot be moved (we’ve seen why), but here it appears to be used as a motive for what comes after. “He seizes the lake.” This seems quite an intentional stance, rather than a passive observer. Which is weird. The Sons, who are speaking and doing here, are also seized within the whole. “He rips them around the pole.” No idea what to make of this specifically. It may be as well bound to conceptual things Bakker uses for his ideas of time and place, but I never delved deep into that, and it’s complex stuff that would require time. “He transforms here into here,” and everything on that scene… But doesn’t seem to do anything with it. That phrase ends. He seems to wrap the whole place, but then what?

“You refuse to drip fear like honey – because you have no fear.”

Here the causal chain seems linked to the head on the pole. He has no fear of damnation… Because there is a head on the pole behind him. But let’s stick to the mention of fear, and go back.

Fear is just meat. It is encoded in the meat same as every other emotion or feeling. Fear is just meat… Because there is a head on a pole? More or less. Again, how literally things are encoded? Kellhus cannot be eaten. Because he’s not there. The living should not, can not, haunt the dead. He’s tricking them believing him being there, but he’s not.

But the moment you see things for what they are, the moment you shift the perspective back to the head on the pole, then you exit that personal consciousness. You understand the movement of a person’s soul. You know what is being moved, you know how. Kellhus knows how. He is inhuman in that way, the same as (well, not really) Non-men described later as “False-men”: “This is what made them False, inhuman … The way they made beasts of Men.” The same as Kellhus makes children of all Men. Toys. The bestial being used as “lesser than,” same as the Emwama in that scene.

As Dunyain, Kellhus has mastered fear. Not as simple control of one own’s emotions, but because fear is “explained away.” Once you have an understanding of reality, fear goes away, same as fear becomes just more “meat.” Once you have a fundamental description of reality, once you’re one with the world, you become fearless. Not so much as an act of will, but as an act of… physics. Fear is determined by what comes before. The nature of fear is for being incomplete and abrupt. To have no bridge between before and after. The moment you switch back to the perspective of the head on the pole, fear becomes at best a tool, not an emotion. By eating that meat you also eat fear, but in the sense that fear becomes illusory, same as consciousness is illusory. The appearance of something else.

Again, how literally things are encoded? Kellhus is not there (so he has nothing to fear, the Sons can’t get him), but he’s also fearless as a state of mind. But so is Theliopa:

“The bottomless indifference of her gaze was the only thing that terrified.”

“She gazed at him with piscine relentlessness, her pale blue eyes dead, void of passion. And for the first time he felt it … the menace of her inhuman intellect.”

“She looked like a thing graven, the goddess of some lesser race.”

I like how Bakker writes, because describing those “piscine eyes” he never flatters. The horror always lies in the truth of the mundane. And Bakker is a genius because Kelmomas sees her cunning, IN HER SKIRT (it’s not a pun, it’s like that).

But these considerations are beside the point. Is Theliopa also fearless? Is she… without a soul? That’s what I meant with “how things are encoded.” Because when it come to metaphysics we don’t know all that much, and it may be that achieving a certain impersonal otherness, the way of the Dunyain, may also translate with them being literal meat, without a soul. But there’s nothing indicating anything like this, up to this point, so this is another diversion trying to interpret this passage, leading nowhere.

We pondered you.

“But I’ve never been here.”

What if he had? This was my first idea. On the whole scene and the identity of the head on the pole.

“This was what his father’s Thousandfold Thought had made.”

“A pattern conquering patterns, reproducing on the scales of both insects and heavens; heartbeats and ages. All bound upon him.”

My guess was that the head on the pole is Moengus. But it may as well be a wrong guess. I’m still biased by the fact I don’t feel the end of the third book complete. I still rage at what I can’t come to terms there. And Bakker STILL teases me, right in this chapter. Moengus couldn’t explain why Kellhus had haloed hands. Here, Kellhus still has no idea why, either.

“He raised a hand into the dim air, gazed upon the nimbus of gold shining about them.”

“Such a remarkable thing.”

“So hard to explain.”

This is Kellhus. “Most failed to even notice his evasion.” I read this almost as if this is Bakker, also evading poignant questions, leaving just “odour of profundity.” Make believe. “They assumed they were being misdirected for some divine reason, in accordance to some greater design.”

This here is a dressing down, pretending to have greater answers where there’s none.

But it’s also a missing point. What’s the matter of the haloed hands? Miracle. Moengus was fooled, or maybe pretended to be, in order to enact. Kellhus doesn’t know. He’s being moved by a head on a pole behind him. By his father’s Thousandfold Thought.

He goes to the outside, but he only moved through the path his father already traveled before. Kellhus has never been there, but Moengus had.

“He was as much a creature of the Thought as it was a creature of him. For it whispered as it danced, threading the stacked labyrinths of contingency, filing through the gates of his daylight apprehension, becoming him.”

This is what I currently have. Which is a collection of SOME of the thoughts I had, just the more recent. I either write them down or lose them. As it happens, these moments stay clearer than what they become later on. So better hold on them while they are here…

(for example, I left out considerations about the first quote in the chapter about the game of Abenjukala, map and territory. It still is an example of occlusion. This was actually something I planned to start from, writing this whole thing, and now I can only stare dully at the page, wondering what I meant to write and then forgot… Sigh.)

The White-Luck Warrior –
R. Scott Bakker

Wind falls through the lazy treetops, shushing the bestiary that is the world.

“TELL ME … HAS THE WORLD ENDED?”

Done, late, with the fifth book. Only the last one is left, 800 pages long, split in two halves. I only have some scattered thoughts here, nothing truly coherent.

Closing the book, picking up the next. Reading the summary at the beginning is always an important step. It helps consolidating the experience, double up. From reading these summaries I immediately get the staggering scale of it all. Only Tolkien before Bakker was able to give the fictional construction such a scale and depth, and the sense of vertigo when you look down deep. A journey in the sense of an ascension. But whereas Tolkien was just doing his thing, turned inward, Bakker is conscious about it. Not just a well executed backdrop painted in vivid detail, what Bakker does is transfiguring it. Nail it to the canvas. Like Kellhus, Bakker grasped Moenghus-Tolkien’s Thousandfold Thought, and then went beyond. Bakker dared flying close to the sun, and did not get burnt.

After reading half of the summary I flipped casually through the first few pages, since I was done reading for that day, but something caught my attention as I saw a scene between Proyas and Kellhus. They are discussing metaphysics! And so I found myself reading this section, some twenty pages into the book without even reading from the beginning. A tolerable spoiler, I figured. I didn’t want to go too far so I only read a couple of pages. Proyas is being consumed by Kellhus and the interesting part is what he wants from him. But they were discussing the nature of the god. Kellhus depicts an idea of the god that isn’t again far from Kabbalah. A distinction whose nature is opposition. Something other than a man. In Kabbalah it is all about the ambiguity: men are opposite to god because god’s nature is giving, and men’s nature is receiving. And that’s also the nature of pain. But in closing that system the destination is being whole, apparently opposite to Kellhus’ idea here, that is more an alien, otherworldly concept of an uncaring god.

That’s the nail Bakker hammered into Tolkien’s dead skull. This interplay of god and no-god, men and non-men. Non-men being the elves, or even, going deeper, Istari-Ishroi. Gandalf is transfigured into Cleric, Nil’Giccas. But Nil’Giccas is also one of the nonmen, angel-like creatures.

“What did you see?” Nin’sariccas asked with what seemed genuine curiosity. “What did you find?”

“God… broken into a million warring splinters.”

A grim nod. “We worship the spaces between the Gods.”

“Which is why you are damned.”

Another nod, this one strangely brittle. “As False Men.”

The Aspect-Emperor nodded in stoic regret. “As False Men.”

Men and false men, gods and false gods. But what “false” even means in this context. And what even is truth?

“Is it true you have walked the Outside and returned?”

“Yes.”

“And what did you find?”

The idea of a god being fragmented into countless pieces is from the third book, where Kellhus tried to unify everything into one. The true god. This concept is reinforced by the voice of the dragon at the end of the book:

“IS NOT TRUTH INFINITE?”

But it’s Nil-giccas reaction that is quite funny, considering the dramatic scene, and throws it all back to Bilbo, out of a fairy tale:

“He plays you,” the Nonman said, his face white and serene. “There is no separating him from his hoard. He is too wicked, and he has slumbered here too long…”

The Nonman is serene because he now remembers, this scene comes from The Hobbit. It comes from the past, and now he knows how it will play out. There’s nothing to fear here, the future is known.

“The God is Infinite,” Kellhus said, pausing before the crucial substitution. “Is It not?”

If men are fragments, wedges of reality, then the truth is infinite in practical terms, just as the dragon says.

A hissing pause. “GRASPING,” the dead beast said, shadowy and mountainous. “MEN ARE FOREVER GRASPING.”

“I search for a map,” the old Wizard said.

Achamian comes to bargain, to obtain his trinket from the dragon’s hoard.

“A bargain then!” he cried in sudden inspiration. “I would strike a bargain with you!”

“WHAT COULD YOU HAVE THAT I MIGHT DESIRE, MORTAL?”

“Truth… Truth is all I have.”

Is not truth infinite? Not quite in general terms… The pertinent trait of truth is being complete. One piece of truth, in itself, is true but incomplete. As long it doesn’t overlap in misrepresentation, as long it is adjacent. As long it’s not contradiction. A piece of the world, a piece of reality. A piece of truth is all Achamian has. But men are forever grasping. Achamian wants more pieces, he wants the whole truth. Or the truth made (w)hole.

“Think, Proyas. Men will so they can become one with the Future. Men want so they can become one with the World. Men love so they can become one with the Other…” A fractional pause. “Men are forever famished, Proyas, famished for what they are not…“

And isn’t the Thousandfold Thought an act of a man, forever grasping to make the future, Muad’dib. Hasn’t Kellhus stepped into the Outside to become whole with the god, and return? Kellhus’ journey, ever drifting closer to truth, growing even more inhuman.

But despite all the goading, I still don’t know where this all leads. I don’t even know the proper position of the inner pieces. When reading the scene between Kellhus and the Nonmen, quoted here above, I thought it was ironic that worshiping “the space between the gods” seems equivalent to worshiping a no-god. The actual distinction between what is and isn’t a god. Spaces of not-god. I’m still completely lost in the easy parts. Men are made of populations that migrated from the east, that thrived as the Nonmen dwindled for their own causes. What is false and true about this? Why would the Nonmen self describe as false men? Nonmen were distinct from men merely because they were native of the region. Would Native Americans define themselves as “false men”? Why?

I would understand it as a negation, worshiping the spaces between the gods would be like worshiping freedom from the gods, like the last epigraph says:

We only have as much freedom as we have slack in our chains. Only those who dare nothing are truly free.
—SUÖRTAGAL, EPIMEDITATIONS

But again this would put Nonmen very close to the Inchoroi:

a race who had come to seal the World against the Heavens and so save the obscenities they called their souls.

Wouldn’t their goals be one?

It’s curious that the further the series proceeds, the more it drifts closer to Malazan in its deeper meaning. The “fantasy” of fetching the world toward reality. The end of magic. “Deliver us from evil”. Which is again fully going back to Tolkien and the story of a world gone. The few remaining elves that sail westward, as the closure of an age, and leaving a new world. Even if it is quite probable that Bakker won’t be satisfied by a forlorn, nostalgic goodbye.

What about the rest of the book? The first part is very much the continuation of The Judging Eye. The quality of writing stays excellent, the sharpness of vision is unrelenting. That’s evidently what Bakker sets off to do, and delivered. He wanted to blend themes from the first trilogy directly into the characters, and find meaning through both introspection and action. On the other hand the philosophy stays back once again. This story demanded time, Bakker delivered it masterfully. It’s still not my own main focus as a reader. It’s still, for the most part, a distraction. Then chapter 7 & 8, right in the center of the book, produce a major shift. Once again Bakker soars above and seizes similar heights of the first trilogy. It feels like it’s a pivotal moment in the book, that everything is about to change… But it doesn’t happen. The story eases back in its previous shape, and from that point until the end it feels like an aftermath. While this may sound as a disappointment from me, it’s very much deliberate. Bakker wanted to tell this story, in this precise way. Taking its time, without rushing, without distractions.

The Slog of Slogs started, more or less, as an interpretation of a standard fantasy quest. Looking for a magical trinket (or a map). As I wrote back then, this is a macguffin because as readers we already know those answers, and we know there’s no revelation there. Through all this book Bakker delivers characters to that end of the story, and fully embraces the intent of interpreting something that came before.

Cleric and the old Wizard, meanwhile, dare enter the ruined maw of the Coffers, where they find Wutteät, the famed Father of Dragons, coiled about a great heap of Far Antique treasure.

Once again, it’s all a game. Bakker uses this part of the story like a parable. He overlaps the classical Toliken with his own reinterpretation. He sounds what came before like a musical instrument. But that’s also where the difference is, because Bakker writes in a way that doesn’t afford that type of nostalgic citation or inspiration. Everything Bakker touches ends up transfigured and transcended, exactly as it happened with the first trilogy and inspiration from holy crusades. When this type of superimposition happens, it’s because Bakker wants to look beyond. And if you are on board, he delivers and does not falter.

That’s the shape of the story, and I ended up accepting it. Achamian and Mimara finally reached Ishual and found it in ruins. We of course didn’t see anything there from the twenty years gap, so who knows what happened. The rest of the journey hasn’t been especially enlightening. Everyone else died, all those other threads started and ended. They retrieved some magical trinkets from the dragon hoard, draped them over their shoulders. But they are described as simple toys. Again, it was all a game.

On the side of Momemn things were somewhat more dramatic, but I don’t think it worked for me the way it was intended. The plot twist at the end was way too predictable, due to a giant Chekhov gun that Bakker left unfired. It was WAY too conspicuous, making its absence very loud. On one hand, Bakker had to write it deliberately so that this “weapon” was authoritative. You have to make the reader believe its power, why it cannot fail. Make it a real threat that can kill a Dûnyain. But it’s a too simple trick to make it disappear from the page just after it’s been primed, and then distract the reader through the plot, hoping that the intervening chaos is just enough to hide effectively that weapon until the moment of its return. I was just there turning pages and wondering when it would come back on the scene. And since it only comes at the very end, it certainly wasn’t a surprise. But the interesting part is the consequences of that event, and that’s for the following book to tell.

I am somewhat confused, because it seems like Kellhus must have glimpsed some of those events. He seems surprised when we get a short scene from his point of view, the story is built in a way (and then reinforced by Maithanet) that seems to make evident that Kellhus already anticipated the important events. Yet it seems weird that this was the result of his Thousandfold Thought, that this was the shortest path. Somewhat too convoluted and quite unoptimized… Wasn’t there a better way? It’s more or less the same Esmenet wonders.

Reading the summary in the following book cements the idea of how much the events end up being shaped by Kelmomas, but in the book we get his point of view, and he’s completely clueless, far from the mastermind he appears to be. In the end he’s only successful because Maithanet and Inrilatas trip on each other. Kelmomas is a survivor of chance, more than a director. Again, how much of this did Kellhus glimpse? How could he see the chaos of Kelmomas as an useful threat?

The scene in chapter 8 between Maithanet and Inrilatas becomes the center of the whole book. I’ve read it a few times, and can go back and read it more. There’s so much that is implied and slips away. Both Maithanet and Inrilatas speak following their own inner threads, rather then to each other. They move in a coordinated, parallel way, but it’s not quite a dialogue. On the side, Kelmomas is only able to watch in shock.

And again, Bakker teases me.

Inrilatas seized the opportunity. “You think Mother has blunted Father’s pursuit of the Shortest Path time and again, that he walks in arcs to appease her heart, when he should cleave to the ruthless lines of the Thousandfold Thought.”

“Who has told you these things?” his uncle demanded.

Inrilatas ignored the distraction. “You think Father risks the very world for his Empress’s sake — for the absurdity of love!”

“Was it her? Did she tell you about the Thousandfold Thought?”

The two speak in parallel, they follow their own trajectory. Maithanet is concerned by something, that is never quite explained. Why is he so worried by the mention of the Thousandfold Thought? Shouldn’t it all be common knowledge at this point? It’s basically a different label for the plan that everyone believes Kellhus has. Belief in him, belief in the plan.

That’s even a main theme of the book, working quite well in the way it is explored through the book: is tyranny necessary?

If men are too stupid, and there’s an existential threat, is maybe tyranny the only possible solution? It’s an actual, tangible question that within the context of the book and its events is completely cleaned of rhetoric. It’s not an excuse to seize power, it’s the same conclusion Sorweel arrives to. From Chapter 7, onward, the function is to show how real is that threat. The neverending flood of Sranc, and the despair it leaves. What’s the answer to this? It’s the same dilemma Achamain has. In the end the truth of it vanishes in the presence of the practical. Yes, Kellhus is a fraud, but who cares? Hasn’t he used his power precisely to save the humanity that is left? Was there a better way? Is truth the price of complete annihilation?

“What if he were simply a man pretending to be more—a prophet, or even as you say, a god—simply to manipulate you and countless others?”

“But why would he do such a thing?” the girl cried, seeming at once thrilled, confused, and appalled.

“To save your life.”

Of course with these types of stories the problem is always in the labyrinth, the Thousandfold Thought: what about the other options? You have to trust Kellhus, and Bakker, saying that there was no other, better way.

That scene between Maithanet and Inrilatas roughly coincided with the moment everyone on the internet started talking about the second Dune movie. I haven’t seen the first, and have zero interest watching either of them. But I did start reading Dune Messiah in parallel, and it become an effective tool to interpret what I was reading here. I really liked Dune Messiah, but it is a book of two sides. The plot itself is a complete failure. Everything ends up being resolved through artificial intervention, it’s simply poorly thought. But Herbert made a great job developing the themes and deeper meanings. He got the metaphysics right, compared to similar attempts that instead failed spectacularly, as I said before, from Alan Moore with Watchmen, to Arrival, Dark, Tenet. They all embrace contradiction blissfully, thinking themselves smart. Herbert instead sidesteps the whole problem. He simply embeds the uncertainty within the prophetic visions of the future, merely because he adds the possibility of hidden actors. There is more than one prophet, therefore no prophecy is ever complete. Therefore uncertainty can’t be squeezed away. But it’s all wonderful because Paul knows from the very first pages there’s a conspiracy against him, and he knows the conspirators are right in front of him. And the conspirators know he knows.

The more I peeled those layers in Dune Messiah, the more I recognized echoes within this book. Hayt is Sorweel. A known weapon that is kept close (even if then sent away, in the context of this book). The path of Paul is very similar to the path of Kellhus. Both end up being quite lonely at the end, and both become inhuman. The moment Paul vanishes in the desert, it seems like the writing takes a somewhat suggestive, rhetorical bent. He goes out to die, but it looks more like he gets transformed, becoming whole with the desert and the planet. The scene wants to be evocative, but is it really just for a show, to make the ending poetic? The moment he grasps his own Thousandfold Thought he actively merges with the future, and then the past. Maintaining a physical form seems almost superfluous at that point. He “grasped” far beyond himself, in a way where time, past and future, have been merged together. In a way that his present happens simultaneously with his past, his perception overlapping and merging. What function has a body left when you are everywhere, anytime, at once? It’s one of the most poetic and yet strictly logical portrays of death I’ve read. Nothing can ever rob you of the moment. A life is always eternal (well, given the current knowledge we have of realty).

Kellhus aspires to the same, and on that level he has no opponents that meddle against his will. At this point I don’t know, maybe the cult of Yatwer has been crafted to conform the same shape conceived by the Bene Tleilax (I absolutely despise them). The White-Luck Warrior being the hidden knife. And it was already been established that the gods are intervening, but they cannot perceive the No-God. So Bakker is adding actors on the scene just like Herbert did. We’ll see where all this leads.

Throughout this uneven commentary I missed quite a few things I wanted to add. A number of characters, both minor and major find their end precisely when their function ceases. It seemed a bit too neat and convenient. Characterization is always a guiding star, shining through all the book. Again, this is what Bakker wanted to do. It is so well executed and meaningful that you find it in the small things, like Sorweel who has to wait being alone to be able to even think his conspiracy. Not because Serwa would read his face, it is assumed that whatever magical power (supposedly) shielded him from Kellhus would work the same for her, but because he cannot have two contradicting halves, one turned inward and one turned outward. And that’s also why he feels betrayed at the very end. He’s still earnest within himself.

The depiction of the idiosyncratic (as an euphemism) royal family is masterful. They don’t occupy much space but they feel so solid and real to me, so distinct and intriguing. I despise Kelmomas with a passion but I’ve truly loved Inrilatas (sadly…). Theliopa comes right behind. She’s not much of a developed character, but deeply endearing to me. And then Kayutas ad Serwa, distancing Moenghus in my own preference merely because Moenghus isn’t quite as distinct or meaningful.

Anyhow, it’s quite telling that whereas the Dûnyain have bred “for intellect”, in reality we breed our leaders for stupidity. The power is their greed, their greed is their end. There’s no further level. One can only wonder what could have happened if there was someone in control, rather than everyone slave to the same machine. We are quite literally victims of an evolutionary dead end without any escape. For all the grimdark, there’s more hope in Bakker’s Eärwa than there ever was on planet Earth (for human beings, that is).

For me reading Bakker has become something more. That grimdark is sustenance, the only way of looking beyond that pointless pain that is the world, the real world. It has nothing to do with escapism, or even entertainment. It’s all about understanding the world and our silly place in it.

A few remaining, quick considerations:

An Ark “toppled”. I can only ask: who comes on the scene by crashing on the stage? Seems quite a clumsy entrance. This still hasn’t been explained. What were the Inchoroi doing? The dragon at the end adds a few things, but I still can’t make anything out of it: “WATCHING MY MAKERS DESCEND AS LOCUSTS UPON WORLD AFTER WORLD, REDUCING EACH TO ONE HUNDRED AND FORTY-FOUR THOUSAND — AND WAILING TO FIND THEMSELVES STILL DAMNED!” 144.000 of what? Worlds? Why 144? “THE LAND OF OUR REDEMPTION!” …Why? Why this land here? “THE PROMISED WORLD!” By who?

The book, as usual, starts with a citation from a real book, Hegel in this case:

The heavens, the sun, the whole of nature is a corpse. Nature is given over to the spiritual, and indeed to spiritual subjectivity; thus the course of nature is everywhere broken in upon by miracles.

—Hegel, Lectures on the History of Philosophy III

“Nature is given”, by who? This appears to reinforce the religious angle in the book: magical intervention is subjectivity. Not the objective description of the world (science). But the subjective moral compass, the judging eye. So, the seed that introduces subjectivity creates the premise of miraculous intervention. Something other than an objective corpse.

I have no idea where this all leads.

A few pages later, still in the summary, there’s a line referring to Kellhus going beyond the Thousandfold Thought: “And go mad.” Next to it I scribbled a note: (miracle?)

The Judging Eye – R. Scott Bakker

“This is a journey without return.”
“She sneered and laughed. “So is every life.”

This is a weird book.
And I absolutely hate writing “reviews.”
I’d love to start reading the following book without saying a thing, but I also feel this commitment to write what I think… so here we are.
(there will be spoilers)

Before I begin here I went to retrieve that old, placeholder cover that was never actually used, and read a couple of reviews that I also must have read at the time they came out, skipping the plot details to avoid spoiler (or pretend to forget). The suspicion I had while reading the book, and maybe that I remembered from back then, was confirmed:

Another error I think I made in The Prince of Nothing as a whole is that I think I focused too much on interior action – I spent too much time knocking around in my characters’ heads. This is one thing that I tried to rectify in The Judging Eye: there’s still plenty of internal action, but I like to think I’ve done a better job balancing it with external action.

Bakker told me that the Prince of Nothing series was always meant to be the “story behind the story.” Hence, he wanted to make sure that The Aspect-Emperor would work for the fans, but also for those who found the literary aspects of the first trilogy (emphasis on particularity and interiority) too much, as well as for newbies.

But here I’m writing what I think, what I was thinking while reading, and I’m not going to make these other aspects intrude now.

This book is essentially a long prologue. I also think it’s really well written, more so than the preceding trilogy. I don’t mean as a quantification, since those preceding three books were exceptional. But the necessities of that story made the pages somewhat uneven, cumbersome for having to carry so much, and Bakker had some quirky writing habits (death came swirling down) that always had a motivation behind them, but also could push a reader either way. This new beginning feels as if Bakker reorganized and decided to write it on his own terms. As if he’s more in control of the story, rather than serving it. More a narrator than a possessed mouthpiece.

And yet the book suffers for it, in a way. The mad desperate rush, or the slow march toward Shimeh, one and the same, had a specific quality. Despite there are aspects of that story that are mirrored here, it almost feels like a fairy tale. Despite the horror, the dread made real, it seems to completely lack an edge. In this regard, the book reads so much more like a well written, but quite traditional fantasy book. And yet it’s very much “Bakker”, every single line. But also so very different.

The idea you could start reading from this book sounds to me simply ABSURD. It makes no sense. There is so much to this story that it would be simply ridiculous to decide to start from a different point. But as I was reading it, I had this feeling of reading an extended prologue. It’s a 400 pages book, the length of the last one in the previous trilogy. The more I moved through it, the more I realized that the prologue wouldn’t end, and the book wouldn’t begin. And as I was reading through the final, extended section, it simply dawned on me a weird idea: this wasn’t written as a prologue to the following volumes… This is a prologue to the first trilogy.

It doesn’t make ANY sense, and yet it does. Without reading the summaries of the story so far, that in this case have been moved to the back of the book, it seems as everything is set up to refer to that story, but without quite spoiling it, without making it known and plain. The first page, a letter to Kellhus, is enough to set the stage, but from a guarded point of view. That story already blended into legend, and built a distance. The original trilogy played on its two different levels, the ancient times of the First Apocalypse, with the brief direct glimpses through Mandate dreams, and then the present times. With Achamian realizing that things were in motion once again, that legends once again become real, become present. Twenty or so years pass, the world is largely transformed, and so are the characters. There is less of an impending doom, even if the impending doom is obviously closer. There is a sense of relative security and stability. This book becomes, at the same time, the future but also the past. Because that past, blending to legend, becomes something to rediscover and reinterpret. And for all these reflections, it seems all building momentum to lead there. There’s emphasis, a sought knowledge expressed from characters that are new, like Mimara and Sorweel, who understand that their circumstances are the result of what came before. Their stories and movements in the book are introductions to the past. They build an offset of wonder, they build an anticipation for things ahead, that are instead behind.

And it’s all… gone.

This is the apparent contradiction: that the book is so well written, to the point of pure spectacle. Of a writer, much like David Foster Wallace, who seems to say “hey mom, I’m driving this bike with no hands!” Effortless spectacle. And yet, the mission, the mad rush forward, the desperate need that fueled the previous trilogy and made it TRUE, is completely gone. Gone in the sense that it is tucked away. Locked out.

The book begins and sets some premises. They are even quite intriguing, like the false memories about Seswatha. But all it does is simply confirm previous hypothesis. To the point it really makes logical sense only in the perspective of leading toward the previous trilogy. Achamian’s whole journey here, toward an explicit excuse: the library of Sauglish. And to do what there? Figure out the place where Kellhus is coming from, Ishual. Because Achamian believes Kellhus is no god, but just a man who is manipulating everyone around him, for his own ends rather than what he claims. He is a false god, and Achamian’s mission is proving it. First and foremost to himself.

But while this is true for that limited point of view, it’s not true for the reader, to a comical level. You simply need to take the very first book, open it to the map at the end. There it is: Ishual. The map that Achamian still hasn’t reached, has always been there. Everything Achamian seeks to understand about Kellhus, we already know in quite good detail. We’ve even seen authoritative flashbacks of his training. But of course, “we”, the readers of what came before. Not the Judging Eye readers, with a wonder for legendary times. With desire for revelation. To know more, to prove more.

We are already there, waiting for Achamian to catch up. For this prologue to end, and the real story to start.

Since The Thousandfold Thought we’ve known that the boundary between the world and the otherworld, the world and hell, is being eroded. It is reaffirmed at the beginning of The Judging Eye. The end of the book simply reinforces it. Shows it. The book is a prologue because it starts and ends the same. We are none the wiser, because the first trilogy has delivered all these answers.

Whereas all the other “mysteries” still waiting for an answer, and that are still seeded here, like what is Kellhus TRUE purpose, what does it mean to seal the world from the outside. Or the very big deal: why Achamian believes Kellhus a fraud, when we’re getting more and more proofs that things are quite weird (the haloes of his hands, in previous books, that Moenghus also couldn’t explain, or Mimara otherworldly powers here, or all about Yatwer… all being intrusions into the world order)? None of these get explained, or even advanced. Because of course there’s no answer in the first trilogy about them. And The Judging Eye is its prologue.

Once again, all I’m writing is about what isn’t there, rather than what it is there. I wrote some comments on goodreads while I was reading through the book. The second chapter with the introduction to Achamian and Mimara is a masterpiece. But the prose and characterization maintain a superb quality that soars above the preceding books. I still have no idea why Mimara is written in present tense, while everyone else is done through a typical past tense. It makes Mimara feel like a timetraveler that got slightly dislodged from the fabric of reality. She’s more immediate, she’s the same as what happens to Achamian when he visits the past through his dreams. He feels there, even if he’s not quite there. As a meta-narrative device it would work well. Sorweel and Mimara are receptacles for new readers. They demand immersion and identification (despite a couple of plot points about Mimara will throw any reader as further away as possible, I guess Bakker can’t abstain from making fun of any form of positive feedback). Yet Sorwell doesn’t share that literary trick that affects Mimara…

I won’t say much about the description of PURE EVIL that is the kid, Kelmomas. These are all the things that Bakker does superbly well, and it feels pointless to comment because they are plainly there, on the page. But The Judging Eye is all about the characters and how they are written. It’s all about a display of mastery.

The twenty year gap is tricky to deliver. It the same thing that not only was tricky for GRRM, but that lead to the complete SHIPWRECK of that series. If anything, this book clearly proves who’s the better writer, if there was still any doubt (and all the more sad, since Bakker hasn’t continued writing). But who cares about pointless comparisons. The point is that most of what is great here is due to everything being so perfectly nailed. All the sons and daughters of Kellhus/Esmenet/Serwe, they are all incredible characters. Different from each other, yet leaping from the page and from the mass of everyone else. Some appear very briefly, and still make so much an impact as to forget everything about the story. They become story themselves. They are so deeply intriuguing, deeply characterized in their quirky behaviors. They have all the otherworldly charm that Kellhus has actually lost, becoming simply inhuman in an unrelatable way. Kelmomas is just a pure representation of pure evil egoism, but in the end he’s just a kid blown large: the disconnect that is plainly stated at the beginning of the prologue: “When a man posseses the innocence of a child, we call him fool. When a child possesses the cunning of a man, we call him an abomination.” But how not be charmed by neurotic Theliopa, or even Kayutas and Moenghus. Or the folly of Inrilatas, what has he seen? He has found revelation without leaving his room.

All of this, the context of the world after a twenty year gap, the superb characterization, the quality of the prose, they all make this book a masterpiece. And yet it is a masterpiece of a prologue… to the first trilogy.

Where has the bone and marrow of the story gone?

The implications that move everything, that drove those preceding books. They are locked away. It’s not even missing in the sense of a lack, it’s simply not there.

The only aspect that I’m doubtful about is the whole cult of Yatwer side-plot. From Psatma Nannaferi, to where it intersects with Sorweel and then the literal Judging Eye of Mimara. It feels like an intrusion in the story that doesn’t quite fit. It hinges on those parts of the metaphysics that still don’t make a lot of sense. They are intrusion from the outside, but for that reason they clash with the “science” of Kellhus. They are obviously deliberate elements of the story, but still fail to win me over. And all this within the minimal page count they occupy here.

I have no idea what The White-Luck Warrior will be. Will it be a sequel to this prologue? A sequel to the original trilogy? Something else entirely? I still have the feeling that Bakker is moving away from the original story, rather than toward it. I suppose some of this is the result of a sort of “rebound” effect. A reaction to the reaction. Bakker isn’t so much writing his story, as he was doing up to this point, but reacting to the moment that story was delivered and made public. But we’re dealing with “art” here, and it means that feedback doesn’t necessarily have a positive effect. Bakker was seeking approval, this book seems to read like a statement that says (and proves): I deserve it.

For all its exceptional execution, it doesn’t grasp what is there behind the curtain. And it doesn’t match what the preceding trilogy is. This book is mostly spectacle.

(How to write a negative review that is just a list of praises, I guess. But that’s how I feel, and how I felt reading this book.)

Further notes:
there are a number of aspects I intended to elaborate on, but I don’t feel like wrestling with what I already wrote to fit everything in. So I’ll only mention that the whole ordeal in those last 100 pages, obvious reference to Minas Tirith, despite all the dread and incredible execution, still felt a somewhat comforting place. We know Mimara can’t die there, we know Achamian can’t die. We know the captain and probably even Cleric are unlikely to die like that. Despite only an handful come out alive, Bakker knows too and makes fun of: “Of those the Bitten had called the Herd, all three survivors were Galeoth – Conger, Wonard, and Hameron – men Achamian had not known until the arduous climb up the Screw.” … A way of saying “redshirts.” Again, despite the so well described and evoked dread, we see only in small scale what we’ve already seen in the large: the nonman king speaks through unconscious Achamian and Pokwas, but it’s nothing compared to world-encompassing sranc choruses, in presence of the No-God. Despite all those scenes felt remote, merely implied dreams, and here they are close and immediate instead. But it’s still nothing new. It all lacks an edge. And no, this has nothing to do with Bakker unwilling to kill more important characters here, it wouldn’t have worked anyway. Nothing really happened. Achamian is looking for a map we readers already have, Mimara got a magical trinket, some redshirts were culled, nonmen are melancholic living or unliving ghosts. Nothing really happened here, it was a prologue.

Another thing I want to mention is “Sorweel’s shield.” There’s some Yatwerian magic that makes him somewhat immune, despite this matter isn’t quite clearly set, to Kellhus’ sight. But we know Kellhus’ sight isn’t magic, but just his ability to read the movement of muscle and skin. As I mentioned above, it’s science rather than magic. And Sorweel does indeed betray himself in very obvious ways. Yet he’s not seen.

Page 225: “We walk the Shortest Path, the labyrinth of the Thousandfold Thought.” I’m still somewhat annoyed how these two became one thing, when most of the 2nd book was built on its mystery of being two things. I still have no idea what Bakker (or Moenghus) was doing.

Page 314: “Nonmen can’t see paintings.” What?

Page 283: “Our God… the God, is broken into innumerable places.” Kabbalistic turn again, Adam Kadmon. Every time Bakker gives in to this type of metaphysics, he seems to channel Kabbalah.

One of the two reviews I’ve read said this:
“most notably the biggest weakness in the series remains: that whilst it is imaginative, powerfully-written and at times intense, it is also a somewhat remote and cold work, easy to admire, hard to love.”

It doesn’t sound quite right to me, but I started wondering if actually true or not. I can somewhat relate to it. But what’s then the difference between characters and books I do love, rather than admire? The answer, for me, is that it’s more about the perceived meaning of love than an actual distinction, that this series of books also mocked in a number of occasions…

(as I mentioned at the beginning, I hate writing reviews. I’d read a whole lot more if I didn’t force myself writing down my thoughts. The main reason why this book took longer to read than the previous three is because I decided to write about them (since book 1 and 2 were re-reads). That means I start postponing reading the book, so that I could postpone the moment I needed to write about it… And also started reading all sort of other books. I’m that type of stupid that makes his own cage.)

The Thousandfold Thought –
R. Scott Bakker

Not a conventional review, if I was ever able to write one.

This final book, and the whole arc of the trilogy is exceptional. Reading it all at once without pauses in between, not as a quick re-read, but as a methodical one where I was fully focused, on every word, every line. Giving it 100% of my attention to every page. I can say that this type of approach helped immensely. It’s not usually the case, as it is often suggested to simply power through, especially with difficult books. That eventually things will make sense. I think here it’s the opposite. The moment you lose even a small thing, you risk missing the world. The more you reign in, the more you collect.

I was curious to see if, with this regular, methodical read on my side, the three books would show some general “changes”. A dip in quality? Some signs of exhaustion? Different pacing, more loose characterization. But honestly there isn’t much that I can meaningfully say. Reading “feels” different, moving from the first, to the second and third. The first book does “feel” the better of the three. Not in writing quality, but because of the ease of plot and themes. I already mentioned that this third book is more frequently than before a fly-by, taking a step away from the closed perspective. But after contemplating the whole thing from the end, I feel that this overall shape was necessary and fitting.

This needs this sort of premise, because I’m going to rant. About what the trilogy ISN’T. But I don’t have even words about what IT IS. Looking back, it truly feels like an impossible journey. The experience of reading these books is unique. And the sheer ambition, and then mastery of the impossible task is inhuman. As a reader, 95% of the hard themes written here were already very familiar to me. I have followed Bakker along the years, and I had similar “worldviews” already before then. He wasn’t going to tell me something new and unprecedented. Yet, I couldn’t do without these books and the read felt transformative. The mental clarity and focus they give me. The sheer ELOQUENCE.

This is in some part what I’ll attempt to write here: past the first book, there isn’t much that is being added. Ironically it refers to the title, the Darkness that comes… before. Mystery and revelation precede, do not follow. And yet, everything that comes after has the sheer power of eloquence, of being experienced. Of seizing the import of what was commanded.

So, to satisfy the simple necessities of a review: this third book is certainly the “weakest” of the three. But not, as I suspected, because of a dip of writing quality (Bakker mentions in the books that the writing of books 2 and 3 was a mad sprint, compared to the elaborate planning that preceded the 1st). I feel like this trilogy acquires a necessary shape, and there’s nothing to match the intellectual war between Cnaiur and Kellhus in the first book. It’s a shape of story that consumes, rather than elevate. And I think this is precisely the point. Those last few pages.

The conclusion itself is perfect, Achamian was MY voice. Rarely I felt so much identity with what was being expressed. That last chapter talked directly to me. Like the “voice”, now addressing Achamian. “TELL ME, ACHAMIAN.” I do think that the world described in these books is the same world we live in. And I’ve reached on my own the same conclusion: that the only way to be in this world, is to refuse to participate. But Achamian is so well written than he’s not just the voice of clarity and a man transformed. He’s still deeply wounded, and he could only end up lashing out at Esmenet. Yet another time. Calling her a whore, lashing at her with the violence of his words to hurt her.

Achamian comes out of the scene as a WIZARD. Bakker even gives him a staff, one step from transforming into Gandalf. And yet Achamian, right here, is a far shot from the wiser calm wizard. He’s still driven by anger. Maybe in this, he is connected with Cnaiur and Kellhus: madness. He finally hears the No-God. The sightless god-head that finally turns to him. Not Seswatha. The whisper from Otside breaks the charm.

The excerpt that precedes this small last chapter has:

“there are many things of which I am absolutely certain, things that feed the hate which drives this very quill.”

I think this last scene, capping the whole trilogy, is perfect in the imperfection of Achamian. In that illegitimate hate against Esmenet, even if in the shadow of the hate for Kellhus. Achamian, still a fucking human being (very much fucking, considering the only thing he could get from Esmenet was fucking one last time).

But.

Reading the last 100 pages has been infuriating, more than it’s been anything else.

I felt frustration when precisely 100 pages from the end, Achamian pulled out his map. How many times this scene was repeated through all three books? Every time it felt like we inched so very close to a moment of revelation. Only for it to slip away, once again. This final time it’s as if there’s crackling electricity in the air, as if the names on the map would start moving on their own, and mold together to form a final design…

The sorcerer rocked back and forth in the candlelight, to and fro, muttering, muttering …
“Back-back … m-must start at beginning …”

He quickly scratched a welter of new lines, all the connections he had ignored since his abduction by the Scarlet Spires. Then, in a hand too steady to be his own—for he was mad, he knew that now—he wrote

he pondered the identity of things, the way words did not discriminate between repetitions. They were immortal, and yet they cared.

He stared at the completed map, insensible to the passage of time.

He had become a ghost that stared and stared, not really pondering but watching, as though the secret lay hidden in the ink’s immobility …
Men. Schools. Cities. Nations.
Prophets. Lovers.

And?

There was no pattern to these breathing things. There was no encompassing thought to give them meaning. Just men and their warring delusions … The world was a corpse.
Xinemus’s lesson.

Nothing. Three books and it all comes to nothing. Delusions. Xinemus hovers like a punishment over the need for meaning.

Even in the light of mysteries solved in the following 100 pages, that map stays pretty much pointless. The revelations about mysteries lingering from the first book, like the figure of Maithanet, lead to dead ends. Solutions that do not lead anywhere meaningful. Mysteries that didn’t truly deserve being withheld for so long.

At the end of this scene I started to feel some cynicism about where the book would ultimately lead. I felt there wasn’t enough “space” left to deliver what I expected and demanded.

75 pages from the end, I decided it was it. In some other review a while ago I read the last 100 pages of the book were like a convoluted discussion of metaphysics. I could only hope it was the truth, because the problem is that there isn’t ENOUGH. The worldly scenes about the battle in Shimeh alternate with the “confrontation” between Kellhus and Moënghus. I didn’t resent this constant interruption and division in small pieces. Everything was fitting. But… there wasn’t enough space left.

I was driven by a hunger for SOMETHING. And despite these pages were tossing little bits of information, it was becoming clear that is was all a giant detour. That there wasn’t that payoff that I was waiting for, and that was, for me, NECESSARY.

So, somewhere around page 75, I closed the book. Because I knew.

I built my own idea, that now I’m laboring to retrieve once again. But it was too complex to simply rebuild here. That’s why I actually hate writing. Because it feels like 10x the effort. I spend effort in the thinking, but then I have to backtrack it all, if I want to write it on the page. A week later, it’s simply an impossible task and even the best attempt pales.

In any case, the central concept was that I saw the trilogy as a sort of domino. Now that I closed the book, that idea still seems to me valid. There isn’t any real point to drive to. There isn’t a final destination, same as Shimeh itself was a sham. It was CLEARLY a sham of course. But the same for the reader. The events that unfold through the series, unfold from the first book. Like water cascading down, taking shape by circumstances, by what it finds on its path. Enacting its own theme, Darkness precedes, the rest follows. If the first book sets the premises, then the evens in book 2 are, as being retold in blindness by both Moënghus and Kellhus: axiomatic. The themes were set, what followed was simply observation. The following books weren’t unnecessary, though. Because even in repetition, it’s the eloquence that has immense power. This last section could be seen as an info-dump, a long recap as Moënghus and Kellhus retell each other movements through inference. But again, it’s power in eloquence. In the power of words that almost become chants.

“You gave them certainty, though all the world is mystery. You gave them flattery, though all the world is indifference. You gave them purpose, though all the world is anarchy.
“You taught them ignorance.

While I was already surrendering hopes of getting the answers I needed, my problem became the answers that came.

Because this, here, is something that sounded hollow. That did not feel coherent, contrasting sharply with the clarity that preceded. There’s so much to unpack in this last book. I wish again I could paste here all my complex thoughts as I was reading. But at least I can get to the point.

There are some things that are suddenly weird. At one point, walking down a corridor, lead by Moënghus in the dark, Kellhus “inadvertently kicks” a skull. This doesn’t return later. Why is this happening? My only interpretation is that it works as foreshadowing. Kellhus was mentioning a conclusion to the Scarlet Spires story. They would all die. But… why? Since when Bakker writes these kind of “scenic” passages? Why this sudden artistic license, when everything is so sharply focused, being driven. There is no real ornaments, outside of the use of language. Instead these last 100 pages seem to be descending into a manipulation. Of things happening for their exhibition. As if the world wasn’t anymore a corpse, but a showman. As if the world wasn’t anymore indifferent to the vagaries of men, but was goading.

This built a disconnect, between me and these pages, that never happened before. Because my surprise was that it wasn’t simply a false perception, but it SEEPED into the story. It became its own theme. Both Moënghus and Kellhus started to sound FALSE. False to each other, meaningfully, but also to the world. They started to act wrongly. To speak wrongly.

How could Kellhus not anticipate the scenes between Esmenet and Achamian. It should have been a child’s play, compared to what he engaged before. How could you shape whole populations, but not understand the two of them.

There is a moment where Kellhus returns himself. He agrees with his father. The world is closed, that’s why he could do the things he had done. Maybe his further doubt is fine. He decides that what happens is beyond mere consequence. My own problem is that while all this comes better in focus, it just isn’t working well. The more things move toward the metaphysical, the more I feel like disagreeing.

I embrace the fact that the world is closed. Here Bakker uses language that is very familiar to me. When Kellhus first is introduced to the concept of magic, he assumes it’s a trick. Another occluded experience that is waiting to be fully exposed. His doubt holds on, because the beginning of his own mission starts with visions, sent my Moënghus. This is already part of the mystery. Not the reason WHY Moënghus summoned him. But HOW. How could Moënghus send visions? What’s the magic of this world truly based on? What’s the gimmick? Is it here to say what?

There are concepts that return often, and that are quite clear. If the world is closed, deterministic, there’s no free will. I feel it’s perfectly fitting that Moënghus seems to blend and merge with the world as he speaks. The voice from nowhere. Impersonal. Godlike. The moment the world is revealed for what it is (closed) then points of view disappear. The Shortest Path is, again, axiomatic. Given the full context and all variables, there’s only one path, the shortest path, connecting A to B (or equally short, but lets not bog down this point). If there’s one optimal, absolute path, then what space is left for personal choice? That’s why I find funny that with Moënghus and Kellhus inferring each other… they become predictable. Because they obviously lose their free will. They also become slaves to their circumstances, not masters. Whether or not they SHAPE circumstances, they shape them in that one precise path that is suitable. That one precise path that no one chose. It was simply there to be taken. Because by seeing everything, they betray their own boundary. They get the world, but they lose themselves.

And yet, what’s there to shatter this system? That the world is not closed.

Here Moënghus simply rambles on. I do not follow.

“The Dûnyain,” Moënghus continued, “think the world closed, that the mundane is all there is, and in this they are most certainly wrong. This world is open, and our souls stand astride its bounds. But what lies Outside, Kellhus, is no more than a fractured and distorted reflection of what lies within. I have searched, for nearly the length of your entire life, and I have found nothing that contradicts the Principle.

Wh-what?!

What the fuck happened to being Dûnyain? How can you say “nothing contradicts the Principle” when by stating that the world is MOST CERTAINLY OPEN, you already, immediately contradicted the very premises that creates the condition for that principle to exist?

What happened to the SCIENCE of knowledge?

You’ve just accused Kellhus of claiming certainty without proof, calling him mad. And now you make mad claims without a foundation. How can you accept those conclusion when they DO NOT FOLLOW?! What happened to what came before?

Science is an amalgam of theories SHAPED so they can be TESTED. They are built specifically TO MAKE THEM VULNERABLE. To collapse possibilities. Because to test truth you shape a thesis to shatter against it. This is what a proof is. It’s a test precisely thought for the specifics that can break the thesis.

Focus moves from ontology, the “what”, the truth of things. To Epistemology, how human beings decide what is true. Not WHAT is true, but HOW we decide. Because, “it is axiomatic”. If we can agree on “how”, the process we look for truth, then WHAT is true is not important. Because we will always agree, no matter what. Once we agree on the process, the conclusion will always be the same. Predictable same as a Dûnyain inference.

We often confuse things on this level. Some believe that science is a way to knowledge. Truth is, there’s nothing else. As human beings, we don’t get to choose. The truth about science, and knowledge, is that there isn’t an alternate path. Not because science is valid, but simply because a contender, in the history of humanity, NEVER SHOWED UP. You can doubt science, of course. You can map its limits. But NOTHING changes the fact that there is nothing else. That there is no alternative.

There is nothing, along the whole history of humanity, that has defied, even for a tiny, minuscule moment in time and space, the rule of physics as we know them. I’m not saying, of course, that everything is explained. The opposite: I’m saying there isn’t one, even minuscule thing that PROVES otherwise. That explicitly contradicts. While we have proofs of science and knowledge working, every single moment of our life, we have not a single instance of the opposite. The opponent never showed up. Not once in recalled history.

Once we know what science is, understanding metaphysics is not trickier, even if most people are biased against it. The point is, there is no difference between science and metaphysics, in the sense that they follow the exact same rules when it comes to epistemology. So when it comes to the ROOTS that make the process for knowledge valid, and those conclusions possible. The dividing like is not conceptual, it’s not abstract. It’s merely pragmatic: science is a process to test thesis. It’s the breaking point. But all that comes before and after, the production of a thesis, the analysis of its outcome, are what is preserved when it comes to metaphysics. Things still have to make sense, and analysis can sometime reveal contradictions. Weaknesses in the thesis.

If the line of distinction is that science can test, then what defines metaphysics is the complete surrender of even the possibility of certainty. It doesn’t mean there’s nothing, but it means that so much more of it than even in science, skepticism will reign. Not only that you don’t know, but you won’t likely know, ever.

Which is kind of funny, because the very essence of Dûnyain, of THE LOGOS, is not using tools of science. Have you ever seen a Dûnyain TEST something? Nope. The Probability Trance maps the worlds ahead, shaping them after variables change. It’s purely mental. Meaning that: IT’S PURELY METAPHYSICAL.

And metaphysics, exactly the same in our world, only works when THERE ARE NO GAPS. Only when the world is closed.

I’m upset here not just at the claim that the world is OPEN. Kellhus could have said that, because the line of distinction, between Moënghus’s Logos and Kellhus’ Thousandfold Thought, is the OUTSIDE. The PRESUMPTION that the world is open. This is the pivotal point. And yet, it’s instead Moënghus claiming, with almost certainty, that the world… is open. And it’s again himself saying… IT DOESN’T MATTER. Because the Logos is untouched. There are all sort of contradictions here. Why doesn’t it matter?! And more importantly, if the LOGOS is your practice, how could you come to the conclusion the world’s open? It’s a huge gaping hole in the Logos itself. In the PROCESS of establishing what’s true. But most irritatingly, it’s not Kellhus’ error here, which would be justified, but Moënghus. They flip sides without even realizing it.

While reading these pages I was shaking my head, because… how could you title a book THE THOUSANDFOLD THOUGHT, and not give an explanation to what it is. We’ve come to the end of a trilogy, and even the title is mockery. So I started to feel like I wasn’t going to get answers, but even more irritating was the idea that answers were actually given in a way that made them incoherent.

What is the point of distinction between everything we’ve known up to this point about the Logos. The Shortest Path and Probability Trance are already a synonyms, but at least one indicates a purpose. We know the Probability Trance, that is just a process to employ the Logos. So what is the Thousandfold Thought, more? What makes it more? What sets it apart from what they both (Moënghus, Kellhus) were already doing? Why isn’t there an explanation about this? “Kellhus had seen it many times, wandering the labyrinth of possibilities that was the Thousandfold Thought”, how’s this any different from the Probability Trance? Kellhus begins in the first book wandering through possible futures, then toward the end of book 2… grasps the Thousandfold Thought, which is the exact same thing, but under a different name.

Again, everything that is happening in this scene is a retelling, with incredible eloquence, of what happened. Plus the suggestion of what comes after: Kellhus not only has retraced his father’s footsteps, but moved beyond. He feels that his grasp of the Logos and circumstances have made his father obsolete. But if this is the point, then the one who could claim of being more, is Kellhus. The Thousandfold Thought is his. The line of distinction would be: the breach of metaphysics. The Outside that bleeds in. His own powers with gnostic magic. The breaking of the Logos, seen by Moënghus as “madness”. The voices, the miracles. What just couldn’t be grasped through the metaphysics of the Logos, because… the world’s open.

I just can’t make sense of any of this. Kellhus “acquires” the Thousandfold Thought in book 2. Before the voices, before the circumfixion. So before the specific events that would make him “mad”. Both Kellhus and Moënghus claim of wielding the Thousandfold Thought, even if again there’s nothing indicating it being anything but a repetition of the Shortest Path and Probability Trance.

Because of his conditioning, Kellhus doesn’t deny the claim about his madness. He actually honestly considers it. He understands that this further segment he’s added to his father’s Thousandfold Thought does not follow. He acknowledges his father’s right. But yet he’s driven by certainty. And he acts (“beliefs beget action”). Even if this contradicts everything, creating a mirror with Achamian final section, where he says something quite similar and being driven by anger and certainty.

He was right. Prophecy could not be. If the ends of things governed their beginnings, if what came after determined what came before, then how could he have mastered the souls of so many? And how could the Thousandfold Thought come to rule the Three Seas? The Principle of Before and After simply had to be true, if its presumption could so empower …
His father had to be right.
So what was this certainty, this immovable conviction, that he was wrong?

My problem with these last 100 pages is that there wasn’t enough metaphysics, feeling solid. The Thousandfold Thought is either a sham, or repetition of the same concepts already introduced in book 1. It all converges to the end, but it isn’t MORE. It doesn’t reveal more. Maithanet, Moënghus and Kellhus don’t become more. Maithanet is played down and dismissed. Moënghus is utterly powerless in the realization he’s been superseded. Kellhus is going through a power trip that isn’t making him more, it’s making him the contradiction of everything he was, without a consistent and meaningful cause. The actual exception to the Logos.

I isolate these three aspects: Achamian’s map, “WHAT DO YOU SEE?”, and the Thousandfold Thought. Bakker built these as if they are rhythmical beats that repeat throughout all the three books. As if they were a march, leading toward some final ascension and revelation. I needed all three to deliver something, to be something more. Every time one of these scenes repeated, it felt like revelation was imminent. That something was about to be said would put things at least in a different light. And yet it slipped away, every single time. It felt as if something was added, but it was illusory. Then, 25 pages from the end,

“Tell me, Father … what is the No-God?”

And we get nothing. Tell me, R. Scott Bakker, why do you keep goading, and surrender nothing. We are at the end, there are no pages left.

“The skin-spies—what have they told you? What is the No-God?”
Though walled in by the flesh of his face, Moënghus seemed to scrutinize him. “They do not know. But then, none in this world know what they worship.”

Then WHY?

It all comes to this central pillar, like a maelstrom that is the pivot of the whole story. And it’s simply missing. There is no motive. None of this, about the ultimate purpose of the Consult and the Inchoroi, is revealed here. There is, slightly past the middle point of a book, a scene where Kellhus face a possessed Esmenet. This scene already revealed more, but again failing to give a solid motive that would justify the rest. It even mirrors the same structure “Tell me, what are the Dûnyain?” and “So what are you, then?” Kellhus asked. “What are the Inchoroi?”

“A race of lovers.” Okay, doesn’t mean anything. “And for this you are damned.” This means even LESS.

“We were born for damnation’s sake.” How’s this a valid MOTIVE. This is a pure evasion. Missing entirely the point.

“Our very nature is transgression.” Transgression of WHAT? If you are part of the natural order, then what are you transgressing if not an arbitrary rule? What is the point of this dividing line? How there can even be a morality, in a system where the concept of sin holds no ground. Who’s even making the rules? The gods? Why aren’t they then RESPONSIBLE for the contradictions they BREED?

Who’s the judging eye? What the hell is “damnation” in a world like this? Why at the very end Kellhus accuses Moënghus, when he has already done the same or worse?

“The crimes you’ve committed, Father … the sins … When you learn of the damnation that awaits you, when you come to believe, you will be no different from the Inchoroi.

“For this I am to heave and scream in lakes of fire?” They are scared of literal hell?! How, when this world already is hell?

“There is no absolution for your kind.” Oh, the merciful god. Where again is the line of distinction? That men are slightly less perverted, slightly more coward?

“To save my soul, hmmm? So long as there are Men, there are crimes. So long as there are crimes, I am damned.” Somehow, the presence of men produces crimes. Not as acts of men, but as the realization of morals. Nothing about this makes any sense. Men create the gods, then placed them on the Outside. Now the Inchoroi resent men, because they have pinned alien metaphysics to their own landscape. What an annoyance. Curious that they were flying through the cosmos in their golden spaceship and happened to crash specifically on that bit of dry land where they happen to be damned.

The scene at the end doesn’t add anything else, beside Kellhus’ realization that a Thousandfold Thought lead by Moënghus would only end with him joining the Consult. And once again, that gaping hole within the maelstrom: why?

The whole thing misses a motive. We see these projected futures, but absolutely nothing about the inferences that lead them, that make them axiomatic. The duel of intellect between Cnaiur and Kellhus, in the first book, was so enthralling because Kellhus was a man. His powers were simply a somewhat plausible extension. They weren’t magical or absurd. But throughout this third book the points of view have been closely guarded, to carefully avoid explanation. To evade. This goads and builds mystery, but then is utterly disappointing when nothing follows.

What about the recurring flashback in this third book. Seswatha and Nau-Cayûti, sifting through the labyrinth of the golden spaceship, looking for a … laser rifle. Following through the whole book. And leading up to what? The revelation, already known from the beginning, that Seswatha tricked the boy. Again, there is nothing MORE. These scenes seem to be just there. They give some insight, but it’s not as meaningful as these scenes FEEL. It always seems as if there’s something missing. They don’t even find the laser rifle at the end. In the final scene they only end up discovering that the Inchoroi have been naughty. And Nau-Cayûti blaming Seswatha for his own stupidity (again, if you really cared, then ask why and how, not what. It seems that Nau-Cayûti simply nursed that lie rather than confront it).

When I first read the “WHAT DO YOU SEE?” scene, in the first book, I was confused. This is being described as the ultimate evil, Sauron turned into a floating iron closet. But… I don’t know. Some of it feels like a parody. And the words themselves. The vagueness. The bold font. They have power instead. The words themselves are used meaningfully through all three books. But within these scenes the No-God seems to be powerless rather than a force of evil.

The little pieces that are added, repetition after repetition, amount to: “I CANNOT SEE SHIT!”, paraphrasing. “Help me! I cannot see!”, the No-God seems to say.

It turns into a voice of desperation. Not force of will. But being all so vague, I don’t really know. There are a couple of places through the books where this idea is directly contradicted. But who knows what comes from the No-God and what is instead simply projected on it. This floating carapace seems built like a trap of misdirection. And yeah… What about the final scene. Once again, with Achamian. A different scene. What if Seswatha’s memories are a lie? Was that the purpose of Nau-Cayûti’s story? The proof that Seswatha would bend the truth and manipulate, if necessary?

“What am I?” the dark and regal face said, frowning. His oiled braids thrashed like snakes about his shoulders. The last of the light glimmered across the lions wrought into his bronze armor.

I already said that Bakker’s writing for these last 100 pages has been oddly evocative. Incongruous because of that. Where the world bends to the vagaries of men. Here’s a similar case, in my own interpretation.

“His oiled braids thrashed like snakes about his shoulders”, I see this part as a reference to the Cishaurim’s snakes, wrapped around the necks. “The last of the light glimmered.” For me the purpose of these words is to evoke blindness. The same blindness of the Cishaurim.

“The painted eyes fixed him, honest and intent.” The No-God, honest and intent.

“As though demanding a boon.” As if the god is waiting… for approval?

I MUST KNOW WHAT YOU SEE.

But I don’t see anything. It’s as if this No-God is asking to be MADE. To be realized. He seems the very opposite of an act of will. He seems lost, blind, waiting for someone to direct him. Tell him where he is and what’s happening. He’s like trapped within the carapace, asking if there’s someone, something outside that can help. Is there even a world? He becomes a voice with no place. A voice with no self. But then, a voice that suffers for sins not committed. “Closeted”, guarded, used.

It is surprising that no one ever answers.

At the end of this specific scene the voice calls explicitly for Achamian. I think the intent shifts here and the purpose is to create a link between Cnaiur and Achamian, and then to Kellhus: madness. All three can hear the No-God. And all three step outside of circumstances because this madness supposedly makes them breach to the Outside. Again, I liked better in the first book, where Cnaiur’s madness wasn’t otherworldly. It simply allowed him to surprise Kellhus, merely because Kellhus could only use the Logos with the information he had. The whole point for keeping alive and using Caiur was that he needed him and his knowledge. Information had to be acquired, and madness was simply a certain temporary darkness. Darkness that stayed this side of the world. And yet, madness at the conclusion of the trilogy becomes a super power that bridges worlds. That whispers like bicameral mentality. That magically connects with that “certain” Outside. It doesn’t feel earned to me. It is not meaningful. It is not insightful. It’s just magical hand waving, and it’s all about this central point that is metaphysically hollow. Basically a McGuffin.

Kellhus walking underground through non-men corridors, described in detail. Always goading onward. I don’t resent reading this, but why? Walking to get to his father, then following his father. Leading to nothing. What’s about that place? What’s about all the water? It builds and builds. Could have just found his father napping under a tree, a passing mention about the skin-spies.

I’d have as many other things still to say, but I’ve had enough here.

I will repeat that all this frustration I voiced doesn’t make the read through these three books less extraordinary. I’ve expressed extensively what the books aren’t, but what the books are still remains. The greater part. It defies me. This is the only thing I’ve ever read, even compared to Tolkien, Erikson or Martin, that I do not think possible. I do not understand how it came to be. If you ask me what would it take to build a thing like this from scratch? My answer: too much.

If I look back at the journey of the men of the Tusk, from the very beginning, I can only think: it’s too much.

Ironically, because what else could the Inchoroi hope for, if not this mad butchery of human life. I imagine them, flapping about and crying “OH YES! THEY ARE DOING IT THEMSELVES!”

About the things missing from the books. Those that I expected but weren’t delivered. I know there are three (four) more books, but this is not the case. I feel that if something was going to be added, and merely moved to the second trilogy, then Bakker would have still written this third book differently. I’m quite sure, knowing the way Bakker writes, that the third trilogy won’t bring more to the table, in the sense I intend. I’m not delusional about what to expect. If those kind of answers were going to be delivered in the way I expected them, then they would have come already. I’m sure of this, but we’ll see.

In any case, this doesn’t make books 2 and 3 superfluous. The journey has to be taken. What is there on the page, is not diminished in any way. I just have my lusts for knowledge…

And I was forgetting one important point. That excerpt that introduces chapter 17, just eight pages from the end, encapsulates with eerie precision my own personal stance toward life and the truth of the world.

Ajencis, in the end, argued that ignorance was the only absolute.
According to Parcis, he would tell his students that he knew only
that he knew more than when he was an infant. This comparative
assertion was the only nail, he would say, to which one could tie
the carpenter-string of knowledge. This has come down to us as the
famed “Ajencian Nail,” and it is the only thing that prevented the
Great Kyranean from falling into the tail-chasing scepticism of
Nirsolfa, or the embarrassing dogmatism of well-nigh every philosopher
and theologian who ever dared scratch ink across parchment.

But it doesn’t stop there. Of course Bakker contradicts it. So when I was reading it I stopped, and decided to continue reading those last 8 pages, to then return to the last part of the excerpt after the end. As if Bakker threw me a final challenge and I’d answer it. Return to see if he would open a crack in the only thing that drives me.

I disagree.

But even this metaphor, “nail,” is faulty, a result of what happens
when we confuse our notation with what is noted. Like the numeral
“zero” used by the Nilnameshi mathematicians to work such
wonders, ignorance is the occluded frame of all discourse, the unseen
circumference of our every contention. Men are forever looking for
the one point, the singular fulcrum they can use to dislodge all
competing claims. Ignorance does not give us this. What it provides,
rather, is the possibility of comparison, the assurance that not all
claims are equal. And this, Ajencis would argue, is all that we need.

This is not an argument, this is a straw man. Then the following becomes more conciliatory…

For so long as we admit our ignorance, we can hope to improve our
claims, and so long as we can improve our claims, we can aspire to
the Truth, even if only in rank approximation.

But I disagree. When it comes to the concept of truth, it’s all about time. Life is fleeting. We are no Dûnyain because, among other things, we have not enough time to think. You can hope to improve your knowledge as long you justify your life by taking your future for granted. But this is another delusion. It’s just moving that nail of morality ever onward. No one is ever judged, because there’s always hope. Hope to understand more and become better.

Judgement about truth, the “Ajencian Nail”, is about the now. What you know, now. What you decide, now. It doesn’t matter what you will know. It doesn’t matter if life will give you another chance, same as it doesn’t matter if you don’t have one. That abstract nail is simply experience. And experience is absolute in the sense that it cannot be denied, it cannot be contradicted. You know it now, and it will be true for the eternity. No one can rob you of your immediate present. People misunderstand things like hallucinations, because they seem proof that perception, too, is deceiving. But this is a false interpretation. No one denies the appearance of hallucination. Only its interpretation can be “false”. You can move and reframe, you can complete by adding more, but you can’t change what is contained.

Our three-dimensional world seems to overwrite our perception every instant. A sequence of frames one after the other like a movie. But there isn’t any contradiction in this world. What appears as overlapping, what appears crossing impossible boundaries, A transforming into B, becoming something other than itself… is merely adjacent. Perception, as information, is forever adjacent. With gaps, of course, because it’s all severely limited, by information collected and ability, possibility for the brain to process. But it’s never contradicting. And yet forever incomplete.

The world is closed. To our experience and memory, it’s never been open. The world is closed. And this piece of the world you hold in your hands, is YOURS. For eternity.

…And the Apocalypse is nearing. But thankfully then, I don’t have years or months, or even days to wait before the next book. Onward I proceed.

(what follows here is a collection of quotes, some already used above, that for some reason I decided to rearrange in what’s essentially an inverse order)

Ajencis, in the end, argued that ignorance was the only absolute. According to Parcis, he would tell his students that he knew only that he knew more than when he was an infant. This comparative assertion was the only nail, he would say, to which one could tie the carpenter-string of knowledge. This has come down to us as the famed “Ajencian Nail,” and it is the only thing that prevented the Great Kyranean from falling into the tail-chasing scepticism of Nirsolfa, or the embarrassing dogmatism of well-nigh every philosopher and theologian who ever dared scratch ink across parchment.

“Set aside your conviction,” Moënghus said, “for the feeling of certainty is no more a marker of truth than the feeling of will is a marker of freedom. Deceived men always think themselves certain, just as they always think themselves free. This is simply what it means to be deceived.”

“Men cannot see this because of their native incapacities. They attend only to what confirms their fears and their desires, and what contradicts they either dismiss or overlook. They are bent upon affirmation. The priests crow over this or that incident, while they pass over all others in silence. I have watched, my son, for years I have counted, and the world shows no favour. It is perfectly indifferent to the tantrums of men.

“And the Truth?” Kellhus asked. “What of that?”
“There is no Truth for the worldborn. They feed and they couple, cozening their hearts with false flatteries, easing their intellects with pathetic simplifications. The Logos, for them, is a tool of their lust, nothing more … They excuse themselves and heap blame upon others. They glorify their people over other peoples, their nation over other nations. They focus their fears on the innocent. And when they hear words such as these, they recognize them—but as defects belonging to others. They are children who have learned to disguise their tantrums from their wives and their fellows, and from themselves most of all …

Lies that have conquered and reproduced over the centuries. Delusional world views that have divided the world between them. They are twin viramsata that even now war through shouts and limbs of men. Two great thoughtless beasts that take the souls of Men as their ground.”

“The path was narrow, to be certain, but it was very clear. You cultivated their awe and their inklings, telling them things no man could know. You appealed to the spark of Logos within them. You mapped the logic of their commitments, showed them the implications of the tenets they already held. You showed them beliefs fixed by truth rather than function. You made their fears and weaknesses plain—you showed them who they were—even as you exploited those weaknesses to your advantage.

“You gave them certainty, though all the world is mystery. You gave them flattery, though all the world is indifference. You gave them purpose, though all the world is anarchy.
“You taught them ignorance.

“And throughout, you insisted that you were only a man like any other. You even feigned anger when others dared voice their suspicions. You did not impose, and you never presumed. You conditioned. You gave one man a wheel, another an axle, another a harness or a box, knowing that sooner or later they themselves would put the pieces together—that the revelation would be theirs. You bound them with inferences, knowing that someday they would make you their conclusion.”

“There were no codes. There was no honour. The world between men was as trackless as the Steppe – as the desert! There were no men… Only beasts, clawing, craving, mewling, braying. Gnawing at the world with their hungers. All these thousands, Men of the Tusk, killed and died in the name of delusions. Save hunger, nothing commanded the world.”

“All things both sacred and vile speak to the hearts of Men, and they are bewildered. Holding out their hands to darkness, THEY NAME IT LIGHT.”

Where a god cannot go

Continuing on my plan to finally read all Bakker’s series to its very end, without anything else in between (though I’m reading a bit of Michelle West). A race between me getting to the end point, or the actual Apocalypse coming first. You can feel it’s close, that pleasant, warm breath on your neck.

Currently some 120 pages into book 3, where page 140 is the farthest point I ever reached before.

Chapter six starts in a rather meandering way, especially coming after the previous that continued in a kind of anticlimactic way. Characters feel a bit distant after lengthy sessions that read like short time-skips and fly-bys. The first book was much stronger on this aspect, since it kept a closer perspective. The distance instead maintains a strong focus on purpose and meaning, but also makes the pages denser and more fatiguing to read.

And yet all at the sudden the distance vanishes and everything comes together to a sharp apex where all levels are fused into one: Bakker gives a rational explanation why GOD CANNOT LOVE. A mathematical proof.

At the first level it’s basically the classic “theodicy”. How can god tolerate evil in the world? Why is there pain and hate if god is the master of its own world? Why is it allowed? It’s the old theme about distinctions. Bakker uses the metaphor of a candle. The candle can only have its meaning if it can shine through the darkness. Without the distinction between light from darkness, the light, the flame and the candle do not exist. And that’s fine, not especially revelatory. It’s just an abstraction.

But here Bakker is able to WEAPONIZE the rhetoric of love. He builds an equivalence between LOVE and KNOWLEDGE. I love you (said to a woman) because only I know you, deeply. I know all the good things as well as the bad about you. The virtues and the vices. I know the way you truly are, and because of that I love you, in a way no one else can. Because I alone know you that way. (and because we know each other in that unique, exceptional way)

It’s not the sudden charm of a lover, the projection of an ideal of beauty, the seduction of a surface. It’s instead the love acquired after many years spent together, the good and the bad, and that profundity of knowledge that is the result. Love past the curtains of beauty, wishes and desires.

The revelation comes unexpected to Achamian, in the exact same moment it comes to the reader. Because it is simply true. Not at a level of abstraction, but immediate. It comes close to the level of the story and characters, and is valid as a universal concept.

A god knows everything and everyone. He knows you, both the things you know about yourself, as well what you hide from yourself (the two faces of the coin, another strong point within book 2). He sees right THROUGH you. As if you were completely transparent, with no sense of shame, of things you expect to hide. That’s why men cower in front of the gods. Because the gods know, MORE. Nothing can be fashioned, nothing is hidden. And yet the god knows everything and everyone EQUALLY. He knows you the same way he knows everyone else. He knows the insides of your body the same as he knows the insides of your soul. He knows your past, what you have done, and the future, what you will do. And he knows better than you, why you have done the things you’ve done. The god knows you the same as he knows everyone else, the same as he knows a chair, a stone, the law of physics that move your body and your soul. He is the substance you swim through and that makes you. Therefore everything is simply equal, there’s no distinction. The god doesn’t love you MORE than another, because you are the same as a rock. There’s nothing more to you. There’s nothing more to anything else. Just a THING. An impersonal eye that looks at you and says nothing. A god that cannot feel. WHAT DO YOU SEE. I MUST KNOW WHAT YOU SEE. A god that cannot perceive any answer.

This is again abstract, but it is concrete within the story. A couple of pages earlier comes another revelation. Kellhus is the personification of the god, but he doesn’t have the powers of a god because he cannot HEAL. And yet it is true that he knows people, that he sees through them as if they are transparent. Esmenet says as much. She felt eager for the first time when she felt being truly known, when Kellhus understood her whole story, the deeper secrets Achamian never came close to. And at the same time she cowered in shame, even if being known by Kellhus was also to be absolved.

When Achamian says to Esmenet that Kellhus knows EVERYONE, he isn’t even telling her, but to himself. Because it comes as a revelation. Kellhus cannot know you (Esmenet) especially, because he knows everyone just the same. He sees through everyone. Validating and reinforcing by a scene back in book 2, from Kellhus point of view we know that he sees Esmenet just the same as he saw Serwe: as another tool to wield. Another piece of the world he walks through. And he sacrificed Serwe, even DESECRATED HER CORPSE, just because it could be an expedient to seize his power.

To be KNOWN by Kellhus is not to be made MORE. But LESS. To become just another thing. A carpet. A door. A knife. Knowledge DEBASES.

It’s kind of ironic that in this moment of absolute power Kellhus loses something. Achamain can indulge in a moment of nothingness he achieved: the light of a god (kellhus) creates the shadow that lets the love between Achamian and Esmenet persist. Achamian has literally created a space where the god cannot go.