Twenty years ago, Steven Erikson was gleefully producing his Malazan Book of the Fallen sequence at a pace that even Brandon Sanderson might feel was a bit much. Every year-and-a-bit, Erikson would unload a near-thousand-page brick packed with epic battles, moral philosophising and wry humour. We ate well, my friends, and perhaps took it for granted.
In the decade and a half since the Malazan Book of the Fallen was completed in all its yak-stunning, shelf-bending, potsherd-uncovering glory, Erikson has switched to a more well-deserved, chilled pace. He has produced two volumes of a prequel trilogy (put on hold due to slow sales, but he's back at work on the finale now), Kharkanas; several unrelated science fiction works; and has now delivered the second of four books in a planned Malazan sequel series, checking in on the Malazan Empire and its world ten years after the events of The Crippled God.
This new series - The Tales of Witness - feels like the main Malazan sequence in miniature. The original series opened on the continent of Genabackis before switching to Seven Cities. The first book in this new series, The God is Not Willing (2021), checked in on Genabackis and here this second volume switches gears and visits Seven Cities once again. No Life Forsaken acts as a sequel or coda to the entire Seven Cities arc from the original series, in fact, including House of Chains and The Bonehunters. That arc in the original series was about Seven Cities fighting for its independence and ultimately failing, whilst here the original, failed rebellion is now inspiration for a bloodier, renewed fight.
No Life Forsaken muses on the idealism of the cause. The Malazan Empire, especially under the redoubtable Emperor Mallick Rel (the effective villain of the original Seven Cities arc, particularly the monumental Deadhouse Gates), is an imperial, occupying, exploitative power and the natives demanding their independence is understandable. But the natives of Seven Cities are also a fractious and unruly lot, more likely to plunge the subcontinent into an orgy of violence, religious blood-letting, ancestral score-settling and a genocidal pursuit of ideological or holy purity than they are to usher in a new age of enlightened peace. It's interesting that there are those on both sides who seem eager for war and also those anxious to stop the carnage before it can start.
As usual with Erikson, the story rotates through a cast of almost entirely new faces (only three characters and a donkey show up from earlier novels and have a bare handful of paragraphs between them). We have the High Fist of Seven Cities and the Adjunct of the Emperor, who has shown up to gauge the threat of rebellion from both the natives and the charismatic Fist himself. The Claw, the sorcerous and elite agents of the Emperor's will, are on the scene as well. Malazan soldiers and marines, philosopher-savants one and all, also provide perspectives on events, alongside the High Priestess of Va'Shaik in G'danisban and even the goddess herself, along with her Inquisitor, a figure noted for his peculiar brand of atheism. Mercenaries, criminals, a random Toblakai (no, not that one), an Elder God or two, and of course Nub, King of the Bhokaral (all hail Nub!), all chime in. The book may be promising more than its modest page count can allow, in fact, and several subplots are left to unfold off-screen.
Also as usual, Erikson is more interested in the themes of his story than delivering crowd-pleasing results. The book hints at gargantuan battles of apocalyptic proportions and teases vast scenes of carnage, but never quite gets there. Everyone involved in the story seems to have read Deadhouse Gates and The Bonehunters as well, and are not eager to blow up more cities and kill tens of thousands of people for the spectacle. The struggle in the book is less between opposed ideologies or politics or faiths, but between common sense and those who measure success in how high the innocent dead can be stacked like cordwood. No life should be forsaken, indeed.
It's certainly a slower, more thoughtful book than The God is Not Willing, which felt like a more crowd-pleasing, focused, directed slice of Malazan. This book is the other side of the series, the more philosophical, chewing-the-fat and enjoying wry humour side of things. It's not Malazan at its most indulgent - the book fills just 400 pages, making it a novella by some of Erikson's earlier standards - and the story benefits from its slimline approach, but there's definitely less of an urge to deliver the Greatest Hits to readers. Karsa fans will probably be unsurprised to hear that, once again, he is playing the role of Sir Not-Appearing-In-This-Volume. On the negative side the book feels like it takes a while to find its feet but, once it does, events accelerate to a typically impressive conclusion.
No Life Forsaken (****½) is a dusty, thoughtful book that takes a while to get going, but once it does it delivers a thoughtful and striking piece of compassionate, intelligent fantasy. And the good news is that we won't have too long to wait for more, as Erikson completed the third book in the series, Legacies of Betrayal, at the same time as this one, and hopefully that should be with us next year.
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