Gardens of the Moon is volume one of the Malazan Book of the Fallen. I know another damn, multi-volume series (this one is ten volumes and counting).

It’s pretty redolent of Glen Cook’s Black Company, but somewhat better (I read the first three books in Cook’s series and left feeling underimpressed).

Like that earlier series, it portrays a grittier side of war, that purports to capture some of the experiences of folks caught up in events larger than themselves (the little people, as it were), but Erikson sometimes seems to shy away too much. A character that I had grown to like was suddenly killed, which was sad, but I respected it. I respected less when a bit of deus ex machina legerdemain brought her back into the series.

But he’s good at humanizing characters and at showing the good side of villains and the bad side of the semi-heroes. Of course, George R.R. Martin does that much better, but we’ll be waiting another five years, at least, for the next volume. There are already ten or so Malazan books out there.

And as I’m writing this, I am actually reminded of those old Thieves’ World books, which were collections short stories taking place in an a shared fantasy environment, so writers had to be careful not to mess things up for their fellow writers by upsetting the balance of the world or killing off too many characters. This has that feel, that the author is trying to write his epic while staying inside these fixed lines. I don’t know. Something like that. I don’t have enough desire (actually, I have exactly none) to go back and read any of those to see if my comparison holds true.

Credit where credit is due: the finale is a blockbuster. But it’s also dominated by characters who appeared later in the book. A lot of loose ends get cut, but the mysteries associated with them, not so much. Maybe the author will return to them, but it felt like he’d moved on.

I’m not actually sure I’m going to continue reading this series. While Jordan’s Wheel of Time may skew towards to nearly unbearably turgid and his ability to write about romantic relationships in ways that non-embarrassing me effectively non-existent, but you do care about his characters (especially his female characters, at least for me). I am unsure whether I really care enough about Paran, Tattersail, Crokus (now that’s a Black Company style name!), et al to get the second book, unless it shows up at a used bookstore at a decent price.

If you were, like me, a haunter of the science fiction and fantasy shelves of used bookstores in the 1980s, Roger Zelazny and his Amber novels were a frequent resident of his shelves, though I never took the final step of pulling it down and asking my mother to buy this one or that one for me (she would have if I asked, but I always made other choices).

When poor old Borders was going out of business, I often looked at the Great Book of Amber, a collection of, shall we say, the ten canonical Amber novels. But I always waited for the prices to go down just a little bit more and when they did finally go down ‘enough,’ the copies were gone.

C’est la vie.

And it all worked out anyway, because I saw a used copy for ten dollars at trusty old Capitol Hill Books.

The first book, Nine Princes in Amber, breezed by quickly and pleasurably, so much so that I was about a quarter of the way into the second book before I stopped to ask where I was.

The hero, Corwin, is definitely a post-Michael Moorcock, specifically, a post-Elric, hero. Elric was conceived as a sort of a fantasy new wave version of the redoubtable Conan. The difference is not in intelligence (Conan was written as an intelligent and well-read character) nor in moral ambiguity (Conan rarely acted in a truly heroic manner, except in some of the stories where he has become a king), but rather in introspection and retrospection, something Conan was not known for. But Elric – and Corwin – frequently ponder their current ideas and ideals and their past actions.

But, onto the book itself…

The opening is blockbuster. Really great. Fantastic. A brilliant, noirish nailbiter. Naturally, the rest of the book cannot live up to it.

Corwin awakens in a hospital room, where he is both recovering from an accident (car accident, as it turns out) and being held against his will. And he has little or no memory, including his own name. The tale of how he escapes, which is partly by the threat of physical violence, but mostly by bluffing his way around his memory loss to hide it from those encounters, is great. Clearly, he is someone important and clearly part of some conflict or conspiracy or… something. It’s written from the first person perspective, so we learn who he is (one of the nine Princes of Amber referenced in the title, in case you hadn’t guessed), but by the time we’ve learned everything important there is to know, well, it’s become a much more prosaic (though still very, very good) fantasy novel.

One cool thing: Corwin’s sword is called Grayswandir – surely a reference Graywand, as Fafhrd, the Gray Mouser’s inimitable companion in crime and adventure, always names his broadsword.

And, again, I find myself committed to some multi-volume fantasy series. I’ll be dead before I finish all these, I fear.