Category Archives: The Second Apocalypse


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.

Ajencis the optimist

Reason, Ajencis writes, is the capacity to overcome unprecedented obstacles in the gratification of desire. What distinguishes man from beasts is man’s capacity to overcome infinite obstacles through reason.

But Ajencis has confused the accidental for the essential. Prior to the capacity to overcome infinite obstacles is the capacity to confront them. What defines man is not that he reasons, but that he prays.

—EKYANNUS I,44 EPISTLES

Mandate Schoolmen

From Chapter 2:

“Ah, yes. I’d forgotten that you numbered yourself among the skeptics. What is it you say? That we pursue ghosts.” He held the word in his mouth, as though it were a morsel of questionable food. “I guess, then, you would say that a possibility, that we’re witnessing the first signs of the No-God’s return, is outweighed by an actuality, the life of a defector — that rolling the dice of apocalypse is worth the pulse of a fool.”

This is a conversation between three individuals that has a lot of subtlety and actual depth.

For the reader the story has a starting point. It’s the beginning of a book, of course it means there’s a meaningful segment of a story to be told. But for these characters this is just one moment. They are all waiting for something to happen, but they don’t know when. They aren’t even sure it will happen. Even if they have the dreams that are an effective tool that prevents memory to fade, they are still caught in the inertia of daily life (as one of the following excerpts will also confirm).

It’s all kind of suspended in uncertainty, and even skepticism. They have a burden, something more that lets them see the world, and yet they are caught within, transported away same as everyone else…

Nautzera studied his face. “Skeptics,” he snorted. “You all make the same error. You confuse us with the other Schools. But do we vie for power? Do we scurry around palaces, placing Wards and sniffing sorceries like dogs? Do we whine into the ears of Emperors or Kings? In the absence of the Consult, you confuse our actions with those who act for no purpose save that of power and its childish gratifications. You confuse us with the whores.”

Could it be? No. He’d thought it through many times. Unlike the others, those like Nautzera, he could distinguish his age from the one he dreamt night after night. He could see the difference. The Mandate was not merely poised between epochs—it was poised between dreams and waking life. When the skeptics, those who thought the Consult had abandoned the Three Seas, looked at the Mandate, they saw not a School compromised by worldly ambition but the opposite: a School not in this world at all. The “mandate,” which was the mandate of history after all, was not to wage a dead war, or to sanctify a long-dead sorcerer driven mad by that war’s horrors, but to learn — to live from the past, not in it.

Nautzera here seems rhetorical, but he only introduces the powerful idea that is then reinforced in the following paragraph.

This isn’t pride, Achamian voices it just a moment later: The Mandate was a curse! Dispossessed of the God. Dispossessed even of the present. Only the clawing, choking fear that the future might resemble the past.

This is just pure description. There isn’t even choice. The idea of the curse is something received passively, and at best endured. Mandate Schoolmen are condemned to see the world as it is.

“A school not in this world.” Because their “curse” dislodged them permanently from the normalcy. They only get to decide what to do about it. They have a “mandate”, but they also don’t know everything. They live chasing a dream that they know to be true, but they don’t know when, or even if. There’s a deep uncertainty part of it all, enough for Achamian to be accused as a skeptic.

And yet Simas watched him so strangely, his eyes curious with their own indecision.

The reader knows, but they don’t. They know the importance of the moment, but they do not know this is the moment. This obviously echoes back.

These are the times I live in. All this happens now.

It seemed possible.

They know what happened in the past, and their mission is about the present. But they don’t know when it will happen. They are stuck in this perpetual state of preparedness, “chasing ghosts”. But being also themselves caught in the present, they are carried away just like everyone else.

The Schoolmen of the Mandate could never forget what had happened — the violence of Seswatha’s Dreams ensured that much. But if anything, the civilization of the Three Seas was insistent.

The more crowded the concerns of the present, the more difficult it became to see the ways in which the past portended the future.

Civilization is insistent. They are out of this world, yet trapped in it. No matter how strong the dreams are and their renewal, they also get washed away every time. There is this double layer of myth and reality, but where myth is stronger than reality.

Mandate Schoolmen have this double layer as part of their vision. Every moment they have to decide which one makes their own present reality. They cannot fully deny one of the two, and so they live as if suspended: “poised between dreams and waking life“.

The Darkness That Is Ahead

The last few days I’ve returned to some things.

Looks like I missed the last Esslemont book with the bad AI cover. It seems relatively well received. For some reason I have the first and third in the series, but not the second. Probably because I couldn’t find the hardcover at the time. Erikson should be busy with the second book of the “sequel” trilogy, but from bits of information I found he also started the final book in the prequel trilogy, and said it was growing big. But then I also read there’s a part about Kallor that might be split into its own book? I’ve been reading the beginning of Fall of Light over and over, I just re-read parts of it. For some reason I don’t want to read it to the end.

Janny Wurts is finishing her own giant project next year with the last book, to be released in May, I think. It’s nice to see ambitious projects that get realized. Tad Williams last book also being delayed to fall of 2024. The publishing industry is at its weirdest. Sanderson too has the fifth book in his big series to come out in fall 2024. That’s where I draw the line because even if he’s a machine he also slowed down, and it’s not so reasonable to plan a 10 book series where it takes 3 years and more for each book, while you also work on countless of other projects, including other book series… and then have a gap between book 5 and 6 to deal with other things. Thematically book 5 closes some kind of cycle, whatever happens past that point is not to be taken for granted…

Of course Martin is stuck in limbo. I’d be less concerned about when the book(s) come out, realistically, and more about the fact that I feel he’s completely lost control on the whole project. I expected that the end of the TV series, rather than give him encouragement, only sowed more doubts.

Bakker has been MIA.

So I read bit of books here and there, because I’ve been distracted by other things. I wanted to continue where I left with Bakker, somewhere within book 3, but I was going to restart from the beginning of the book. And then I thought, why not restart from the first one…

The first few lines resonate with everything beyond.

It is only after that we understand what has come before, then we understand nothing. Thus we shall define the soul as follows: that which precedes everything.

—AJENCIS, THE THIRD ANALYTIC OF MEN

There is a superficial, common way of understanding the first line. We truly understand events with the wisdom that comes with time, long after they happened. “We understand nothing” reads like an admonishment. But that’s the thing with Bakker, it’s never rhetorical. The argument here is literal. It follows one of those cycles: if it’s only after that we understand present time, then understanding is always escaping. Because we don’t understand the present in the moment we are understanding. See the difference? Superficially “we understand nothing” is rhetorical: because we understand SOMETHING. We understand what has come before. So it reads like an cynical exaggeration. But the actual meaning is like the Liar’s Paradox, we are fooled in the segment, but are actually bound in a loop. We don’t truly understand anything if the moment of understanding is itself escaping. There is no closure there. We are ever moving toward, or away from meaning. But never actually seizing it.

The second line mentions a “soul”. Itself a vague concept, but representing some sort of original mystery. It’s what we’re drawn to. The center of the attention. It is vague but important: we know the soul is the place where answers are found. It’s the place where present time and understanding are in sync. If we define the soul as that which precedes everything, then it’s meant as the ORIGIN. It’s the point either where the loop is started, or escaped. The Breaking of the Vessel, so to speak.

Already here there’s the whole concept of the “Darkness That Comes Before”. The idea of men creating gods, and then placing them before themselves. The gods create the world and men both. A pattern that returns many times through the book, in various forms.

“What came before?” There’s this 2017 video where Bakker says he was a kid writing philosophical thoughts on a typewriter, in red ink. And got himself spooked after writing that thought X is caused by though A, which itself is caused by thought B. And so on. Who is the original “mover” of these thoughts? I think he was spooked more about the fact of seeing it in red ink, and as if the typewriter took control of itself. Those thoughts aren’t spooky because of notions of free will, but because they become foreign. Who’s writing? Not me. Who’s this? Who else is here? It’s like a typical scene in a horror movie, where you see a typewriter start writing on its own, or writings appearing on the walls, written in blood. It’s almost schizophrenic: external, intrusive thoughts.

Then the actual Prologue starts:

One cannot raise walls against what has been forgotten.

This has a practical function, since it introduces what will be explained later. But here walls are meant as defense. If you forget about the threat exists, then how can you defend yourself from it?

But it’s also related to the wider theme, and so to the lines just above. Something not understood is just like something forgotten. Not perceived. That soul becomes then not just the mysterious place you’re drawn to, to find answer. But also the monster in the closet. A place of very basic fear. Of unknown that already seizes you. And how can you rise walls, how can you defend from that which you don’t understand? How can you protect your identity?

I didn’t know where I was. I guess I’ll start again from the beginning.

Quotes

The first is Erikson, the last Bakker. They aren’t together because I think they are really related, but I read them the same day.

“Traditions die. And those who hold fast to them, cursing and filled with hate as their precious ways of living are torn from their hands, they dwell in a world of dreams where nothing changes.”

“Tradition was not a thing to be worshipped. Tradition was the last bastion of fools. Did the fisherfolk see their final fate? Did they comprehend their doom?

And oh, how they all grew fat and lazy in the weeks that followed, their bellies soft and bulging. There are fish in the lake, the elders said. There have always been fish in the lake. There always will be fish in the lake.

The elders stopped telling their stories. They sat silent, their bellies hollowing out, the bones of their wizened faces growing sharp and jutting. They spat out useless teeth. They bled at their fingertips, and made foul stench over the shit-pits. They grew ever weaker, and then slept, rushing into the distant dreams of the old days, from which they never returned.

The layering of memories built tradition’s high walls, until the place made by those walls became a prison.”

“There were two pasts; he understood that now. There was the past that men remembered, and there was the past that determined, and rarely if ever were they the same. All men stood in thrall of the latter.”

Could you just stop the EAMD bullshit?

I have Fall of Light and will start very soon, I’m now back reading the final part of The Bonehunters, as well the last 300 pages of A Dance with Dragons. It makes for a nice and interesting contrast.

These last few days there has been at least a little noise about R. Scott Bakker. The new book is imminent (July) (actually only the first half of the first book, something that makes me very upset) but the first reviews are coming out as well as sample chapters that, in Bakker’s case, are always enough for plenty of discussion and speculations.

But my attention was caught by a specific aspect that I consider very interesting. What’s the “EAMD bullshit”? Here’s a quote:

Ever Are Men Deceived. It’s shorthand for the psychobabble that Bakker tends to get into in the middle of, like, random sentences. The crossed-out part above is an example. You have a woman running around desperately trying to find her young son in the middle of her enemy storming the gates and a full-blown riot. So…naturally she reflects on how prior knowledge influences actions and guides the course of events

This is the pertinent quote he gives (the italics are not Bakker’s):

Our knowledge commands us, though our conceit claims otherwise. It drives our decisions and so harnesses our deeds—as surely as any cane or lash. She knew well the grievous fate of little princes in times of revolt and overthrow. The fact that her husband’s Empire crashed down about her was but one more goad to find her son.

And here’s how he comments it:

Esmenet’s chapter would be amazing if he could just stop talking about the EAMD bullshit every other sentence. She’s panicking, she’s crying, and then she’d thinking that ya know, everyone is controlled by what came before and the history of their world and blah blah blah.

Seriously, edit that shit out. The first paragraph here is totally unneeded, at least the two sentences. It robs the story of the drama and panic that Esme has in the moment. She’s a parent. She’s not thinking about how knowledge command us. She’s thinking that in sieges and revolts princes die.

That’s it. That’s her motivation. We don’t need more than that. We don’t need to jump from point to point. Just that mantra – in sieges and revolts princes die.

Well, there’s indeed a noticeable slip into third person. That’s why it would be interesting to discuss it with the writers themselves, not even just Bakker.

These days we are used, especially in fantasy, to this “third person limited” perspective, and it happens that when some structure is universally used it becomes canon. People get used to the canon and if you suddenly don’t respect it then you’re doing something wrong, or giving a feeling of wrongness to the reader. In this case I wonder, is that simply a slip, a stylistic quirk or vice, or a *deliberate* slip?

I use to think at this third person limited point of view as a bird that alights on the shoulder of a character and speaks for him. But sometimes it’s the bird talking, you just don’t notice. Or the bird can alight from that shoulder and land somewhere else. A meta-structure. Self-awareness? Erikson in the eighth Malazan book uses Kruppe, a character in the book, as a framing device. Commentary. It’s one further loop of that voice, another lens that bends the light of the story.

As a reader, the more you play with this, the more you have my attention. Writing about writing. It’s not a slip, a mistake, it’s grasping the structure itself.

David Foster Wallace in a short story titled “Mister Squishy”, part of the “Oblivion” collection, has a sudden shift, mid-sentence, in the middle of the story, from third person to first. It’s one of the biggest chills I ever got while reading a story. Only then you realize the story was always told in first person. Of course that’s deliberate, if a bit gimmicky. It’s part of the experimentation, playing with the rules to obtain an effect. Or just put the reader off balance by failing to conform to certain expectations. It’s a sense of vertigo, and it can be very powerful.

It might be asking Bakker too much to actually play even more explicitly and deliberately with structure, and drag the point of view breaks even more as a plot point. It still might be just a slip, or simply a measured consideration, where the effect and the message were considered more important than submitting to a rigorous structure.

Martin is absolute king, in my reading experience, of dealing with this third person limited. Better than everyone else by far. There are still “slips”, for example in descriptions, but they are always “transparent” for the reader, so you can never catch the bird talking, it’s always the character. Martin never actually slips, never wanders off.

Bakker might be seen as having this voice driving a point, using characters as metaphors. Erikson? I’m not even sure and I’ll observe with more attention. Erikson deliberately breaks structure even if usually sticks to third person limited as the norm. I remember at least one case where in a single scene the bird jumps shoulders. Maybe Erikson just doesn’t give much authority to the rule of the structure and, if the story is better serviced that way, he makes exceptions without hesitation.

“Stop the EAMD bullshit” is a mantra that works perfectly well for Erikson too, after all. That’s what I often read in forums (“I wanted to see more action. If I wanted unlikely philosophical conversations I would read Dostoevsky.”). Yet that’s why I read these books. Because they just don’t repeat and conform to the rest of the genre. Wouldn’t it just be more carefully hidden and unaddressed sleight of hands? I want those voices. I treasure that self-awareness, those layers of commentary that bend the angle, that disrupt the natural flow. Sometimes you have to break this habit of just slipping into stories, of immersion. Sometime breaking the immersion you very carefully built might even be the point. Show a deceit, seize that structure. But, of course, the higher you aim, the higher the risk. You might even slip and it makes for a clumsy fall. Part of the deal? Accept it.

The Warrior-Prophet – R. Scott Bakker

“Ajencis once wrote that all men are frauds. Some, the wise, fool only others. Others, the foolish, fool only themselves. And a rare few fool both others and themselves — they are the rulers of Men…”

World-born men, Kellhus had found, despised complexity as much as they cherished flattery. Most men would rather die in deception than live in uncertainty.

If The Silmarillion and Dune had a baby, and it had a truly dark soul, that baby would be the Prince of Nothing series. The Warrior-Prophet is book 2 in a trilogy sub-series. Another trilogy comes after whose third book is expected to come out later this year, depending on how long Bakker continues working on it since the first draft has been completed already. After that there may still be some other kind of follow-up in the form of duology or something similar, and what is important to consider is that all of this was already part of the original vision and not further extensions to take advantage of some success, since the risk here is the inverse: that the relatively narrow reach of such a work may cut its expression before it reaches the end. At least we know that the final book of the second trilogy is going to happen, and that it should lay out Bakker’s Grand Plan in its full potential, if not exhausting it. Potential new readers should then consider that this is already a satisfying work even in its current state.

Instead I’m still at book 2. This one is by far the biggest in the first trilogy, 200k words for 600 pages. Maybe not that HUGE compared to other typical epic doorstopper, but to me Bakker’s books feel so packed with ideas and tight focus that they lose none of the feel of epic breadth. More to the point, he deliberately channels with his writing style and tone the biblical feel that can make characters and events bigger than they are. I think the greater majority of Bakker’s effort when writing goes in this aspect: make every line of text the bitch of his purpose. Bakker, the writer, is a madman possessed of clear intent and indomitable determination. Nothing escapes his writing. It’s all heightened sight focused on purpose, and you could say that this, right here, is where he loses most potential readers.

Bakker’s writing is, if you let me play a bit, mono-tone. In the sense that every page sustains the same purposes and similar focus. This book has a true center in its protagonist, the nail of the revolving heavens, and there converges everything else. Mono-tone not in the sense of “dull” or “boring”, but meaning that the same obsession that drives every line also drives the story and characters. It drives the events and all the themes that smolder underneath. Other writers can have an advantage playing with a range of different tones, breaking rhythm through a different sense of pacing. Alleviating tension while building familiarity and camaraderie. But Bakker’s writing gains in integrity and consistence. Every part of the book serves its purpose. There’s no digression, no distraction. No “fanservice” to reach for a certain audience to please it. No compromises. It feels, maybe, “driven”. As driven are the people in the book blindly following their holy faith. Everything sacred and holy is what’s at the heart of the book, and Bakker approaches and seizes it with blasphemous ferocity.

And Cnaiür grinned as only a Chieftain of the Utemot could grin. The neck of the world, it seemed, lay pressed against the point of his sword.

I shall butcher.

This is not a tale conceived to be narrated to a reader. It’s more an inward kind of study and, with no compromises, can very easily drive readers away. But it is not hostile, it is not falsely pretentious or esoteric. It definitely tests a reader. It is not a test of “purity” or “worthiness”, but it’s definitely a test in prejudices and a challenge to how far you can reach, or how close you let it cut. It’s even easy for me to acknowledge some criticism against this book, accuses of misogyny and brutal violence. I do think that here and there some compromises would HAVE helped. A few things felt gratuitous and trying too hard. The very last scene could have been removed and the book would have lost absolutely nothing, and maybe gained some from it. The “Circumfix of the Warrior-Prophet” is another of those things that tips the balance over to the ridiculous, mirroring quite closely (I even suspect Bakker may have glimpsed this at some point) the scene where Achamian tells his story, thinks he’s finally reached his audience, when in the end they all burst in laughter. But it is true that Bakker would rather cut himself for playing on that edge over and over again, than back off and desist. He becomes Achamian (a kind of self-reference being played), ready even to humiliate himself just as long he stays “true” to his purpose. The other way, I’m sure, would have been easier. And this, I think, makes Bakker more like an ideal “artist”, who surrenders to art in order to serve it fully.

So “grimdark”. The Prince of Nothing is grimmer and darker than grimdark. Violence, sex, and sexual violence. Monstrosity, blasphemy. There’s filth and this book bathes in it as if the only possible and ideal place where to be. But again all this doesn’t serve a deranged appetite, only truths that are way more complex than how they appear. The horrors in this books are horrors that other books try to hide or completely deny. Like an inverted horror story where you pray the Boogie Man won’t come, but HE IS. Places where you’d rather not be. Other books are harmless, this one is not. But all this “ugliness” isn’t merely justified by some higher purpose, it is there because it is part of everything this story is. It is not simply excused to be there by the kind of setting the story uses, but it’s instead the fabric it is made of. The Inchoroi, the mysterious otherworldly race obsessed over human carnal activities and exploiting them in the ugliest way possible, are described as an “obscene race”. Magic is blasphemy, unclean because it undoes the order of reality. These themes revolving around the idea of purity and its perversion are what the book first and foremost engages with, and if it wants to reach deep it can’t recoil and filter just so the story is more palatable. It goes through an unavoidable path where absolutely no one dares going and conflating this to other books that show and exploit violence and sex is the huge misunderstanding, and the big risk this book takes without resorting to any compromise. “Grimdark” is usually used as a pejorative but it’s the greatest injustice to call this book so. The reason is that it would make this book sit in the center of a genre, but this book couldn’t be less representative of a genre. There’s nothing like it out there, especially in the fantasy genre, and even more specifically the Grimdark genre. The writing has an opposite focus, looks elsewhere. What you can identify as an “act” is instead completely different here.

If anything, Bakker tries to copy the more solemn, scriptural Tolkien (The Silmarillion), and the “vision” of Frank Herbert in Dune. The Prince of Nothing is a direct descendant of those works, maybe even to a fault. But at least it can absolutely stay up to lofty standards. Bakker is radical and takes no sides, including his own. His writing is ruthless, spares no one, carries no prejudices. Its grimdark posture is just that, what it looks from afar but that couldn’t be more alien from it. Look at the moon, not at the finger. Sadly, superficial looks is what books and their writers get most of the times. It is legitimate, and a reader is not to be judged if refusing this book. But there’s more to it than its “act”. So I can only implore, whatever you decide, to still approach this book after leaving behind all prejudices and with an open mind. You will find value, and it’s of a necessary, very rare kind.

To open a book was not only to seize a moment of helplessness, not only to relinquish a jealous handful of heartbeats to the unpredictable mark of another man’s quill, it was to allow oneself to be written. For what was a book if not a long consecutive surrender to the movements of another’s soul?

Characterization is a strong quality. There may be some controversy around this topic but I think that all characters are treated equally, whether Point of View characters or bystanders, women or men, they seem all cared for equally and very precisely characterized. Some choices could appear dubious and sometimes you don’t see the ideal arc of character development being realized, but once again the focus of this book is different and not simply about retracing those ideals. Some characters are described as trapped in their own cages and the reader expects them to eventually get free, to complete that ideal trajectory, but in this case Bakker isn’t interested in going through the standard movements. If you take someone like Martin who’s praised for his strong characterization you can see that every character is bound tightly to his own story, they “make sense” together, drawing an ideal path. There’s a sense of masterful craft in what Martin does, a search for narrative perfection and balance. But for Bakker this kind of idealism is made to be violated, undone. Bakker is an heretical voice, always subversive but never gratuitous. If Martin’s work dances on the edge between beauty and ugliness, Bakker instead explores some dark, bottomless pits where no one dares going and where it’s legitimate a reader refuses to follow. Nudity and shame. Unclean, unclean! He can show beauty too, but it’s often so vulnerable and momentous. Too exposed for the world not to spoil and devour it.

This quality of characterization surprised me not simply because it’s well motivated and coherent or consistent. But because the writer has a very fine attention for the subtler details, the very little gestures or partially hidden reactions that truly make a character into a whole. Bakker’s characters answer directly to the mantra of the book: what they are, the movement of their thoughts, depends on what came before. Who they’ve been, what and how they live determine what they become, the way they think. Being stuck in this middle position ideally constructs this “cage” that represents the universal human condition. So not only Bakker provides the finest characterization I’ve read, as true as possible to the singularity of the personal world of that character, but all this is still facing toward the core of the book, giving it power. He’s true to the small detail without ever forgetting about the sharp intent. The tone and purpose of the book, its direction. And so I admire this mastery where you notice both the sheer quality of the smallest element, yet realize how that element plays the fundamental role within the overall construction. Success on these two levels means reaching a kind of perfection in art, and I think Bakker goes very close.

Yet again this doesn’t mean universal acclaim. The frenzied, extremely lucid, but maybe self-absorbed writing style isn’t ideal to reach a wide public. And it becomes especially easy to misunderstood. Too incomprehensibly bleak and filled with unpleasantries. When Bakker does characterization the focus is on “being”, not “doing”. The cage of being can sometime, with certain characters, become intolerable from the passive position of the reader. After the accuses of misogyny and whatnot I still believe that what happens in the book and what the characters do is always coherent and necessary for this story (if not “opportune”). I do believe that women in the book are treated awfully, and if you reduce the book to this single aspect, everything becomes a catastrophic failure. But doing this is a manipulation, partial, partisan and single-minded. Because I do believe that women are treated equally to the men, it’s just that some readers decide to only see one side while obscuring the rest, and make that one part into the whole. No one is left standing, every single man is made into a pathetic fool and seen through the same lens. Bakker desecrates everything and everyone. Men and women. Offenses are taken personally.

Most, by and large, were born narrow, and cared to see only that which flattered them. Almost without exception, they assumed their hatreds and yearnings to be correct, no matter what the contradictions, simply because they felt correct. Almost all men prized the familiar path over the true. That was the glory of the student, to step from the well-worn path and risk knowledge that oppressed, that horrified.

There’s also to consider the aspect of “worldbuilding”, though I hate to deal with it as a separate thing. As it was with Tolkien, Bakker excels with it. This work is extremely well crafted and lends itself to (and is able to sustain) that type of close examination and speculation the fans love to do, much more than Malazan. Bakker doesn’t quite reach Tolkien’s levels of obsession but I really do believe that right now he absolutely has no rivals in the genre. There’s a great care for all the small details and structure that are only hinted in the background, the idea of a fully realized and consistent world, with its strong personality. And even more than Tolkien this isn’t just pointless detail, but still intricacy that contributes to an unique purpose. Motives that run deep and that aren’t simply scenery and choreography. So the attention for the little things is paid off aplenty, rewarded. For example the way magic works isn’t a “system” that is conceived to be just intriguing, but it engages deeply and meaningfully with the themes of this world, a sustaining force through it. That’s Bakker’s talent at creating a so incredibly complex, yet consistent world where none of its smallest cogs act independently or without reason. No writer I know comes even close, it’s just the way it is.

Lately I’ve heard often the expression “it’s very good at what it does” and I think it applies well to Bakker’s work. What’s most important for me to underline is that there’s no other thing out there like this. It’s epic fantasy, it can be called Grimdark, but there’s absolutely nothing in or outside the genre that does similar things or has a similar ambition (and sheer talent at craft). The only cousins are The Silmarillion and Dune, as I said, but that’s only in tone and as a search for a certain aesthetic, because purpose brings this book into a completely different territory. Bakker can actually channel Tolkien’s epic range and solemnity better than Tolkien himself, but where Tolkien’s world is all completely luminous and ideal, Bakker uses it to shatter the same holiness. To expose the ugly truth under it. The writing in this book feels extremely well measured, always sharp. Erikson can have a more varied tonal range, but Bakker loses that to gain in focus and consistence. In the next years it is likely that we’ll get more good writers in the genre, as it always happens, but Bakker represents exceptionality. Something that will stay unmatched because it goes outside every genre or trend. Books come out every year, in every genre, this is one that isn’t going to be replaced or obscured by anything else.