"In the seas...time is unveiled. In the depths ride currents of vast antiquity. In the shallows whisper the future. The tides flow between them in ceaseless exchange." --Mael, elder god of the sea.

Last week we started to look at one of the great underrated strengths and appeals of fantasy fiction: social critique. Unlike writers of realism, fantasy writers can examine difficult, politically-charged or historically-slanted issues important in today’s culture, but do so on the merits of the issue itself, thereby avoiding divisive connotations. For example, if a fantasist wrote a novel about the descendants of a defeated army that cling to the illusion of a great and noble cause, an illusion which papers over a sordid and brutal reality…. You see where I’m going with this? Or maybe a tale about a king who conned his way into power and used his authority capriciously, endangering his subjects and his country. You couldn’t do that in realism without Laura Ingraham delivering nastygrams via Fox and Ted Nugent….doing whatever it is that Ted Nugent does.

Fact is, abuse of power and historic revisionism are both eternal conditions. If you want to look at the thing itself, perhaps the most instructive way to examine the ascendance of such a condition is to reset it in a place not of this world and thereby strip away all the political and historic connotations. Last week I wrote about R.A. Salvatore and C.J. Cherryh. You would not read Salvatore and think “Birmingham bus boycott,” or Cherryh and think “Freedom Caucus.” But the critique is there, and it holds. In neither case is social commentary the primary motivator; the respective novels are about other subjects — but in both the social critique in the narrative adds power and resonance to their fictions.

Maybe nobody does this better than Steven Erikson. Maybe there are other writers who do this as well, but I haven’t read them yet. This week and next (and maybe one week after that, depending on how things go) I want to discuss Midnight Tides, the fifth volume of The Malazan Book of the Fallen, an enormous ten-volume series of interlocking novels.

These are not easy reads but they are rewarding, and much of what Erikson has done is worth talking about. In the service of full disclosure, I’ve only read the first five so far. I have reasons: 1) each book is almost a thousand pages and is densely written; 2) I have a life, a farm, a novel in progress, dogs that regularly beg for ball-throwing, a cat that chews on my papers if I don’t render sufficient attention, and a patient spouse who does many things but doesn’t cook; 3) the books are so absorbing that if I gave myself over to reading them in succession I’d do nothing else for about two years because 3a) these novels reward re-reading in an enormous way. Therefore: so far, only five. But those five are packed with material worth pondering, so ponder we shall.

Tonight we ponder about: Capitalism, and the subversion of expectations. Shall we commence?

Midnight Tides is a stutter-step in the rhythm of reading TMBOTF. The first four novels shuttle back and forth between parallel military campaigns on two different continents, four armies in two struggles and compelling sympathetic characters on all sides. The point is, you’re in a rhythm: which of the Paran siblings is going to figure in this book? Are we going with the Bridgeburners or the Bonehunters?

Instead, it’s And Now, Something Completely Different. The action opens on yet a third continent, disconnected to the world we’ve moved in for some four thousand pages, and two entirely new civilizations to meet.

The Tiste Edur are a group of tribes (think archetypal Native Americans) recently united under the control of one Hannan Mosag, the Warlock King. The Tiste Edur are the last of a group of tribes to remain free of conquest and subjugation by the Letherii empire, and Letheras wants to conquer the Tiste Edur. Yes, parallels that carry the perfume of Manifest Destiny do apply.

In fact, the novel begins with a particularly interesting clash when, in violation of their long-standing treaties, the Letherii send a fleet of ships into Tiste Edur territory and slaughter a harvest of seals, seals that the Edur need to avoid conditions like starvation. The Edur retaliate by sorcerous means, slaughtering the sailors and filling their ships with ghosts that return and wreak carnage in their home port.

The Letherii, arriving for negotiations, admit that the harvest was illegal, but since a harvest took place and that harvest is now in Edur hands, by treaty the Edur owe the Letherii, and the Letherii expect to be paid. In consideration of the fact that the Edur don’t use money, the Letherii are willing to accept land in compensation. If you can read this passage and not recall the sophistry and betrayal of countless treaties between Native Americans and both government and private individuals in the name of Progress, then saying that history may not repeat itself but it certainly rhymes must not hold much meaning.

And then there’s that subversion of expectations thing that Erickson is so good at doing. This one is nicely timed. After a couple hundred pages of exposure to the tribes that were destroyed by Letherii greed, we think we know this plot. However, the Edur, despite considerable internal stress and unrest, are ready for their guests; they respond that they don’t have the harvest, but since the Letherii agree that a harvest was taken, under the terms of the treaty it’s the Edur who are owed. Hannan Mosag, leading the negotiation, says

“We are undecided, at the moment, on the nature of recompense we will demand of you. After all, we have no need of coin.” “We have brought gifts!” Quillas shouted. “For which you will then charge us, with interest. We are familiar with your pattern of cultural conquest among neighbouring tribes, Prince. That the situation is now reversed earns our sympathy, but as you are wont to say, business is business.” (1, p. 432)

We spend a lot of time with the Tiste Edur, and they’re not human, so we should explain a bit about them. It’s a tribal society based on honor and courage, heavily traditional and segregated by class and gender roles, which is a bit unusual in Erikson’s fiction. Among the Edur, only the males are warriors, and warriors rule. The people live in longhouses organized by clan affiliation, and they take slaves from among the Letherii who are captured. In general, a Letherii slave in a Tiste Edur village has it better and enjoys more rights than does a poor free citizen in Letheras. The Tiste Edur don’t use currency except to sheathe their dead warriors, and we are invited to like them and root for them as the obviously better guys in the impending conflict. I’m leaving lots of information out of this description but, remember — broad strokes, folks.

And there’s Letheras. The “children of the first empire,” the Letherii are humans. They worship an empty throne. They have a king (who does precious little as events swirl around him and whose wife and heir are thoroughly disagreeable but that doesn’t mean they deserve what happens to them), and while the king is a good enough sort, he is also a sufficiently diminished figure that Tehol, the middle of the Beddict brothers, feels comfortable naming a two-headed graveyard bug after him.

What the Letherii really worship is wealth. Money. The more the better. Their capital city is clotted with refugees and “half-bloods,” the raped offspring of their conquered subjects, who starve, who disappear, and who become Indebted — a fate in some ways worse than death, because the debt becomes the Indebted’s inheritance, debts passing through successive generations. In Letheras, nothing is worse than being in debt.

The clash of these two civilizations is a resonant one, but not as cataclysmic as one might think (more on that next week). Erikson is largely in the business of subverting expectations, which makes for particularly pleasant reading when an odious character receives a well-timed comeuppance, and particularly unpleasant for those of us who like to look at ourselves in the mirror. For Letheras is a lot like any given expansionist capitalist empire, with a few of the metaphors made literal. For instance, instead of citizens drowning in debt, they’re literally drowned in the canals, weighed down by coin in a kind of trial by water for every conceivable offense, from loitering to murder.

If someone could pay the fine, he did so, thus expunging his criminal record. The canal awaited those who could not. The Drownings were more than public spectacle, they were the primary event among a host of activities upon which fortunes were gambled every day in Letheras. Since few criminals ever managed to make it across the canal with their burden, distance and number of strokes provided the measure for wagering bets. As did Risings, Flailings, Flounderings and Vanishings. The criminals had ropes tied to them, allowing for retrieval of the coins once the drowning was confirmed. The corpse was dumped back into the river. Guilty as sludge. (p. 150)

There are more than a few uncomfortable parallels to our current criminalization of poverty and the inequities in our criminal justice system to be found in Midnight Tides. In fact, the book provides the most explicit critique of Capitalism and its sibling Imperialism that I’ve found in any novel, as well as more than a few well-placed jibes at corruption.

An archaeologist and anthropologist, Erickson insists that his critique is not specifically aimed at contemporary American culture, but rather meditates upon the trends common to all imperial and capitalist societies. This is where fantasy is particularly potent as social criticism. Letheras is not America, but we can draw powerful lessons in the experiences of the Beddict brothers of Letheras. Hull, an ethnographer whose research was taken from him by commercial forces that used it subjugate and destroy the tribes he studied and loved, is a man betrayed by his people and destroyed by his conscience; Tehol, an economics genius who plans to avenge his big brother, and Brys, the youngest, a soldier who sees clearly where it’s all going:

The Letherii military was still strong, yet increasingly it was bound to economics. Every campaign was an opportunity for wealth. And, among the civilian population of traders, merchants and all those who served the innumerable needs of civilization, few were bothering with martial training anymore. An undercurrent of contempt now coloured their regard of soldiers. Until they need us, of course. Or they discover a means to profit by our actions. (p. 373)

A few pages later, Brys is still thinking:

He had never felt entirely comfortable in the crowded, sordid maze that was Letheras. The face of wealth stayed mostly hidden, leaving only the ravaged mien of poverty, and that was at times almost overwhelming…. At what point in the history of Letheras, he wondered, did rampant greed become a virtue? The level of self-justification required was staggering in its tautological complexity, and it seemed language itself was its greatest armor against common sense. You can’t leave all these people behind. They’re outside the endless excitement and lust, the frenzied accumulation. They’re outside and can only look on with growing despair and envy. What happens when rage supplants hopelessness? Increasingly, the ranks of the military were filling with the lowest classes. Training, acceptable income, and a full belly provided the incentives, yet the soldiers were not enamored of the civilization they were sworn to defend. True, many of them joined with dreams of booty, of wealth stolen and glory gained. But such riches came only with aggression, and successful aggression at that. What would happen if the military found itself on the defensive? (p. 388)

Tell me that doesn’t make you at least a little uncomfortable. Granted, the observation applies only to Letheras in a fantasy novel and in this world more to Rome than to the United States, at least so far, but still….I write this recalling that, behind the valorization of the American soldier there is John McCain arguing against a generous G.I. bill, or even one that guarantees a life free of food stamps and predatory lenders for the families of deployed soldiers and disabled veterans. I recall the number of suicides among veterans, and rates of homelessness, and not only among the veterans of our current wars but wars throughout our history. It’s a short step from Arlington to the Bonus Army, practically speaking.

As it turns out, Brys’ misgivings about the Letherii army are reasonably spot-on. And Letheras is not a society whose misfortunes, taken as a whole, deserve to be grieved. They’ve committed all the atrocities that must be committed to justify an Empire, as Seren Pedac, a guide and mediator between Letheras and the Tiste Edur muses as she looks on the ruined statues of a subjugated and exterminated tribe’s abandoned gods:

Such dark moments in Letherii history were systematically disregarded, she knew, and played virtually no role in their culture’s vision of itself as bringers of progress, deliverers of freedom from the fetters of primitive ways of living, the cruel traditions and vicious rituals. Liberators, then, destined to wrest from savage tyrants their repressed victims, in the name of civilization. That the Letherii then imposed their own rules of oppression barely acknowledged. There was, after all, but one road to success and fulfillment, gold cobbled and maintained by Letherii toll-collectors, and only the free could walk it. Free to profit from the same game. Free to discover one’s own inherent disadvantages. Free to be abused. Free to be exploited. Free to be owned in lieu of debt. Free to be raped. And to know misery. It was a natural truth that some walked that road faster than others. There would always be those who could only crawl. Or fall to the wayside. The most basic laws of existence, after all, were always harsh. (pp. 701-702)

Again, there’s that pesky look in the mirror. Draw the conclusions you wish, but Letheras does sound to me a lot like a Libertarian’s privatized paradise. Or a vulture capitalist’s dream—it’s great, as long as you’re on the winning side. Everything else is for losers. Sound familiar?

Tehol sees through it all in a way that cuts through all the pretense of power and wealth:

“Money is slight of hand….If you want to know the cheat behind the whole game, it’s right there, lasses. Even when money’s just an idea, it has power. Only it’s not real power. Just the promise of power. But that promise is real enough so long as everyone keeps pretending it’s real. Stop pretending and it all falls apart.” (p. 107)

Tehol of Letheras, meet Mr. Robot. And have you met the Commerce Secretary? How about this Amsterdam tulip merchant? Tehol has a plan of his own, and it’s not mere revenge on a system that destroyed his parents, broke his older brother and reduced him to the image of abject poverty. Tehol lives discontentedly in a city where people die for being poor, where murder can be settled with a bribe, where crowds of the poor starve in the streets and will be first to be conscripted, poorly outfitted and sent untrained to die before the Edur army...but not if Tehol can do anything about it. Not for the wealthy citizens of Letheras, the ones who bet on the Drownings and ignore the half-bloods and the Indebted and the poor, but for the people Tehol cares for.

Letheras sounds pretty unlovely. In fact, the only people who love Letheras are the people who are making a profit, and Letheras is the dominion of the 1%. It’s all justified, in the words of genuine villain Gerun Eberict (and genuine villains are rare in Erikson), speaking for Letheras: “We have hammered freedom into a sword. And if you won’t be like us we will use that sword to kill you one by one, until your spirit is broken” (p.498).

Now….does that not resonate? It’s a refrain that empire has carried to every frontier everywhere.

No, we don’t like Letheras. We don’t especially like the Edur, either. One of Erikson’s strengths as a novelist is that he can build a world where we don’t especially admire either side, but there are characters on both we admire and love.

It’s important to remember that social critique is not the subject of this novel, which is the rise of the Tiste Edur and the fate of the Sengar and Beddict brothers (and I haven’t even mentioned the Sengars yet, which goes to show how meaty this novel is.) Social criticism isn’t even part of the plot, outside of Tehol Beddict’s ambition to bring down Letheras, which we’ll take up next week, along with the fate of the Tiste Edur. The week after, if you want to, we can discuss Erikson’s handling of supernatural elements, which abound: sorcerers, an emperor who dies repeatedly, gods in disguise, wraiths, undead both comic and pathetic (there’s Kettle, a sweet dead child, Harlest, who is hilarious for a dead guy, and Shurq, who is, well, Shurq) , dragons, various powerful entities trying to get free, a host of imprisoned baddies, and a handful of heartbreakingly wonderful characters. Tehol and Bugg, whose friendship is that rarest of unicorns — a genuine friendship between two men that rings truer than any I’ve read in realism in years. And behind it all, a god in a tent, twisted with malice and yet unrevealed intent, and pulling a harp’s worth of strings. None of which blunts or undercuts the critique of power and the nature of power that runs through Midnight Tides. A rich novel, and we’ve barely scratched the surface.

Until next week. Meanwhile, there are other novels that pull this sort of trick of social criticism in fantasy — which ones should we look at?