Kellanved's Reach by Ian Esslemont
The enigmatic sorcerer Kellanved has seized control of Malaz Island. His cohort and ally Surly plots the conquest of her homeland, the Napan Isles. Meanwhile, the mainland of Quon Tali is wracked by war and civil war. Purge and Tali are locked in incessant conflict in the west, whilst to the east the Bloorian League is trying to crush the city of Gris. Conflict stalks the world but great changes are coming in the warrens as well, as Kellanved seeks the Throne of Shadow and also the First Throne of the T'lan Imass, the Army of Dust and Bone...
Kellanved's Reach is the third novel in Ian Esslemont's Path to Ascendancy series, which acts as a prequel to both the Malazan Book of the Fallen sequence by Steven Erikson and Esslemont's own earlier Malazan Empire series. Following on from Dancer's Lament and Deadhouse Landing, this book continues the story of Kellanved and Dancer, the founders of the Malazan Empire.
The events described in this trilogy, and in this single novel especially, are vast, epic and the stuff of myth. Kellanved's seizure of the First Throne, his alliance with the T'lan Imass and the military campaigns which saw the Malazan Empire start coming together have been referenced in hushed tones throughout the sixteen novels of both of Erikson and Esslemont's original series, so to see those events first-hand is thrilling. Or rather it should be.
If one word comes to mind when reading Kellanved's Reach it is "rushed". The book is only 330 pages long (barely a third as long as some of Erikson's books) and Esslemont tries to fit into this modest page count no less than five major military campaigns, a major subplot with Kellanved and Dancer exploring the Shadow Realm and the stories of numerous POV characters. There simply isn't enough room to do this justice and as a result we end up bouncing back and forth between characters and stories like a pinball machine. Massive, major events (like the nascent empire's capture of the strategically vital city of Cawn) take place in sentences, let along paragraphs, and the epic final battle which ends with Kellanved's crowning feels perfunctory at best.
This is a shame because the improvement in Esslemont's writing and character voice which has been building since Dancer's Lament continues apace here. The early chapters, which relax a little to focus on the military campaigns on opposite coasts of the continent, are well-written and excellent, and it's fun to see future important characters like Greymane and Skinner arise from the masses to start their own steps down the road to destiny. But around the halfway mark the pace accelerates and suddenly major plot events are whizzing by like they've been shot out of a machine gun.
There's still much to enjoy here, of course, even if the later chapters of the book do start feeling more like a plot summary than a novel. I suspect it will be even more frustrating as - if as seems possible - more books in this series follow; Path to Ascendancy was contracted for three books but the series has sold extremely well, so it may be extended. There's plenty of scope if so (the book ends with Kellanved crowned but only a very small part of Quon Tali under his control), and it'd be interesting to fill the gaps in between this book and Night of Knives (set roughly 100 years later), where Kellanved's plans are finally fully realised.
Kellanved's Reach (***½) is a reasonably solid addition to the Malazan mythos, with some genuinely exciting, myth-making moments. It also feels like the novel should have been either twice as long as it is, or its events should have been split over two books. As it stands, the brake-neck pacing means that the emotional resonance and dramatic power of some long-awaited scenes are diluted. The book is available in the UK now and next month in the USA.
I know this thread is old now, but I came across it while Googling info about this series. It only shows part of your review, but I wanted to focus on what you said about the death of characters. I may be in the minority here, but the return of dead characters, or having scenes in the afterlife, tends to be a plus for me. I like worlds with established afterlives (I specifically Googled "afterlife in Malazan", which is how I found this thread. I have been hearing a lot about this series, and am always keen on finding a new epic. Again, I know this thread is old now, but if anyone would be willing to tell me about the gods (if there are in) and afterlife in Malazan, please enlighten me. I have asked in other places, and answers are eithe vague or nonexistent. Sorry to revive an old thread, but I am curious!
That's a very difficult question to answer. Malazan has gods and demigods (Ascendants) who have worshippers and immense powers. The proper gods are, interestingly, restricted to their home planes (or warrens); if they venture or are torn into the mortal realm, they lose power and become vulnerable. Ascendants, who still live in the mortal realm but have access to greater powers, are stronger as they have the best of both worlds.
Do the souls of their worshippers go to their home plane, then? What is the "basic afterlife" for someone who has died? By this I mean, the destination of the soul of your average Joe. Has this been explained? The OP mentions there are scenes in the afterlife, and people coming back from the dead, so I assume their souls are hanging out somewhere?
The God of Death is an Ascendant named Hood. Those who die pass through Hood's Gate into his warren, which is the one warren it's impossible to return from. Souls queue up outside the gate and if you can recover a soul before it passes through, it can be reincarnated (the Wickan people have a special ritual for this) or reconstituted as a ghost. Actual resurrection is possible but it requires the intervention by a god who gives up a small part of their power (presumably to Hood) for the pleasure.
Hood himself is a character with his own history, backstory and motivation (the god of death is a position which has had multiple holders in the past), and sometimes overreaches his supposedly totally neutral position to achieve things for his own ends.
Witness #1: The God is Not Willing
More than a decade of peace has passed since the fall of the Crippled God. The Malazan Empire, once an ever-expanding nation, has secured its borders and set about bringing stability and order to its holdings. One of the furthest-flung of its outposts is Silver Lake, an isolated town in the far north of Genabackis, still reeling from the events of many years earlier, when three Teblor descended from the mountains and brought chaos with them.
The 2nd Company of the Malazan XIVth Legion - reduced to just three squads and eighteen soldiers - is bound for Silver Lake to reinforce the garrison there. To augment its strength, it has hired the very mercenary company they were recently fighting against, a practical measure that neither side likes very much. With redoubtable allies, the Malazans have to hold Silver Lake against an implacable foe. For the Teblor of the mountains, tiring of waiting for their Shattered God - Karsa Orlong - to return to them and motivated by a growing threat to the north, have made a decision to migrate south to seek out their reluctant deity. What else are a people to do, when their god is not willing?
Well, this was a surprise. Steven Erikson's work has been called many things but "concise" and "focused" are not among them. All of Erikson's twelve previous novels in the Malazan universe are sprawling, brick-thick volumes you could use to stun a yak. The God is Not Willing, at a relatively breezy 473 pages, is easily his shortest fantasy novel to date. Erikson's work has also been called (sometimes fairly, often not) "obtuse" and "confusing." The in media res opening to the first book in the setting, Gardens of the Moon, remains fiercely debated on Reddit and fantasy message boards to this day. The God is Not Willing is instead pretty streamlined and comprehensible. The word - whisper it - "accessible" may be applicable.
But if those terms are applicable, don't go thinking this is Erikson with the training wheels on, or restrained, or (grimace) going commercial. The God is Not Willing is packed with the philosophical musings and rich worldbuilding of his prior work, it is just paced here with discipline and vigor, and an undercurrent of Erikson's distinctly underrated humour. With the exception of the late, great Terry Pratchett and maybe Abercrombie in his more whimsical moments, Erikson may be one of the funniest writers in modern secondary world fantasy, something he usually keeps under check but here lets loose a little more. This is still a dramatic and sometimes tragic story, but it's also one balanced by the kind of comedic banter between soldiers-under-duress that we've seen before in earlier novels, but here taken up a notch.
The God is Not Willing is set ten years after the events of The Crippled God, in north Genabackis. The events of the opening of House of Chains have left an ugly scar on the town of Silver Lake, with ex-slaves and ex-slavers having to find new roles after the Malazan Empire outlawed slavery. Rast, the half-Teblor son of Karsa Orlong, has been exiled from his home by his mother. The town's depleted garrison is reinforced by the Malazan XIVth Legion's 2nd Company, with the slight problem that the company has been almost destroyed in an engagement with a mercenary company, with heavy losses on both sides. Fighting the mercenaries to a standstill, Captain Gruff hits on the splendid - or barking mad - idea of hiring the mercenaries to augment his depleted forces, which is slightly undercut by the two sides disliking one another. Elsewhere, the Teblor tribes of the mountains have discovered that the fading of Jaghut sorcery from the world is about to have cataclysmic consequences, spurring a mass migration into the lands of the south, and a potential showdown with their reluctant deity Karsa Orlong, also known as Sir Not-Appearing-in-this-Novel.
And that's kind of it. The novel rotates between these three storylines with a laser-like focus, with Rast's growth from a confused and terrified youth into a character of moral courage, using his Kara-like, single-minded and utterly unbendable determination as a force for good (or what passes for it) getting a lot of focus. So too do the Malazan marines holding Silver Lake. There's only eighteen of them left after the clash with Balk's mercenary company (who also get some attention, though it's more of a subplot), allowing Erikson to explore most of their characters in a lot of detail. It's the splendidly-written Stillwater who emerges as the best character in the novel, a lethal assassin-mage who has been trying to effectively trademark the idea (and ignoring the various assassin-mage organisations we've already seen in the previous novels, not least the Claw) and whose facility with the warren of Shadow is slightly complicated by her relationship with the Hounds of Shadow. Stillwater entertains because of her determined lack of interest in the normal ongoings of the Malazan world, and her metacommentary on what is happening is the source of much of the book's humour.
The book is relatively small in scale for most of its length, being concerned with very small groups of characters, until Erikson shifts things up a gear in the last hundred pages or so, when we suddenly pull back to a widescreen view of events and discover that things are about to go south very, very fast. Entire cultures and nations are caught up as Erikson finally delivers when he nearly did in The Bonehunters - a fantasy disaster novel! - and does so with spades.
I was very surprised at this book. A dozen novels, half a dozen novellas and thirty years into writing this series (and almost forty since he and Ian Esslemont created it for gaming purposes in 1982), with the previous two-published books being commercial disappointments, you could have forgiven Erikson for writing a crowd-pleasing war story or a thousand-page recap of Malazan's greatest hits. Instead, he delivers a determined, focused, well-paced and immensely rich novel of war, peace, hubris, consequence, sorcery and compassion. He even finds time to right some wrongs from earlier in the series: the somewhat brushed-over consequences of Karsa's odyssey of destruction in House of Chains are here laid bare in full, and the logical (if long-in-unfolding) consequences of events in the main series which were outside the scope of that story are explored in depth by one of Erikson's finest casts of characters yet.
The God is Not Willing (*****) is Steven Erikson bringing his A-game, turned up to 11, and delivering what is comfortably one of his three or four best novels to date. The book will be published in the UK on 1 July and on 9 November in the United States.
Finally Karsa's trilogy
Is there any knowledge of what is beyond the Gate--well, presumably Hood's realm, but I mean is there any knowledge of what kind of realm this is (gloomy like Hades, or more like Elysium), or is this left to the imagination?The God of Death is an Ascendant named Hood. Those who die pass through Hood's Gate into his warren, which is the one warren it's impossible to return from. Souls queue up outside the gate and if you can recover a soul before it passes through, it can be reincarnated (the Wickan people have a special ritual for this) or reconstituted as a ghost. Actual resurrection is possible but it requires the intervention by a god who gives up a small part of their power (presumably to Hood) for the pleasure.
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the warrens/holds are hardly ever described, mostly vague stuff, I kinda remember it appears like the Grey Waste, except souls are crushed into layers of earth like fossils, and I think time does not flow there similar to the Astral
All I care about is does Icarium figure out what he remembered...