The Return of the Crimson Guard

Return of the Crimson Guard is the second novel written by Ian C. Esslemont that complements the main narrative told in The Malazan Book of the Fallen series written by Steven Erikson. If the previous volume, Night of Knives, was simple and straight to the point, here Esslemont aims for a complexity similar to that of Erikson’s, betting on the multitude of points of view, plotlines, and conflicts. The author, however, gets lost amidst his ambition, presenting several poorly developed characters, problematic prose, contradictory discussions, and a climax that focuses on the wrong characters.

As the title indicates, the plot of Return of the Crimson Guard follows the return of the Crimson Guard to the political landscape, after being strangely absent for decades. The Guard is a mercenary group that swore to end the Malazan Empire and finds in this oath not only its raison d’être but also its power and its curse, as the members who held the vows cannot die until they are fulfilled. Meanwhile, allies of former Emperor Kellanved are reuniting in a rebellion against the current Empress Laseen, who, in turn, has to worry about internal political machinations and a possible coup d’état by her vile adviser Mallick Rel.

Inside the Guard, the main point of view is Kyle’s, a new recruit whose unique position allows the character to function as a bridge between the reader and that fantastic world, with various explanations being offered to him. Despite being the best candidate for the post of the protagonist in the book – due to being related to the group in the title, being the most mentioned name, and opening the first chapter –, his character arc is quite anticlimactic. Kyle’s conflict comes from a fatality that occurs at the beginning of the novel: serving the Crimson Guard, he witnesses what appears to be the murder of a deity of his religion – an event that leaves him divided about his alliances and that numbs his senses, making him indifferent to violence and death: “He could stare at them now, at anyone dead or alive, and not see them.”

Despite being a major theme of the series, this indifference is not developed, being quickly discarded in favor of an internal conspiracy within the Crimson Guard, which makes Kyle a fugitive. From that point on, the character could have had any personality or internal conflict that it would not make the slightest difference, for Esslemont ignores what has been presented so far to treat Kyle as a mere tool for the plot, putting him in a quest that is not influenced by his own traits. From time to time, the character remembers, “Yeah, they kinda killed my god”, but soon forgets this inconvenience and continues his journey for the Guard.

The other characters do not fare better and, unfortunately, there are countless of them. A group of Malazan soldiers, led by Captain Storo, gains prominence early in the novel as it attempts to retake and defend a city from a rebel army. If this plotline provides some major events, the characters that participate in them don’t live up to the scale of the action, showing no traces of complexity whatsoever. Some of them, for example, are defined by their striking features: the mage Silk, for his smile and secrets, and the warrior Rell, for his skill as a swordsman. The sappers, meanwhile, don’t even have striking features going for them, and they quickly start to blend with each other: what is the difference between Sunny and Shaky? I have no idea and I bet few people do.  The only ones that manage to stand out are Soro, because he’s the leader and so has to make difficult choices, and Hurl, the main point of view in the group, who is characterized by her eccentric traits – hating horses – and by being exhaustively haunted by the consequences of their actions.

Repetition is a constant element in Return of the Crimson Guard, especially in the composition of the characters. Silk’s smile, for example, is portrayed at one point as capable of seducing people: “Silk answered with an enigmatic smile of his own – one that Hurl had seen turn many a girl’s head.” Only three pages later, however, that same description returns, reinforcing the character’s seductive nature: “He gave his most charming smile – the one that she’d seen never fail any female. Any except her.” And then, four pages later, the smile is mentioned once more just to ensure the reader got it: “He flashed his most winning smile, the warm yet teasingly distant, slightly impish expression. That captured camp followers and slave girls.” After three similar descriptions of the same feature in less than ten pages, it is expected that it will at least impact the plot in some way, but no: Silk’s smile is just Silk’s smile.

Yet, such repetitive repetition surely serves, if nothing else, to mark Silk in the reader’s mind. After all, other characters don’t share the same fate: as the narrative navigates between varied points of view, but stays too long away from some of them, it makes it tricky for the reader to remember who is who. Their names notably fail to contribute to the cause, as characters appear to partake in a somewhat arbitrary alliteration game: there’s Shell, Shen, Sept, Silk, Su, Sour, Skinner, Smoky, Stoop, Stalker, Storo, Slate, Sunny, Sessin, Shaky, Shijel, Shellar, and Shimmer. Commencing with C: Cowl, Cole, Coil, Choss, Chord, Coots. In a single company of the Crimson Guard, of only twelve members, there is a Balkin, a Black, a Baker, and a Bower.

Esslemont also doesn’t give them a strong and unique voice, which only aggravates the problem. The dialogues in the book are full of clichés and one-liners, such as in, “You’re playing a dangerous game” / “That is the only one worth playing,” and “Nothing Personal, you understand. Just business,” besides unnecessary exposition. At one point, Chord explains to the spokesperson of a group of looters that were eating Wickan horse meat: “Wickans regard their horses like members of their own family. They’d no more sell one of them than their own daughters.” However, the looters clearly knew the importance of the horses, as their purpose was precisely to humiliate the Wickans they so hated. Chord knows this too, due to his expression of contempt. Therefore, the dialogue ends up being directed more to the reader, to remind them of the Wickan culture, than to Chord’s interlocutor, who already knows this information.

Another symptom of bland dialogue is that characters speak with the same idiosyncrasies: characters don’t need to use different expressions to mark themselves apart from each other, but the fact that they all share the same element in the way they speak doesn’t help to mark their individuality. Esslemont, for example, shows an overwhelming preference for sentences similar to “Surely you can write better characters” and they appear in the mouth of murderers, nobles, engineers, gods, captains, and soldiers, even coming up twice in the same reflection:

“Would he accept? Surely they were finished now; how could they beat more than they’d faced so far? They’d had a damned good run. In truth, they got farther than she’d thought possible. Then she blinked away the sweat and salt stinging her eyes. Damn this mind-numbing exhaustion! These pirates would cut them down the minute the weapons left their hands! Surely the Captain must know that.”

For comparison, this type of construction appears only six times in Gardens of the Moon and only three times in Deadhouse Gates. In the whole of Mistborn’s first trilogy, about nineteen times. Return of the Crimson Guard alone has twenty-seven appearances of this construction. Within Esslemont’s own work, Night of Knives, even with its small size, features eight similar sentences, and the next volume, Stonewielder, has an alarming thirty-three of them.

Still about style, Esslemont’s prose also suffers from a profusion of simple sentences, which holds back the pacing of the narrative. There are several excerpts that could serve as a class activity with the command “Build compound sentences with some of the clauses below,” as the following example proves: “The Cellar beneath was no more than a vaulted-roof grotto. Armed and armoured men stood shoulder to shoulder. They numbered about thirty. Kyle recognized fewer than half.” This profusion of simple sentences doesn’t fulfill an important function to justify the paused reading it causes: it’s not a case in which the syntax mirrors the tension, as such style is present in the entire novel. Further ahead, for example, at a moment even more devoid of action, there is the following passage, which reveals the same problem: “The next day a small boat entered the bay. An old man rowed it. He tied it up at the least decrepit dock. The men of the blade watched from cover.”

As for the characters, the only one that is satisfactorily developed in Return of the Crimson Guard is Empress Laseen, who is as enigmatic as in Erikson’s work and Esslemont’s previous volume. The author goes so far as to explore some of the yet hidden sides of the Empress, such as her ability in battle, and reveals a little of Laseen’s humanity by suggesting a certain melancholy in her always rigid posture. Nevertheless, here the Empress is for the most part developed in opposition to her main officers: Korbolo Dom and Mallick Rel. This contrast works very well, encouraging the reader to sympathize with her, although it doesn’t make the character that more complex: everyone seems to have common sense when compared to Korbolo Dom, or to have scruples when compared to Rel, after all. Now, on the matter of Laseen having let both of them take the important positions they have, the reader will only be frustrated to realize that no one ever reaches the empress and, pointing at the two, very bewildered at her choice of generals, exclaims in Esslemont’s style: “Surely, you cannot be serious!” After all, in that case, Laseen’s answer would have certainly been: “I’m serious, and do not call me Surly.”

On the other hand, a character without any interesting traits is Princess Ghelel, introduced in a scene similar to a confrontation involving Arya in A Game of Thrones: seeking to make her a political prisoner, soldiers attack the girl during her training as a swordsman, when she is defended by the own trainer, which proves to be more than he claimed to be. After this event, Ghelel joins the rebellion, but does absolutely nothing throughout the whole novel – not even during the climax. She remains a reactive character, with her brief moments of proactivity proving futile, serving only for her to self-assert her independence in a foolish manner.

Thematically, Return of the Crimson Guard opens with a poem about eternal conflicts and the rejection of those who try to stop them – which works with the tragic history of the Crimson Guard –, and the novel plays all the time with the clash between the “old” and the “new”: a group called “Old Hands”, for example, who served Kellanved, now opposes the new Empress Laseen, while within the Guard itself there is discord between former members like Skinner and new ones like Graymane. However, by the end of the novel, the battle is all over the place, with old men killing old men, and the new people killing the new, which makes the whole point somewhat arbitrary: it would have made more sense in a narrative concerned with the repetition of the past, like The Bonehunters, than in one that contains a widespread war, like this one.

The climax also focuses on the wrong character. Kyle barely appears – and barely has his own climax as well –, Storo’s team is worried about another problem, Laseen rightly stays in the background, and Ghelel does not even participate in the event, which leads a soldier that was until that point a supporting character to take the protagonist’s mantle. The whole construction of his group of sappers is fun, precisely because Malazan sappers are always eccentric, but there is little to no emotional investment in the scenes; an investment that could have been there if that character had been the main focus of the narrative from the beginning.

Return of the Crimson Guard marks the first truly bad volume about the Malazan universe, relying on an annoying, bloated narrative. Esslemont’s earlier book might be simple and straightforward but it’s still quite good. Here, his ambition only drowns the few qualities of the novel in an ocean of problems.

December 29, 2018.

Originally published in Portuguese on May 04, 2018.