A FIRST-TIME READER’S HAZY, DISORIENTED ANALYSIS OF DEADHOUSE GATES

 

“He came shambling into Judgement’s Round from the Avenue of Souls, a misshapen mass of flies.” 

Have you ever read a book and, from the opening line, you knew that this was the book for you? Not just that you would like it, or even love it, but that this would be your book? In some way, in some unique fashion, this book would reflect and compose you, could enact some form of self-enlightenment upon reading? Steven Erikson’s Deadhouse Gates is not only a novel that I fell for in the opening line, but it is a novel that enveloped me, that felt like it was mine, it was catered to my tastes, built for me—a ridiculous notion, to be sure, but one that took hold of me. From the first line, I wanted to live in this book, because with the Malazan Book of the Fallen, with Deadhouse Gates, Erikson has not only created one of the most original and imaginative works of highly fantastical fiction I’ve ever read, but one that pulls the literary into focus—a work so thoroughly entrenched in fantasy that it cannot possibly be removed from it as a genre, but also so deeply intellectual and richly written with literary merit. And that’s what I want to talk about. Loosely. 

    It starts with Erikson’s economy of language. A sore point for a lot of Erikson readers is the density of his writing, and while a lot of that stems from his tendency to avoid needless exposition, respecting the reader’s ability to find their own footing in the world, it’s also because his use of language is so economical. Much of the prose in Deadhouse Gates is precise, considered. You get a lot of sentences like:

“Endless motion broken only by its dulled absence—the shock of rest…” 

    ...and this sentence does not leave the reader much breathing room. Every word here serves a very specific purpose in this sentence, and it’s a dizzying sentence because of that. It almost feels contradictory, calling motion “endless”, only to then contrast that with “rest”, but this emphasises a lot of pressure on the word “dulled”. Even in rest, their motion is not ended, it is just dulled, and this is then captured in the word “shock” juxtaposed against “rest”. It creates in the reader this dizzying imagery, almost nauseating, and the key to its power as a sentence is in its density, in its brevity. You take a sentence like this, and then you place it into an epic fantasy novel of 270k words, and we begin to see why Erikson’s prose weighs as heavy as it does, most of its pages filled with sentences rich in both implicit and explicit meaning. A great example of implicit and explicit meaning being used to great effect is with the motif of our characters being pushed or pulled, manipulated, especially by elemental forces around them, and this motif eventually plays quite deeply into character arcs and deeper themes that resonate throughout the whole novel:  

“The wind was a hand at their backs, dismissive of hesitation in its unceasing pressure.”

“‘All very fascinating,’ Felisin drawled. ‘I take it we’re going to enter this place—since that’s where the wind is going.’”

“The tunnel narrowed, the howling wind making it difficult to resist being pushed forward"

“How far do we have to be pushed? We’re not slipping into madness, we’re being nudged, tugged and pulled into it.”

“We’re the same, you and I, the same as them. Struggling beneath the sun, pushed and ever pushed to our place of slaughter.”

    This motif of our protagonists, especially Felisin and Duiker, being pushed and manipulated by elemental forces is an important one, because it is both reinforced and dismissed by our protagonists in equal measure. On one hand, we have Duiker, being pushed along with Coltaine’s Chain of Dogs, and he is very willing to accept his change, his place, he’s quite self-defeating in his acceptance of futility, which is perhaps undermined by the ways in which he pushes himself more than anything else, long past the point where he could have given up, might have preferred to have given up. We see this is reflected on after Duiker’s metaphorical rebirth among all those dead refugees, among all those butterflies (and the usage of butterflies is a deliberate one, I think, to signify metamorphosis, change, rebirth), where it says:

“Then dark's descent was done.”

    We have to think to ourselves, was this a change into something less human, or more? This question is also posed by Lull, to which we get no definitive answer—not from Duiker, not from Erikson. But we can think about it: surely, the pessimistic answer is to say that this change is into something more human, in a world defined by futility, attrition, cycles, and cycles of violence. The Chain of Dogs slowly wears away, being chipped at bit by bit. But I don’t know if the pessimistic take is one entirely supported by the text. We see the heart of the novel reflected, I feel, by Icarium and Mappo, and the power of their friendship, their love, and in the face of these overwhelming cycles of futility and pain that confront these characters, they are always fighting to overcome it. Of hundreds of thousands of years, of seas swelling and drying up, cities rising and falling, Empires flaring and fading, the futility of life and cycles of violence and survival—but at its heart is beauty and strength and compassion and love and tenderness, within a futile existence. Many characters throughout the novel are often philosophising on their own futility, but it's the tenderness at the heart of it that makes me feel that maybe these characters are wrong to despair.

    Regardless of where we fall with our ruminations on the nature of humanity and how it’s represented in the novel, we see this change in Duiker, from historian to soldier, named to nameless, this inversion of his own history, his past, where we once again get this very deliberate wording: 

“Being pulled from the front lines had been the Emperor’s reward all those years ago. That and the various alchemies that keep me tottering on well past my prime. Gods, even the scars from that last horror have faded away!” 

    We see here once more the use of the word ‘pulled’, where he was pulled, and transformed, taught to read and write, given unnaturally long life, from soldier to historian. So here we have Duiker, so sadly being pushed and pulled, and he always accepts his position with this grave sort of indifference: 

“‘Silence!’ Korbolo snapped. He eyed Duiker. ‘You are the historian who rode with Coltaine.’ 

The historian faced him. ‘I am.’ 

‘You are a soldier.’ 

‘As you say.’ 

‘I do, and so you shall die with these soldiers, in a manner no different.’”

    And that change in him is beautifully reflected in his relationship with the unnamed marine and this wonderfully poignant passage: 

“I’ll never return to the List of the Fallen, because I see now that the unnamed soldier is a gift. The named soldier—dead, melted wax—demands a response among the living…a response no-one can make. Names are no comfort, they’re a call to answer the unanswerable. Why did she die, not him? Why do the survivors remain anonymous—as if cursed—while the dead are revered? Why do we cling to what we lose while we ignore what we still hold? Name none of the fallen, for they stood in our place, and stand there still in each moment of our lives. Let my death hold no glory, and let me die forgotten and unknown. Let it not be said that I was among the dead to accuse the living.” 

    At the end of the novel, we see that sad reinforcement of naming the dead, when the unnamed marine’s name is written on the scrap of cloth found on Duiker’s corpse, and the real tragedy of Duiker is that the one time he makes what feels like a decision for himself, the decision to finally give up, to be with friends, to die, where he thinks on death as “the last gift”, “I am done with this world, for I am alone in it.”—that decision is wrenched from him, when the bottle crushed against his chest, foreshadowing his potential literal rebirth, which then drives home those words we see from Duiker: 

“Names are no comfort, they’re a call to answer the unanswerable. Why did she die, not him?” 

    And on the other hand, we have Felisin, who outright denies having been pushed or manipulated, when she might have had less control over her fate than Duiker did: 

“‘When did Dryjhna choose you?’ 

‘What do you mean?’ 

‘When did the manipulation begin? Here in Raraku? Skullcup? Or on a distant continent? When did the goddess first cast her gaze upon you, lass?’ 

‘She never did.’ 

Heboric started. ‘That seems—’ 

‘Unlikely? Yes, but it is the truth. The journey was mine, and mine alone.” 

    At first, we might be inclined to believe Felisin when she says this, and when she talks about the freedom of the human soul afterwards. We find that Felisin is far less accepting of being pushed into her fate than Duiker, where perhaps Duiker really did have a choice in what he did, in how he pushed himself into change, with how frequently he laments the futility of the work of historians, he was, perhaps, a force that wanted to change, that needed to change. Felisin, though, feels less open to those changes. She is constantly battling with herself, internally, as well as with those around her, and there are definite hints, when she says to Heboric, “the journey was mine, and mine alone”, that she is lying to herself, and we can see this constant war of control within Felisin throughout the novel. Felisin, chained between Baudin and Heboric, enslaved with them, turns to selling her body as a commodity. And instead of helping her, they only judge. She clings to Beneth, a man who, despite using her, helps her, makes her feel needed. And when Heboric and Baudin should help her, she instead helps them, and she finds a small sense of empowerment in that—perhaps the only empowerment she can find, when she’s being gaslit and manipulated and used by Beneth. So when they escape, and Baudin kills Beneth, he kills Felisin’s only connection to control. To help her, in her mind, it's too little too late, a fool who couldn't do his job, who thought Felisin unwilling to leave or unwilling to be helped: 

“Can’t pull out a person who don’t want to go.” 

    But we ask, Baudin, did you even try? 

    Instead of her owing them her life, they owe her theirs. When Baudin uses her like Beneth, instead of giving her any power, he takes away it away, he takes away what she thought was her use. When his protection over her is revealed, she resents him, her sister, both having failed in their jobs of responsibility for her. After she forces Baudin to leave in Raraku, we then see she is being constantly pushed by the storm. And the more this goes on, the more we see the personification of the Whirlwind as it manipulates Felisin, and of Raraku as well. We see these two acting as sort of twin forces for change in Felisin, the kind of forces that Baudin and Heboric couldn’t be: 

“Raraku reshapes all who come to it. This is one truth you can cling to. What you were falls away, what you become is something different.” 

“And this is a one-way trip—Raraku will claim us, devour us. The sands will bury every dream of vengeance, every desire, every hope. We will all of us drown, here in this desert.” 

    There are also a lot of great allusions to Raraku as an ocean, a sea. Sometimes, more than allusions, it is referred outright as having been a body of water, but other times like this one, it’s more of an allusion (there’s another great passage near the beginning of the book, where it’s said “the sands hoarded power within their susurrating currents”—fantastic imagery), with the implication of Raraku’s properties as an ocean as a force for change, the way water reshapes the world around it, the erosion of land through the currents and shape of water. There’s even a great little poem at the beginning of Chapter 12, with this Homeric epithet: 

“Ages unveiled the Holy Desert. 

Raraku was once an ochre sea.”

    And that little epithet there, that ochre sea, reflecting Homer’s wine-dark sea, it’s a great way of introducing Raraku as this ever-changing place in a state of flux, acknowledging it specifically as an ochre sea, can possibly be interpreted as it being both a sea and a desert in the same stroke. That is it is not just one or the other, but both, in eternal cycles.

    Atop of all of this, we often see the Whirlwind affecting Felisin where it will not affect Kulp and Heboric: 

“Her legs and body rode the wind, and from everywhere she felt that dreadful rasp of the storm’s tongue. I will be nothing but bones and sinew when we reach the bottom, tottering fleshless with a rictus grin. Felisin unveiled in all her glory…” 

    It’s here that, after having been pushed and shaped and manipulated by these twin forces, guiding her through the First Empire (also referred to early on in the book, “It was said each city rose on the backs of ghosts, the substance of spirits thick like layers of crushed bone; that each city forever wept beneath the streets, forever laughed, shouted, hawked wares and bartered and prayed and drew first breaths that brought life and the last breaths that announced death. Beneath the streets there were dreams, wisdom, foolishness, fears, rage, grief, lust and love and bitter hatred.”), and when she comes out from the other side of this buried city, this liminal space that instigates change for Kulp, Heboric, and Felisin, we see her taking more control of who she is: 

“‘I am not a slave,’ Felisin said. And I am no longer for sale.” 

    And, in turn, we see Heboric, admitting his inability to help her the way he wants to: 

“‘Gods, girl, would that I had your armour!’ 

And should I bleed within it, you see nothing, old man. No-one shall see. No-one shall know. 

‘If I had,’ Heboric continued after a moment, ‘I would be able to stay at your side, to offer what protection I could—though wondering why I bothered, granted. Yet I would.’” 

    We see Baudin fulfil his vows to protect Felisin, at the cost of his own life, and this shell, the armour that Felisin has built around herself, finally breaks, and she’s able, from this point on, to find some semblance of real control in herself: 

“Armour can hide anything until the moment it falls away. Even a child. Especially a child.” 

    Throughout all of this, throughout all of Felisin’s fraught changes, we see a lot of her inner monologues, we find her adopting new philosophies, attempting to create a sense of meaning for herself, her life. There’s this unceasing sense of change in her, and she, more than any other character, is being manipulated the most, by everyone around her, by the world, by herself, so it’s no wonder that by the end, once she’s gone through all this, undergone this change, she denies having been pulled, pushed, manipulated, shaped, guided, controlled, by anyone, or anything. It makes sense that she would claim her rebirth, her transformation, for herself. It’s telling, for instance, that she does not acknowledge the word “rape” until after Baudin’s death, until her armour has fallen away and she acknowledges her intimacy with grief and rape: 

“Grief rapes the mind, and I know all about rape. It’s a question of acquiescence. So I shall feel nothing. No rape, no grief.” 

    One set of armour has fallen away here, and we see Felisin building new walls for herself, changing, not for the last time, so that when she full embraces the role of Sha’ik, once she is locked into a role that has been set for her, in order to hold onto some semblance of control that she had finally found for herself, of her own empowerment, she names her adopted daughter Felisin: for her innocence, her promise—a second chance. 

 

“Reborn. Renewed. Heart of the Apocalypse. Delivered by the unhanded in the suspended breath of the goddess.” 

    I think this entire motif, that of our characters being pushed and pulled, is beautifully encapsulated in a quote by Apsalar late in the book, where she says to Icarium: 

“We each have our protectors—neither of whom is capable of protecting us. Especially not from ourselves. So they're dragged along, helpless, ever watchful, but so very helpless.”  

    Because, lest we forget, Duiker and Felisin are not the only characters being pushed and pulled. They are, in turn, affecting others, pushing and pulling others, and there are other characters, like the aforementioned Apsalar and Icarium, who have their own character arcs as well, which also deal with these themes of cycles and ascendance, and you can see then how much density Erikson has crammed into one little motif, one little motif that can be understood fully in a sentence like, "The wind was a hand at their backs, dismissive of hesitation in its unceasing pressure”, how it tumbles on and on into something larger regarding all our characters, themes, storylines, and that’s where the density of his writing truly comes into focus. There’s this wonderful scene maybe midway through the novel, where Fiddler is talking to Mappo in Iskaral Pust’s temple, and he mentions that the lamp had gone out a while ago, that they’re in the dark. And as they leave, they come across a cache of torches, and we get this brilliant little line: 

“Darkness was anathema to shadows.” 

    Which just kind of blew me away. Five words, and it just says so much about this scene and their place in it. In the temple of a High Priest of Shadow, talking of these bhok’arala that worship Pust like a god, and how Pust wanted to “encourage an escort of his god’s minions”, they come across a cache or torches, and all it needed was just that one line, “Darkness was anathema to shadows”. So much is packed in there, and it’s ultimately not a particularly important line, but it worked so well in the context of this scene. 

    Another point in favour of the economy of his language is how Erikson writes dialogue. All of his characters talk with a purpose—dialogue doesn’t fill unneeded moments. His characters talk deeply of ideology, memory, philosophy, and when they talk, they tend to use each other’s names within their dialogue, which is a technique that helps forgo the overuse of dialogue tags. So, these conversations, which can get quite long, feel very even and flowing. They occur so naturally, very rarely broken up by exposition or descriptions, which helps to give the dialogue a unique feeling of its own, almost entirely separate from the prose, where conversations just read beautifully, and simply. You aren’t going to find a conversation in Deadhouse Gates that starts, is upended by two pages of exposition in between, and then continues on. When a conversation starts, it is given precedent in the narrative, and if there is something discussed that the reader isn’t familiar with, it doesn’t take a break to explain it. Which feels incredibly refreshing to read in a genre that’s prone to this particular tick, where dialogue can get so derailed that you need to go back a few pages to remember what was initially said. 

    I’ve seen criticisms of Erikson’s dialogue for being too philosophical, some readers have used the phrase “unrealistic”, “people don’t talk like this”, and this is where I have to interject in this wider perception of what counts towards realism, because a big point in favour for me is just how philosophical some of these characters can get—and it is only specific characters that talk this way, which is why it works so well. Icarium is hundreds of thousands of years old. At that age, especially with such an existence, fraught with forgetting, what else would you be able to talk of at that point, of ways to philosophise? And this goes the same with Mappo, who, while I don’t know his age, we are told that he has followed Icarium for hundreds of years, burdened with the grief of friendship and (what he thinks is) the truth behind the losses of his people. Apsalar has three lives within her head; Heboric has lived as a thief, a priest, and a scholar; Duiker was a soldier, a historian, and a soldier once more, aged by alchemies! And the soldiers around him, experiencing hell, what are they to think of in their dying march but of things beyond them? Felisin, though young, has experienced inexplicable horrors, and her philosophising reflects a traumatised girl trying out these ideas and ideals, thinking up philosophies that might suit her, but don’t always align with her actions, just trying to find something to believe in. All of it, all these characters, have reasons to think deeply, to talk broadly, with one another. And inversely, Fiddler and Crokus, aren’t like the others, they aren’t quite so deep or complex—they’re like a blanket of normality we can wear against a cast of grander characters. Kalam, in turn, isn’t prone to philosophising. His character lives in this sense of efficiency, of loneliness; he’s driven, and thus doesn’t reflect as deeply as others in this narrative. He’s a character driven by action over thought. And all of this just works. 

    In a final thought on the economy of Erikson’s writing, of its efficiency and density, and how that might affect readers, I will quote this line from the novel, which is, admittedly, about assassins, but I feel like it describes Erikson’s writing well: 

“Assassins bow to the altar of efficiency, Icarium, and efficiency is brutal.” 

 

    Another aspect of Erikson’s writing that impressed me was the level of respect with which he writes his characters, and in order to emphasise what I mean about respecting the characters, I need to give an example of a narrative that disrespects them. Please be aware of spoilers for Hanya Yanagihara’s 2015 novel A Little Life: 

    In A Little Life, the narrative is focused on the character of Jude, a man who, in his childhood, suffered innumerable traumas that haunt him for the entirety of the novel. Battered constantly by trauma, self-harm, and self-hatred, Jude refuses to tell any of his friends (or later, his adoptive family) of his past. When he thinks of it, he feels intense shame and self-loathing, he could not bear it if any of the people he loves were to know of what has happened to him. So, of course, Yanagihara uses this as an opportunity to give the reader an omniscient view into Jude’s past. Jude does not explicitly ruminate on these things. He does not explicitly think of them. He does not give the reader access to his past, Yanagihara does. She uses these long, detailed chapters of his abuse as carrots on a stick for the impatient reader. Right when we reach a point where Jude’s self-loathing and self-pity might get overbearing for a reader, the reader is rewarded with details of Jude’s abuse, so the impatient reader can then empathise, can feel pity, can feel bad for him. Jude’s friends, Jude’s family, on the other hand, do not get this omniscient privilege. They must stick with Jude, through thick and thin, through his unwillingness to share, and they must love him through it. They do not require omniscient access to his past in order to sympathise or empathise with him. And when, towards the end of the book, Jude overcomes his biggest fears, tells his loved ones of his past, what does the reader gain? We don’t get anything from this, we don't feel Jude's release. We didn’t gain Jude’s trust—we broke it. We were complicit with Yanagihara’s willingness to exploit a character in order to appease the whims of her narrative. But would it not have been more impactful, would it not have felt more earned, if instead of betraying Jude’s biggest fears, he opened his history up to us at the same time he did his closest friends, his family? And it’s in this way that Yanagihara disrespects Jude as a character, disrespects his agency as a person, his privacy as a person. And it feels wrong. 

    Erikson doesn’t have this issue. Take Felisin, for example, we have already discussed her at length, but let’s focus on the ways in which her character is respected: a great contention I’ve seen regarding Felisin is a terrific example for how Erikson respects her as a character. Felisin’s hurt, her rage, isn’t undermined or sanitised by Erikson. The narrative does not make judgements or excuses for how she behaves, it does not take time to pity her, and it respects her development. I already mentioned it earlier, but this is especially applicable in how “rape” is not mentioned until Felisin herself is ready to acknowledge it for herself. Before this, we see her refer to it, to Baudin, as “lovemaking”. Felisin is presented exactly how she is, how she thinks, and how she acts, and the reader is left to pick up the pieces. Erikson does not interject trying to defend or decry her, he lets Felisin be who she is as a character, and the narrative supports her growth as it happens. It feels natural, and earned, and above all, it feels respectful of this character. Similarly, Icarium and Mappo’s relationship is left for us to observe within the characters’ actions. When we see Mappo’s fears for what his friend might learn, or become, or what he might do, we never get the full picture, because Mappo himself is too afraid to acknowledge them—even to himself. He has no need to reiterate his fears in detail to himself, and so they unravel naturally throughout the course of the novel. And in the end, when Mappo lies to Icarium, who has forgotten most of the narrative’s events, the story respects that by not casting any form of judgement or exposition on this moment. It just lets it happen. And we are left to decide what to feel for ourselves. This way of respecting the characters also just plainly respects us, as readers. It acknowledges that we don’t need an author to interject, to tell us what to feel, to tell us how to interpret a character, a scene, or a moment. 

    As I conclude my thoughts, I want to touch on a few other things that really grabbed me in Deadhouse Gates. One is the undercurrent of humour throughout the novel—while a good deal of the narrative is very bleak, it’s worth noting that it is almost effortlessly humourous at times, and that there’s a seemingly deliberate use of contrasting comedic elements against the darker ones. Mappo and Icarium’s hunt for Iskaral Pust’s broom, Fiddler’s horse biting the guard’s nose (the horse who knew an insult when it saw one), the undead servants who chatter endlessly about the horror of their deaths, Kalam’s magical rock (a funny subversion of the enchanted jewels or valuable items common in fantasy), Mappo’s bag of holding that he’s filled with people who irritated him, and there’s this other motif where, typically after or during a stressful, devastating, or dire situation, characters will joke to each other. It’s a frequent sense of tenderness and camaraderie, it’s not portrayed in a smarmy way, but like, even in this devastation, they’re trying to uplift each other, where up until the bitter end they’re all still finding small pockets of joy and light-heartedness in their darkest moments. 

    I also want to note a particular scene for what I feel is this tragic and, somewhat funny, cold irony. As Duiker, Nil, and some Malazan soldiers are heading into this tunnel to kill a Tithan warchief, Nil comments that "the Malazan professional soldier is the deadliest weapon I know", and Duiker muses that the Malazan soldiers "plan for every eventuality"—both these statements are made almost immediately before the Malazan soldiers face an eventuality they did not prepare for, and lost seventeen soldiers from, and this is just delivered by the narrative without comment. 

“What makes a Malazan soldier so dangerous? They're allowed to think.”  

    There’s also this undercurrent of surreality to the novel. While most of the imagery and descriptions can be taken literally, there’s an almost dreamlike quality to much of it. Let's go back to the opening line for example:

“He came shambling into Judgement’s Round from the Avenue of Souls, a misshapen mass of flies.” 

    This isn’t a line rich with metaphor, but the imagery on display here gives us so much to chew on. What is Judgement’s Round? What is the Avenue of Souls? We do not know these locations, but their names alone give us imagery to explore for ourselves. A misshapen mass of flies—that’s an image for the ages. And the more the imagery of this novel comes out, and especially when we are given description with metaphor and simile, the more the whole tone of Deadhouse Gates paints this blurry, surreal, magnetic picture of a realm in flux, a hazy state of existence, with these brushstrokes of cinematic eloquence. When half of our protagonists are in the elder warren on the Silanda, and there’s a mad mage streaming across the sky a web of red colour, and the T’lan Imass rise out of the silt on a ship traversing a thick, sludgy ocean, that’s surreal, it’s intense, and it creates an effect that I’ve not felt in any other work of fantasy, from the way scenes are framed and written, Erikson imbues them with a sense of weight, and scope, and abstract esotericism. 

    From the very first sentence, Deadhouse Gates feels unique, and drags you in. It's a novel that feels vast and deep. Despite the few points of interest I’ve decided to discuss and analyse here, there’s so much more of this book that I haven’t even mentioned, or grasped, and it feels like a work I will go back to many times from this point onward, and find new details to obsess over. This is just a brief overview of my most prevalent thoughts as a first-time reader, and I feel like I still haven’t even begun to touch on what makes it feel special, characters I’ve barely even mentioned that take up large parts of this narrative, with their own wealth of talking points and moments for discussion. I mentioned themes of rebirth, but I didn’t even mention the relevance of Kellanved and Dancer, Coltaine, or Gesler, Truth, and Stormy, and how all of their stories weave into a larger set of themes that are sewn deep into this work. 

    I adored Deadhouse Gates beyond compare, and I want to finish this off with another favourite line of mine from the novel, another great example of Erikson’s economic language, and one that I also think can accurately sum up my feelings of not just this novel, but likely every entry in the Malazan Book of the Fallen: 

“There was around each beast an aura of dreadful competence, wrought with vast antiquity like threads of iron.”