House of Chains

The fourth installment in The Malazan Book of the Fallen series, written by Steven Erikson, House of Chains is the most problematic book so far. Although it still manages to impress the reader with its thematic complexity, its fragile structure ends up sabotaging the strength of the narrative.

The plot returns to the Seven Cities’ desert, at the time when Adjunct Tavore of the Malazan Empire arrives with her army to end Sha’ik’s rebellion. The inevitable battle between the two forces ends up generating a confluence of powers, making many other characters interested in the outcome of the event.

The novel’s first act, however, has nothing to do with Tavore and the rebellion, preferring to plunge the readers into the point of view of a barbarian named Karsa Orlong. It’s a welcome change in the typical structure of the series, which usually alternates between several perspectives in a single chapter. In House of Chains, on the other hand, readers will only follow Karsa for more than 200 pages.

Erikson takes advantage of this change to bring back the sense of being dropped in the middle of an unknown environment, once again making the story a great puzzle for the readers to solve. Karsa is a Teblor warrior, living on a distant land, isolated from society, with a restricted worldview. The author, then, shackles the reader into the character’s perspective, with descriptions being written with the warrior’s limited vocabulary, who use uncommon terms to refer to familiar things. The protagonist, for example, refers to mystical beings (“Forkassal“) and objects (“Blood Oil“) with particular names, leading to a deduction game about their meaning. Regarding events of the previous books, readers are not even situated in time and space, knowing only what Karsa knows. And Karsa doesn’t help the contextualize things, as he faces situations where, because he lacks the vocabulary to describe what is transpiring, fails to grasp the full significance of the events.

Erikson subverts the traditional characterization of barbarian characters in the fantasy genre to discuss the relativization of cruel actions, when they are accepted in the culture of origin. Karsa’s village applauds acts of brutality – their farewell similar to “Have a good day” is “May you slay a thousand children” – nurturing an animalistic mentality that sees no value in human life and encourages acts of violence. Therefore, when Karsa rapes, murders, and mutilates, morality is not a factor present in his reasoning, as such acts are not reproachable in the society in which he grew up, granting him, on the contrary, fame and glory. The question that Erikson proposes to the reader is: does the killing committed by the protagonist being an admirable feat for his people redeems the character? Not knowing that such actions are vile makes them less reprehensible? Does the perpetrator need to know that he is committing a crime to be judged morally by his actions? Erikson works with this problem by provoking the reader through the character’s actions and the specific terminology he uses – “children”, for example, shocks in its subversion – and in the evolution of his character arc, whose evolution is not only cultural but moral: Karsa begins to understand that there are universal values ​​that should withstand the punctual differences of behavior between cultures.

Therefore, the fact that Karsa begins to understand these nuances and continues to act as a violent maniac makes him a fascinating individual. After all, Karsa, despite being a barbarian, is anything but a flat character, constantly surprising those around him, and the reader, with his insights and actions. On the one hand, he reveals simple thoughts that ignore matters of scale and reveal his simplistic view of the world, such as the idea of capturing the city of Darujhistan all by himself. On the other hand, these ideas are often counterposed to very accurate insights on his part: at one point, the warrior sees the true nature of the Sha’ik’s rebellion, realizing that the people will never profit from it regardless of the outcome, as they are fighting not for the end of inequality, but to decide who will get to exploit them (“What matter the color of the necklace around the neck if the chains linked to them were identical,” the character points out).

Karsa’s greatest struggle is precisely to free all the people from any kind of imprisonment. His journey in House of Chains leads him to understand that prisons can transcend the physical plane, and lock up the person on the spiritual one. His relationship with the gods of his village, for example, progresses over time, with the protagonist questioning whether their influence really is positive: Karsa notes that the function of religion is to give comfort to people by offering compassion, and if it also seeks to control their way of living, faith ends up putting only a couple of more chains in the individual.

Back to the plot of Sha’ik’s rebellion, it’s important to highlight some of Erikson’s narrative devices. The construction of Tavore’s personality, for example, is done from afar, without a point of view of her own. As the character is described as being cold and distant, her development occurring through the reflections of other characters about her personality reinforces this characteristic of Tavore. Nonetheless, the author gives Tavore some scenes that make her more human and complex, mainly through her relationship with Captain Gamet.

Opposing Tavore is her sister, Felisin. One of the great messages of the Malazan series is the condemnation of the absence of feelings: being hollow or broken leads a person to thoughts and acts of cruelty. Felisin’s journey in House of Chains, however, positions her as one of the pillars of indifference in the narrative. Her character arc is tragic, for the girl wishes she had never had to assume the role she had to in the rebellion, but she sees no alternative if she wants to be able to confront Tavore.

The way Erikson decides to build the climax of the book, therefore, is very appropriate: in very general terms, in the scene in question, Erikson inserts the reader in a fatalistic point of view, which doesn’t see a way out. This reinforces the element of tragedy, because it leaves the readers aware of how helpless the character is, with a terrible destiny that is clear and inescapable. One of House of Chains’ themes important for the success of the climax is the multiplicity of identities: several characters in the novel adopt a second name that reveals a change in their personality and, in the aforementioned scene, Erikson abandons one of those names to reinforce the personal drama of the situation.

The author also deserves praise for how he relates certain words to themes and characters. If someone is described as broken or damaged, for example, chances are high that such a figure is going to be eventually associated with the main antagonist of the series, whose name is part of the same semantic field. Such consistency, therefore, ends up rewarding more attentive readers.

Another device that Erikson uses is alliterations. They don’t come to play as fundamental a role as in Deadhouse Gates, but they always reinforce some element of the scenes in which they appear: repetition of the consonant sounds of the letters ‘f’ and ‘b’, for example, reflects Karsa’s repeated movements as he forges his weapon: “Smaller flakes removed from the twin edges, fist one side, then flipping the blade between blows, back and forth, all the way up the length”.

Here, Erikson also continues the pattern of creating comic characters by building a unique voice that plays with language. In this novel, we have Greyfrog, a demon who, by communicating telepathically, has the habit of expressly saying the intonation of his sentences: “What comes cannot be chained. Warning. Caution. Remain here, lovely child. My brother can come to no further harm, but my path is clear. Glee. I shall eat humans this night”.

Regarding its connection with previous books, House of Chains goes back to some of the main themes of the series, such as the reproach of betrayal (“Betrayal was a mystery. Inexplicable to Lostara. She only knew that it delivered the deepest wounds of all”) and indifference, and still creates an efficient thematic rhyme with one of Deadhouse Gates’ most striking sentences (“Children are dying…”), when one of the antagonists exposes one of the consequences of their plan (“Children will die”).

Nevertheless, despite having all these qualities, the novel shows some flaws in several points of its structure. First, we have Erikson’s apparent difficulty in picking up some points of view from the second volume: Kalam and Crokus artificially exit their state of inertia by the urge of a god who acts basically like one of those NPCs of an RPG game that appear out of nowhere to just to reunite the group. Besides that, some events in the middle of the novel are very inconsequential to the story, such as Kalam’s random confrontation with an ancient demon. If the result of such a struggle becomes important in other volumes – a habit of the series – it doesn’t justify the fact that it is so irrelevant here.

The novel has its good share of superfluous and unnecessary scenes: Karsa’’s fight against a shark near the end of the first act neither advances the plot nor develops the character, as Karsas’s strength had already been very well established when the event occurs. In other words, it is just an action scene repetitive in its narrative purpose.

Erikson also appeals more than once to a fake death scene and equally reprehensible are the instants in which a point of view is cut off just when valuable information is going to be revealed: the hook works in grabbing the readers’ attention, but it is a very poor narrative device when compared to the standard set for the series.

Also inferior is the friendship between the characters of Onrack and Trull when put before the duo of fantastic creatures in Deadhouse Gates: if the relationship of Mappo and Icarium arose from a tragedy that also extended to their future, that of Onrack and Trull is born out of chance and takes time to get some direction. Worse still is to attest that the two characters end up without a climax, as their plot is interrupted just when it will occur.

Finally, Erikson makes the mistake of continuing to introduce new characters even as the narrative nears its end, giving little or no space for them to be developed, as well as slowing down the pace of the narrative.

House of Chains maintains the ambition of the series written by Steven Erikson and, if it suffers from a few mishaps, it never fails to delve into the study of various complex themes and characters. Therefore, it being the weakest volume so far doesn’t prevent it from still being a pretty great book.

December 17, 2018.

Originally published in Portuguese on January 29, 2017.