Planet Sillicon

However…

By blog on May. 9, 2010.

There’s always a however when it comes to Malazan, isn’t there?

So, I’m still enjoying the book, and I’m still finding motivation to stick with it, but there’s one little group of characters which is extremely depressing, and one character specifically that’s rather irritating.

Remember when I was talking about Alan Wake, and how I didn’t like that a fair portion of the storyline was told through Wake’s internal monologuing? Well, there’s a character who does that a lot in Dust of Dreams, too, Badalle. If her internal dialogue wasn’t the mean depressing diatribe that it is, this probably wouldn’t bother me so much, but really, she’s just such a depressing point of view to read.

The Snake, which she’s a part of, is a very interesting and odd little group, and where I’m up to I’ve no idea where it’s going. We know they’re all children, and what Erikson’s putting them through is absolutely horrid, but that’s really about all we know. They’re on some mass exodus from a city, and they’re headed ’somewhere’ and were being pursued at some some point but probably not any longer.

Badalle seems to be the religious leader of the group in a way, delivering poems to the children as if they were services. It’s all very sad and surreal to read, and that can become quite grating. I really do enjoy a bit of surreality in a book, but more like a scene of it, not an entire recurring point of view of it, and this group/PoV isn’t the only one that’s pretty much entirely surreal and… odd.

The group currently running around in the abandoned K’Chain Che’Malle city fortress thing is also a very surreal group to read about. There’s a ghost running around with them, but I honestly have to wonder if it’s just one of the group who thinks he’s a ghost. They’ve all seemed to lose themselves, to be taken over by some sort of force. They absolutely don’t seem the same as they were in previous books, so I really don’t know what’s going on there.

That’s the thing about these books. A lot of it you read on faith that all will be made clear at some later point, and that is exactly what happens, but occasionally you have to slog through it to get to that point. Still, I am enjoying the read overall and do look forward to the next, and final, book in the series.