Gardens of The Moon - Style and Themes

Style and Themes

Stephen Moss writes in the Guardian of Gardens of the Moon, "what does it exactly mean?" He adds: "And what about the sentence, 'The winds were contrary the day columns of smoke rose over the Mouse Quarter of Malaz City'? Shouldn't that have a preposition, I ask Mr Erikson politely?" And for the uninitiated Moss parses a paragraph from the novel:

"It was midday, but the flash and thundering concussion of magery made the air seem dark and heavy. Armour clanking, a soldier appeared along the wall... The man leaned vambraced forearms on the battlement, the scabbard of his longsword scraping against the stones. 'Glad for your pure blood, eh?' he asked, grey eyes on the smouldering city below." Coming to terms with this 523-page book is clearly going to take a while, though the seven-page glossary explaining the structure of Malazan civilization, the mores of the Barghasts, Darus, Gadrobis and Jaghuts, and the geography of Darujhistan will undoubtedly help.

Additionally, Moss compares Garden of the Moon's complex plot to Joyce's Finnegans Wake: "...I don't want to be unfair to him. Was James Joyce ever pressed for a detailed textual analysis of Finnegans Wake?"

Andrew Leonard, writing for Salon.com, explains that the complexity of Gardens of the Moon offers the reader the opportunity to explore a rich and varied new world:

Erikson is a master of lost and forgotten epochs, a weaver of ancient epics on a scale that would approach absurdity if it wasn't so much fun. His time span ranges over hundreds of thousands of years. Races (both human and nonhuman), cultures, empires and even gods rise and fall. Vast struggles range across multiple continents and dimensions of time and space. There are so many fragments of myth, so many hints of back-story unending, and so little explained, that it is all the reader can do to comprehend what is going on, to hang on to the narrative as if clinging by one hand to the underbelly of a flying dragon. (And yes, there are dragons, and magic swords, and quests, too. But not a whole lot of teenagers.)

Erikson trained as an archeologist, which is apparent in the world he creates in which ruins abound, and history goes back for hundreds of millennia. The concept of time, and epochs spanning eras and ice ages are apparent in the plot of Gardens of the Moon. Moreover, the span of time is so great that tribes are long lost, some characters, once gods, are "themselves living fossils", and others have been at war with the gods for a long time.

The world Erikson creates in the first book of the Malazan series, is immense and immensely immersed in time. Leonard writes: "One character, Icarium, 'a mixed blood Jaghut wanderer' who pops up from time to time wreaking havoc, and who has lived for eons, suffers from his own devastating memory loss, trapped in an eternal search for the truth of his own identity. Everyone, it seems, must at one point or another struggle with the immensity of this world's past."

Gardens of the Moon opens with a war scene and continues to follow the ebb and flow of war across the Malazan empire. Leonard writes about the series: "War is a constant – from continent to continent, century upon century. Erikson's universe is a violent one, Gothic in intensity, without clear demarcation between good and evil. It's perhaps more like the real world, then, than most fantasy, which so clearly differentiates between light and dark."

Furthermore, Leonard believes summarising the plot is "cheating."