Deadhouse Gates

Deadhouse Gates, the second volume in Steven Erikson’s The Malazan Book of the Fallen fantasy series, is an even better book than the first one. Beautifully structured and written, the novel offers an incredibly pessimistic story, with a wide range of tragic characters, whose arcs always come back to the same question: how to face the horrors of violence?

The story in Deadhouse Gates takes place on a continent different from that presented in Gardens of the Moon, introducing new characters and environments. The focus is the Seven Cities, a region surrounded by desert, whose mythology is all sustained by the notion of rebellion. Having been conquered by the Malazan Empire years ago, the cities are at a boiling point when the old historian Duiker is assigned to work for General Coltaine to help avert civil war.

Besides Duiker’s, there are several points of view in the book: Felisin Paran is a young woman of the nobility who has to deal with the shock of being sent by her own sister to a distant mine, where she begins to work as a slave; Mappo and Icarium are extremely powerful creatures who have to face a dilemma capable of jeopardizing their old friendship; and the assassin Kalam travels with his colleagues, Fiddler, Crokus, and Apsalar in order to assassinate his empress, Laseen.

The book’s prologue is very effective in establishing the tone of the story and introducing its main themes, accompanying the journey of a bewildered Felisin during the purge of her city by the Empire: nobles are being sentenced by a jury of beggars and drunken judges to be dumped into a kind of arena for the violent catharsis of the poor, who will push, trample and kill them. The Malazan Commander in charge of the event is precisely Felisin’s sister, Tavore Paran, who is punishing Felisin in an attempt to clean up their family name. Anticipating the impending lynching, the girl ends up talking to a monk named Herboric and the assassin Baudin about their chances of survival. Baudin’s answer comes with a sudden, but lengthy execution of a noblewoman, whose head is thrown to the crowd to cause a distraction.

Deadhouse Gates is a violence-driven novel whose characters are prone to outbursts of anger, hate speeches, and acts that cause the deepest repulsion on the reader. Gore, therefore, is a constant element in the narrative, and one that always astounds with the horrors that one human being can inflict on another. The climax in the prologue is a terrifying execution, but the events that follow are even more shocking. Erikson works with graphic violence by progressively intensifying the level of brutality while creating visual metaphors to mark it on the reader’s mind. He makes the characters seem eternally imprisoned in a last moment of agony, incapable of dying, which often makes them see death as a form of salvation. On the very first page, for example, one can hear the desperate howls of a dog close to dying, “but not close enough.“

One of the many atrocities that Kalam encounters on his journey is a crucified child. The scene follows the same pattern of intensifying horror: first, he observes a bloody hole in the place of one of the boy’s eyes and notes that his nose is also destroyed. Then, the assassin boggles at the sight of several other children in the same conditions behind that one. His gaze, then, follows the moths devouring the boy’s flesh – so many that it makes the child’s arms lool like wings – until Kalam finally realizes that the child is still alive.

Erikson also makes a point of highlighting the human element behind the tragedies: it is not enough to describe that hundreds of women were raped while they were hanged by the guts of the men who laid around them; the author also inserts a pause, indicated by dashes, to register that such men were their husbands, brothers, parents, and children. And he works the issue of anger and aggression not only with visceral imagery but also with sound. The characters in Deadhouse Gates do not “talk” or “say” stuff, but grunt every sentence. The most used verbs are “grunt“, “growl“, “groan“, “grimace” and “grin“. All starting with “gr”, producing in the narrative the constant noise of a growl: an excellent use of alliteration that complements the story’s suffocating atmosphere and has an ironic effect, since Coltaine’s group is called Chain of… Dogs.

Faced with so much violence, the characters in Deadhouse Gates tend to be hopeless, often taking a cynical, pessimist stance on the future of humanity. In this sense, the protagonist, Duiker, finds himself in a special situation for being a historian. His aim is to record the events that are transpiring in the withdrawal of Coltaine’s army from the Seven Cities, when the outbreak of civil war forces them to flee through the desert with more than fifty thousand refugees. Coltaine’s journey bears many resemblances to the 300 of Sparta: his men are far fewer in number than their enemies, but resists due to the discipline, union, and ferocity of its members. Each battle takes place in a situation more disadvantageous than the previous one, but each time Coltaine comes out victorious nonetheless, and with a smaller number of survivors.

Duiker watches Coltaine’s victories with bewilderment, shocked by the amount of savagery witnessed on both sides of the battlefield. The historian realizes that when it is time to kill, murder, and tear the enemy down, there is no more specific discrimination of gender, race, or class, because just being the “other” is enough to merit carnage. Duiker sees how hate speech, the binary mentality of “us versus them” is toxic and can only lead to acts of violence. Dismayed, he notices how history, science, and reason are then abandoned, condemning everyone to a tragic end. When Duiker attests – like Kalam – that even children are not being spared, he declares, unbelievingly, “Children are dying” – a sentence that is immediately complemented by a nearby soldier, who puts the function of his colleague in perspective: “That’s a succinct summary of humankind, I’d say. Who needs tomes and volumes of history? Children are dying. The injustices of the world hide in those three words. Quote me, Duiker, and your work’s done”.

Felisin doesn’t deal much better with the horrors she witnesses. Following the events of the prologue, her reaction to the world around her becomes a tragic one: to move away from reality, finding a reason to live only in the desire to take revenge on her sister. Numbness is a term constantly related to the character while she works in the mines: Felisin is numb by her hatred to Tavore, being no longer able to feel anything else, as if she’s anesthetized by anger. Such lack of feeling leads to a social numbness, a resignation that doesn’t exempt her from her growing complicity to the horrors of the world. At one point, Erikson – who loves to work with symbolism – constructs an intense visual metaphor by temporarily blinding the girl to everything that is happening around her. It is a heavy scene, for the insects that are assaulting Felisin are trying to enter her ears, mouth, eyes, and even between her legs, while she defends herself with mud until she is completely immersed in it, deprived of all her senses. The girl’s character arc is even more tragic than Duiker’: he never stops being bewildered by so much violence and so he never stops condemning it,  but Felisin’s struggles end up leading her precisely to embrace violence, making it as a part of herself. Hate, in all its forms, whether political or personal, at the level of discourse or action, is treated in the narrative as a dehumanizing tool, which removes the individual’s capacity for empathy, transforming them into another animal blind by rage.

The story finally gains a lighter mood in the interwoven journeys of Kalam, Fiddler, Crokus, Apsalar, Mappo, and Icarium. The plotline that follows the assassin is the most serious one of the group, from which he separates early on, taking a path of his own to reach Laseen. His journey through the desert is lined with scenes of action and persecution, forming several important events in the story. He is a character divided by his alliances – he was born in the Seven Cities, but works for the Empire –, that sees in the death of the Empress the solution for the war. Kalam, therefore, wishes to end all the violence with a gesture of violence,  which makes the anticlimax of his plotline fitting. Erikson builds very well several scenes involving the assassin: a simple statement about Kalam’s motivation in revealing his identity to the guards of a fort, for example, makes more interesting the moment when a group of mercenaries enters the place due to the irony of the resulting events. Besides that, the episode itself serves to increase the tension over the possibility of Kalam failing in his mission, as it shows him making errors of both observation and judgment.

Now, the rest of the group meets Iskaral Pust, a Shadow priest who follows Kruppe’s characterization in Gardens of the Moon: a character that functions as a mysterious comic relief, because of the contrast between his seemingly illogical lines and the immense power that they nonetheless imply. Pust, however, has his own characteristics, like the habit of speaking his thoughts in an apparently involuntary way, leading to hilarious situations in which he ends up exposing to others precisely his desire to betray or manipulate them.

Finally, Mappo and Icarium are responsible for another emotional load of the book. Their friendship, born of a tragedy, seems destined to end in the same way. Icarium suffers from amnesia due to his involuntary outbursts of fury, a torment that his companion sees as a blessing: it’s a way of forgetting all the violence that he perpetrates. Their friendship, therefore, moves the reader because they are honest, kind characters, but also violent, tragic ones that are walking towards an inevitable fatality.

If Gardens of the Moon was a great start, Deadhouse Gates is a brilliant book that reaffirms Steven Erikson as one of the greatest authors in the fantasy genre. Working with the concept of violence, the novel offers several possible answers to the source of such hatred, but one is especially poignant in its simplicity: “Difference in kind is the first recognition, the only needed, in fact. Land, domination, pre-emptive attacks – all just excuses, mundane justifications that do nothing but disguise the simple distinction. They are not us. We are not them.”

December 08, 2018.

Originally published in Portuguese on August 01, 2016