Book Review: Crack’d Pot Trail by Steven Erikson
Steven Erikson’s Malazan Book of the Fallen series took the fantasy world by storm when Gardens of the Moon was published in 1999, leading to a 10-novel epic fantasy series, several additional novels written by Ian Esslemont, and a number of novellas. Earlier this year, Crack’d Pot Trail, a tale of Bauchelain and Korbal Broach, hit the shelves, offering a strangely compelling narrative concept in an over-embellished, long-winded package. Using the backdrop of the Bauchelain and Korbal Broach novellas, Crack’d Pot Trail follows the Nehemothanai and their artist/pilgrim companions as they continue their hunt of the infamous Bauchelain and Korbal Broach (a less-than-reputable pair, to say the least). Stuck traversing the wasteland of the Crack’d Pot Trail with dwindling resources, the artists are pitted against themselves in a feat of narrative prowess: whoever tells the worst tale may become the next meal. The question becomes: Who can play the narrative game with cunning and skill, and who will flounder in a sea of their own artistic deficiencies? Crack’d Pot Trail does two interesting things: It draws upon a rich history of larger narratives told through artists weaving miniature tales. It provides a meant-to-be-humorous, if not disturbing, scenario involving cannibalism and artists. The first of these will become obvious to anyone familiar with Boccaccio’s The Decameron or Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales (among other stories, new and old). Erikson plays with the narratives-within-a-narrative to examine the nature of the artist as a complex subject — that is that rather than showing a series of people telling stories, Erikson challenges the nature of the story by deconstructing their origins and their tellers. What Crack’d Pot Trail does well lies in its ability to expose the boundaries of authorship, which may interest non-traditional fantasy readers more than those who come to fantasy for an adventure (this may also be specific to the Malazan readership, since Erikson’s work has often been cited as a participant in the nihilistic overthrow of fantasy — whatever that means). Erikson, however, explores these questions in a written style which reads as authentic, but comes off as exceedingly convoluted and linguistically excessive. The result is that much of the book is difficult to read, often at the expense of the narrative (within a narrative). Sentences are bloated to a degree that they often have to be re-read in order to capture details or meanings. Such details could easily have been said with greater strength if Erikson wrote with more concision. For example: Suffice it to say she was the first to set out from the Gates of Nowhere and her manservant Mister Must Ambertroshin, seated on the high bench of the carriage, his face shielded by a broad woven hat, uttered his welcome to the other travelers with a thick-volumed nod, and in this generous instant the conveyance and the old woman presumed within it became an island on wheels round which the others clustered like shrikes and gulls, for as everyone knows, no island truly stays in one place (16). Or: Apto rubbed at his face as if needing to convince himself that this was not a fevered nightmare (as might haunt all professional critics), and I do imagine that, given the option, he would have fled into the wastes at the first opportunity, not that such an opportunity was forthcoming given Steck Marynd and his perpetually cocked crossbow which even now rested lightly on his lap (he’d done with his pacing by this time) (41). Or this paragraph: Is there anything more fraught than family? We do not choose our kin, after all, and even by marriage one finds oneself saddled with a whole gaggle of relations, all gathered to witness the fresh mixing of blood and, if of proper spirit, get appalingly drunk, sufficient to ruin the entire proceedings and to be known thereafter in infamy. For myself, I have always considered this gesture, offered to countless relations on their big day, to be nothing more than protracted revenge, and have of course personally partaken of it many times. Closer to home, as it were, why, every new wife simply adds to the wild, unwieldy clan. The excitement never ends! (150) The problem isn’t that these sentences are meaningless, but that they often distract from the narrative, either because they are exceedingly long (to the point where comprehension becomes difficult) or because they digress into complicated musings about things that, oddly, play little significance in the story. Some digressions are amusing, such as when the narrator criticizes critics, but outside of the dialogue (with exception to when stories are being told), Crack’d Pot Trail is a difficult book to read, without offering the kind of payoff you expect from books with complicated styles (such as one would expect with a Pynchon novel). What should effectively be an exploration of the artist and authorship through the guise of a cannibalistic contest is really a narrative of digressions that seems determined to avoid focus in exchange for abstraction and incompleteness. This is perhaps why I was disappointed with Crack’d Pot Trail. Erikson sets up a story that should be endlessly hilarious and compelling, but the result is a rambling mess which, to me, seemed to go nowhere because so many of the stories told are never completed. Whereas other narratives with similar forms have provided ample room for continued exploration, Erikson’s novel ends without much fanfare or purpose. The main points are easy enough to pick out, but I found myself unwilling to traipse through the prose to make the additional connections that would lend strength to Crack’d Pot Trail‘s narrative (there are interesting connections to make, though). Instead, I got to the end of the book, after two weeks of struggling, without much interest in looking at it again — a feeling I don’t wish to have when reading anything, in part because negative critical reviews are the least entertaining to write (in most cases). Crack’d Pot Trail leaves a lot to be desired. Fans of the Malazan series may love this particular book, yet
Nihilism and Genre: Some Random Thoughts
I’ve been thinking a lot recently about the issue of nihilism/darkness in genre fiction. This post will come off as a kind of random exploration of things swimming around in my head. Some seem to think that we live in a world that is far more nihilistic and dark than any other moment in the past. To some extent, that might be true, particularly if you pick and choose which years you use to make the comparison. But reality doesn’t hold up well to pick-and-choose methods. While the present is certainly beset with death, destruction, and violent rhetoric, the same could be said of almost every other moment in our history. The difference, perhaps, has to do with where those elements are directed. (Note: by nihilism, I am referring to the form I think most imagine when they say “nihilism.” That is that morality is not innate to human beings, but a product of our cultural constructions. In other words, morality is artificial, not natural. There are plenty of other camps of nihilism, but I make the assumption that people who name “nihilism” do so with morality in mind.) The 50s are often cited as the best years in America by cultural purists; but to make that argument, you have to ignore the rampant levels of sexism and racism, which permeated every level of contemporary 50s culture. Toss in a few wars, famines, McCarthyism, and other disturbing events and you end up with an era which looks nice for a select cast of individuals living in a select group of nations. (I make the assumption that few would say the 20s, 30s, and 40s were amazing years for everyone, what with the aftereffects of WWI, the Great Depression, WW2, and so on). If we move to the 60s, what we end up with is an era that, once more, doesn’t look that great. The Civil Rights Movement was important, but the era was home to some of the worst violent rhetoric we have ever seen, directed at one group of people for pointless reasons. Then you had the Vietnam Conflict, which bled into the 70s, and numerous other problems the world over. And let’s not forget the Apartheid government of South Africa, who were playing the racism game in a way that would make the 50s and 60s in America look like a picnic. The point is that there are always wars and conflicts. There are always battles of ideology. There is always suffering. But ultimately, the world gets slightly better every decade. Usually. There are fewer conflicts today than ever before, even if America is losing its bloody mind and tearing itself apart from the inside (a product of intolerant people driven by intolerant ideology who refuse to admit to their intolerant nature). We may be in a bit of a rut right now, but we’re all human beings…and we always come out on top. Eventually. We’re notoriously good at survival and progress, even if we’re slow as molasses at it. These developments show something unique about the human species: that our moral frameworks change and adjust over time. Men thought it moral to deny women basic American rights, but eventually changed their tune (for the most part). Whites saw blacks as inferior and wanted to exclude them from white culture, but good people rose up and fought against that racist ideology, leaving us a better world (though racism still exists). And now the tide of public opinion is changing in favor to gays and lesbians; the push against them stems from a kind of re-imagined racist ideology as anti-contamination narrative driven primarily through narrow-minded and contaminating religious interpretation. A mouthful, for sure. But things are getting better, and the people who don’t see it are either too focused on this single moment of terror or on their own ideological view of the world, in which change constitutes wickedness. What does all of this have to do with genre fiction? A few have talked about the nihilistic feel of fantasy and science fiction in recent decades. The good and evil dichotomies, we are told, have disappeared, or been complicated by the dismembering of moral objectivism/naturalism (i.e., through moral nihilism and relativism). Similarly, we are told that because fiction is a reflection of our time, genre fiction is unreasonably dark. But I don’t buy into either of these ideas. There have always been optimistic genre stories with clearly-defined sides of good and evil. True, many of those stories are found on our TV or movie screens instead of on our pages (depending on what you read), but the idea that nihilism, in its moral form, and fiction-as-reflection-of-the-present have done something negative for literature or society seems specious. When we break down the moral boundaries of our ideologies and start to look at how people are shaped by culture, I think we start to come out of the darkness of ideological purity. That is that we come to understand one another as members of the same species. Our fiction, I think, reflects this process of developmental understanding more so than it reflects the results (in its intentions, insofar as those can be determined). I wouldn’t be surprised, for example, to see stories in our near future dealing with allegories of the current forms of racism (the West vs. the Middle East). And those explorations will run the gamut of types: propaganda for, propaganda against, and deep exploration of both sides. And reading fiction that deals with these issues helps train us. Those kinds of explorations are good for us. We need them in order to progress. Because our literature and our films are gateways to developing a better world, to making us think about where we are and where we really ought to be — in the pragmatic utopianism sense. Genre fiction is a part of that process. A great and glorious process of change. I’d even argue that the nature of good and evil in fiction for young people,