A little while ago I asked here if Gardens of the Moon (the first book in the Malazan series) was ever going to get moving. Well it did, about 400 pages in, enough for me to read it all the way through. And now that I've finished it, I wonder what the hell that was all about.
I honestly can't call this a good book. While not badly written or clichéd, there are so many flaws that I really hope the second part makes up for them. To name a few:
- Fucking endless truckloads of characters, of whom only a handful I can even remember what they were like. I honestly couldn't keep track at all of who was working for what, why, where or what they were trying to accomplish. The characters whose motivations stayed clear I can count with one hand, the rest blurred together into an endless sea of interchangeability. Most of them are not fleshed out, developed or even introduced properly, they're just thrown into the mix like we're supposed to care about them automatically. 600 pages in there's still new characters being introduced, and at that point I couldn't give less of a shit. The first time I was even remotely interested in anything was when Crokus and Sorry were united, upon which I realized I hadn't cared about anything any of the characters were trying to do before that at all. Plus, many significant characters from the first half hardly even show up in the second half, and some are even killed off. What the fuck was the point of Hairlock, for example? He just pranced around being a dick and then (spoiler) died, with him not mattering to the book at all.
- The world and how it works is weakly explained, if at all. I can understand what the author was going for, ie. the world being organically explained through character actions and their dialogue, but the book falls flat on its ass with two broken kneecaps and a severe rugburn in this respect. Everyone seemed to be a magician, some sort of champion for a god, a super assassin or something else, and it was nearly all completely incomprehensible. How magic and its limitations and the Warrens were supposed to work is still lost to me. Most of the time I didn't even know what the characters were supposed to be doing. Was going into Warrens a meditation? Moving into some pocket dimension? Some sort of ward? I have no idea. Combine this with an endless barrage of your typical bingly-bongly fantasy names for things, and at times the book seemed to be written in some alien language
- The plot moves at the pace of a crippled snail. I can hardly remember anything from the first 300 pages, aside from it feeling like sweet fuck-all was happening. Whenever something interesting happened, it was over all too soon, and then we went back to more characters whom we've never met and are supposed to follow them.
- The general plot seemed disjointed as fuck. It felt like a second draft had never been written, and many plotlines which were followed for hundreds of pages ended up fizzling out with zero relevance, and the focus shifted to entirely different things. Or at least that's what it felt like. The book skips over significant periods of time between chapters: for example, when Tattersail escaped from wherever she was, I thought we were going to follow her for a while. Nope. The next time we see her, she's already caught. It took forever for the various plotlines to come together, and when they did, they felt completely disparate. One is about a world-ending monster rising from a slumber of millennia, the other... is about a party with some scheming among nobility. Guess how well they mixed together? Like ice cream and chicken soup, that's how.
- For all its 700-page length, the book both moves too fast and hardly moves at all. Situation changes and environments are often described in single sentences if at all, leaving hardly any time for the viewer to paint a picture of what is happening. When the big baddie was defeated at the end, I didn't realize it for like 10 pages, because there was simply no description of it, just some characters saying "Eh, he's dead". No grand finale, no feeling of accomplishment or that something has happened. I can't even tell what the Big Baddie was supposed to look like! Like Jesus, that's the one thing you'd think would be imperative in a fantasy novel but nope, the only thing I remember about it was that it had tusks, and that's it. Was it humanoid? An octopus? A chair? A giant walking penis? Fucked if I know.
This ended up being a rant didn't it? Well it was just something I had to get off my chest. I am still going to seek out the second book, but the only thing it has going for it right now is your word that it's supposed to be really good. And possibly Anomander Rake, who seems like a cool character. Please, let it be good.
TL;DR: Gardens of the Moon is fairly well written and original. It is also long, slow, boring, at times nearly incomprehensible, has about a zillion characters, poorly explained and disjointed. By only the slightest margin was it interesting enough for me to want to read more of the series. Not a good first installment at all.
Agree or disagree?
I honestly can't call this a good book. While not badly written or clichéd, there are so many flaws that I really hope the second part makes up for them. To name a few:
- Fucking endless truckloads of characters, of whom only a handful I can even remember what they were like. I honestly couldn't keep track at all of who was working for what, why, where or what they were trying to accomplish. The characters whose motivations stayed clear I can count with one hand, the rest blurred together into an endless sea of interchangeability. Most of them are not fleshed out, developed or even introduced properly, they're just thrown into the mix like we're supposed to care about them automatically. 600 pages in there's still new characters being introduced, and at that point I couldn't give less of a shit. The first time I was even remotely interested in anything was when Crokus and Sorry were united, upon which I realized I hadn't cared about anything any of the characters were trying to do before that at all. Plus, many significant characters from the first half hardly even show up in the second half, and some are even killed off. What the fuck was the point of Hairlock, for example? He just pranced around being a dick and then (spoiler) died, with him not mattering to the book at all.
- The world and how it works is weakly explained, if at all. I can understand what the author was going for, ie. the world being organically explained through character actions and their dialogue, but the book falls flat on its ass with two broken kneecaps and a severe rugburn in this respect. Everyone seemed to be a magician, some sort of champion for a god, a super assassin or something else, and it was nearly all completely incomprehensible. How magic and its limitations and the Warrens were supposed to work is still lost to me. Most of the time I didn't even know what the characters were supposed to be doing. Was going into Warrens a meditation? Moving into some pocket dimension? Some sort of ward? I have no idea. Combine this with an endless barrage of your typical bingly-bongly fantasy names for things, and at times the book seemed to be written in some alien language
- The plot moves at the pace of a crippled snail. I can hardly remember anything from the first 300 pages, aside from it feeling like sweet fuck-all was happening. Whenever something interesting happened, it was over all too soon, and then we went back to more characters whom we've never met and are supposed to follow them.
- The general plot seemed disjointed as fuck. It felt like a second draft had never been written, and many plotlines which were followed for hundreds of pages ended up fizzling out with zero relevance, and the focus shifted to entirely different things. Or at least that's what it felt like. The book skips over significant periods of time between chapters: for example, when Tattersail escaped from wherever she was, I thought we were going to follow her for a while. Nope. The next time we see her, she's already caught. It took forever for the various plotlines to come together, and when they did, they felt completely disparate. One is about a world-ending monster rising from a slumber of millennia, the other... is about a party with some scheming among nobility. Guess how well they mixed together? Like ice cream and chicken soup, that's how.
- For all its 700-page length, the book both moves too fast and hardly moves at all. Situation changes and environments are often described in single sentences if at all, leaving hardly any time for the viewer to paint a picture of what is happening. When the big baddie was defeated at the end, I didn't realize it for like 10 pages, because there was simply no description of it, just some characters saying "Eh, he's dead". No grand finale, no feeling of accomplishment or that something has happened. I can't even tell what the Big Baddie was supposed to look like! Like Jesus, that's the one thing you'd think would be imperative in a fantasy novel but nope, the only thing I remember about it was that it had tusks, and that's it. Was it humanoid? An octopus? A chair? A giant walking penis? Fucked if I know.
This ended up being a rant didn't it? Well it was just something I had to get off my chest. I am still going to seek out the second book, but the only thing it has going for it right now is your word that it's supposed to be really good. And possibly Anomander Rake, who seems like a cool character. Please, let it be good.
TL;DR: Gardens of the Moon is fairly well written and original. It is also long, slow, boring, at times nearly incomprehensible, has about a zillion characters, poorly explained and disjointed. By only the slightest margin was it interesting enough for me to want to read more of the series. Not a good first installment at all.
Agree or disagree?
