Else rereads: back to Malazan (pt. 4)

by Else

(This is the fourth installment in an ongoing series. You can find part 1, 2, and 3 here.)

I AM BACK! I have returned to gush about the love of my life, my one true love, Malazan Book of the Fallen. We’re up to book four already! Time flies when you are having fun.

So I’ve been thinking a lot about how to structure these blogs and rereads, because of course I don’t want to fully spoil the books. This is not an in-depth read-through with all my thoughts and insights, but I don’t just want to mindlessly keep saying how much I like these books, either. So I’ve decided to try and use these blogs and posts as a sort of hook to hang other stuff on.

So for House of Chains, I thought it would be interesting to talk about time in books. Usually stories are told chronologically, so we just move from A to Z in an orderly fashion. Sometimes books like to play a bit with time and flashbacks (think Project Hail Mary), or events seemingly happening at the same time, but are they really (like The Fifth Season), and sometimes they become one of my favourite books of all time (pun intended) by using HOW it is written to show the play with time (see: The Vanished Birds).

While Malazan Book of the Fallen generally sticks with a chronological order within the books, the chronology of the reading order of the series is muddled up. Generally, the publication order is used to reference which number in the series it is, but that does not mean all the events directly follow the previous book.

I mentioned last time how Deadhouse Gates and Memories of Ice happen simultaneously. Well, the start of House of Chains happens before those events. The fourth installment of Malazan takes everything you thought you knew and puts it to one side to start off with the adventures of one single character, Karsa Orlong, and his companions. Karsa is not a likeable character, I would say, but the character growth (and sometimes lack thereof) he goes through is very interesting indeed. After learning about his relevant backstory, the rest of the events unfold in a time right after books two and three, going back to Seven Cities, and trying to stop a rebellion. And all the heartbreak that comes with the moments in which characters learn of the faith of their friends and loved ones.

One of my favourite trivia bits I’ve discovered and started to appreciate while rereading these books is that some of the books can be viewed as the stories certain characters are telling others. For instance, at the end of Memories of Ice, we meet a character who, at the end of the book, starts to tell the tale of the rebellion in Seven Cities – basically telling the story of the book before. This also means you can totally switch out the order of those to books and feel like you’re being told the story by said character.
Another one of these bits is that at the end of House of Chains, a character starts telling their companions what brought them into the situation they are in now. Which is actually the entirety of book 5, Midnight Tides. Of course we get way more detail than a single point of view can provide, so we learn more, but this also explains why Midnight Tides introduces this specific new place and characters and intrigue in this place in the story, instead of right before Reaper’s Gale, book 7, when it becomes relevant again.