Yeah… weird one. I think this happens when the author is caught so deep in his own lore that despite using lots of words he forgets to explain half the stuff that is going on here. It is all inside his head but not on the page and there may be some people who have read this books enough that they can guess what is in his head but most readers won‘t be able to. Either that or he just didn‘t know how to resolve this scene in a manner that worked a little smoother.
Personally, I thought that they get angry because they knew that their friend, her lover was waiting to meet her (as a ghost) and that she was laying to rest her love before having this last encounter… something like that.
I feel like some of this stuff should have been caught by his editor. There are more such things. Some subplots. I don‘t think the phrase „kill your darlings“ was ever uttered when these books were edited.
Then there are the character appearances by description only that are never named and left to guess for the advanced reader and confuse the first time reader? But after 10 books maybe the editor is caught inside the world as much as the author ? I don‘t know.
I like the books, I would never have reread them if I didn‘t. But with that much text of course there are parts that I enjoyed a little less, that confused me or that I wish I didn‘t have to struggle so to make sense of. After the first two books, which I have grokked enough to understand it, I skipped most of the pre-chapter poetry because all the references in there just go over my head.
Well, yeah, that’s spelled out. That doesn’t make it any more nonsensical than my description. You don’t threaten to murder someone at a funeral because you think they might be about to give up on an undead former commander of yours.
These are not well-adjusted people I would guess. Isn‘t Hedge there? Just saying… the series went to great lengths to make sure we knew what sappers are like.
I am trying to figure out if it makes any sense in the book‘s world.
My biggest issue with Malazan in particular and fantasy series in general is this. It is visually clear when I look at the stack of Malazan books that editors were used by the author to less effect after book 3 and possibly not at all after book 6.
I don’t know if it’s an effect of early ones selling well, exhaustion, the author having so much more commitment to the material throughout, or authorial ego growing. Whatever though, the genre seems like it will have less punch and clarity on endings and throughlines because of this issue.
I once ‘rage-quit’ on an author when a character was told something at the end of volume 1, and then at the beginning of volume 2 (which was, chronologically, immediately after the earlier events) someone told them the same thing and it came as a surprise. I can imagine how such things might occur, but I don’t ever want to feel that I’m paying more attention than the people writing the books.
I distinctly remember feeling that there was a good book buried in George R. R. Martin’s A Dance with Dragons, just waiting for an editor to let it out.
The best explanation I can come up with is that the writing is relaying what happened in a roleplaying session (the books apparently being based on roleplaying campaigns?), with the roleplayers doing their best to inject moments of “poignancy” and/or “tension” between characters so everyone gets to do more of their roleplaying.
The fact that the characters, as written, had no real reason to be doing these things gets lost along the way.
Some events were roleplayed like the ending of Toll the Hounds. But it is not a retelling of their games.
At the end, you have a bunch of soldiers gathered at the funeral of two friends. The non-human centuries-old lover of another dead friend approaches holding a stone that the soldiers have heard in her culture is a symbol of “the gift of her heart”. All the soldiers go to draw their swords, threatening to kill her just because they think that stone is probably the one she carries for her most-recently dead lover that they all respect and they think she’s about to leave it as an offering at the grave of the funeral they are all at.
They were not threatening to kill her in my opinion. The drawn weapons signify something of course but not a real threat to her life. Hedge said it: “But that stone – we know what it means to your kind. You just shocked us, that’s all.” And they shocked her too.
This scene and the whole ending is a bit on the sentimental side. I was a bit surprised by the tone in the end, never would have expected that. But I feel grateful too, I wouldn’t have liked a dark ending
I read a novel that was based on roleplaying sessions, and it was not good. You could see where the GM had rolled some dice and short-cut things for the purposes of moving the story along, and the author had more or less used those sequence verbatim… except in the absence of a GM rolling dice, it just came across as ridiculous.
The example I remember most clearly was the group entering a ransacked house which was described as being in a completely chaotic state – the contents of all shelves and drawers strewn in piles all over the floor – and, despite not knowing what they were looking for, just casually finding the exact thing they needed and then immediately leaving without looking at anything else or even knowing whether what they had found was actually relevant (but of course it leads them directly to the next phase of the story).
You can get away with something like that in a live group, but not in a book. I did actually like some of the story, but the translation from its origins needed a lot of reworking. (Related to earlier discussion, I assume there wasn’t much in the way of editorial input…)
Someone in my company has published several novels which are essentially based on his sessions as a GM. I’m curious (but would be surprised) if it’s the same person.
AFAIK this author has published only 1-2 books, so I believe it couldn’t be the same person. Interesting to hear that this approach is not entirely unusual, though.
See: the whole phenomenon of LitRPG, where the books are written to reflect roleplaying game logic and the like. I love RPGs and I love a good book, but this is definitely not my bag.
Jill Bearup’s Just Stab Me Now borders on this: an author is trying to write an enemies-to-lovers romance, but her protagonist keeps arguing with her. Not perfect but good fun. (I also recommend Bearup’s YouTube channel.)
LitRPG is a huge area with a lot of mediocre stuff. Dungeon Crawler Carl is by far the best in my opinion and it steps away more and more from its LitRPG origins with every book.
I read this several years ago, but someone just commented on how rapidly aircraft technology changed (albeit talking about the 1930s), and this book about the rise and fall of the post-WW2 British jet aircraft industry came to mind. It’s really good.
I finally finished reading this, following my typical “dip into it for a few pages, every few days” (and with numerous long breaks) approach. It was fine? The risk when reading the biography of a performer is that the likely reason you were interested in reading about them is based on their public performances, and that those will constitute a relatively small part of the story of who they were in private, and it’s very hard to know in advance whether you’ll appreciate the latter as much as the former (especially when the subject themselves isn’t around to contribute). I suppose I also found the early parts of her life more interesting than the latter – partly because that’s when she was really breaking new ground, and partly because I simply wasn’t familiar with her later works.
It was interesting enough, and probably as comprehensive as possible, but I can’t particularly recommend it to the casual fan – I feel like anyone keen enough for this to be a must-read would probably have read it already.
