R. Scott Bakker: What am I missing?

[duckman]

Personally, I loved the confusion that came with TDtCB. I like it when I have to think throughout reading a book. Although it does start off a little slow, I was expecting that from reviews I read, and that made me want to read it slow to make sure I didn't miss anything.

I've already done a re-read through the series, and will probably do so again later on in the year. It seems to get better with a re-read.

I can understand how his writing style would not appeal to everyone. I think he's one of the better writers out there right now, and can't wait for his next book to come out.

[Spring Bass]

I actually found The Darkness That Comes Before to be my favorite of the series, whereas I enjoyed The Warrior-Prophet to a much less degree.

One thing you have to remember about Kelhus is that his 'people' have not only been breeding for superior mental capacities for two millenia, they've also been focusing (and their entire philosophy is built around this) on the best ways to manipulation. That's a lot of why Kellhus appears so godly; aside from being among the Few, he absorbs things mentally at a rate much better than that of normal humans, and he has training designed to 'read' people.

We also have to remember that a lot of the time, we only see Kellhus from the perspective of other people, like Achamian, Esmenet, and the like. Aside from Cnaiur, none of these people know that he's actively manipulating them, so he appears god-like to them.

To keep things in perspective, at the beginning of TDTCB, he almost dies of exposure in the North.

[Arakasi]

SPOILER: more stuff on Bakker and Erikson

One I call bullshit on that he hasn't run into the consult. He has run into them and has spoiled their plans on several occasions. If you mean he hasn't come up against the No God himself and won, well he's done well enough against everyone else that I've lost interest in the series.

Rake and Karsa have equals. Rake has come up at times against Osric and sometimes he's won, sometimes he has lost. Karsa in the time he's been in the series has been broken by being captured by humans, humiliated by Heboric and knocked senseless by Mappo. I've seen him be bested more than I've seen Kelhus bested, and he is hardly the main character of the series. The thing is they have met their match and their opponents have been setup already. If Kelhus has a match out there we do not know of him. It's outside the realm of the first series. And since so many have stated to me that we should take the first three books as a standalone trilogy (old arguments here with Bakker fans who kept telling me the series is finished), well to me Bakker has failed there. As well Erikson is smart and has not made Rake a major character in the series. His role has been actually very small. Karsa a bit more of a role, but he's not quite as powerful.

Well on your point about breeding, what makes Kelhus different than his father, or other Dunyain? The point is he is still mortal. One can make similar arguments with Karsa and the thousands of years of domination by the renegade Imass that have shaped their culture, as well as the direct influence of a god in the CG's influence on Karsa. As for Rake he is powerful because of his heritage, being the son of Tiam. My point isn't that they're not strong, or they're not mary sues in ways. Sure they are, but so are Osric, Silchas, Tool, Cotillion, Mael, Icarium, etc. There are countless powerful immortal characters in Erikson's books. They contest with eachother or ally with eachother for their own goals. Kelhus stands alone.

As for the last part, well yeah duh. That is what Bakker wants to do. A character study on having the main character be an amoral god like being. Sure I get the point. I just don't like it because I prefer a series where there is balance between the different sides. I have an interest in reading Silmariilion or Illiadish like tales of gods and men fighting over milenia old struggles. I have zero interest in reading about a god like character dominate a series as much as Kelhus does. I wouldn't have a problem with the series if he did have an adversary currently out there capable of standing up to him. Even if they hadn't met yet and had only clashed through agents and subordinates. But such character doesn't exist, unless you use the copout that the character so is the No God. Anyway after reading 2.5ish books of Kelhus just pwning everyone, I have zero interest to read more. Even if in the future he gets bested (which I'll be rooting for) it's a bit too late for me to save my enjoyment of the series.

[Lightsnake]

I didn't find the books slow at all, and read about 400 pages of TDTCB in a single day, the last book I did that with. The litmus test I usually use is compare the series to Dune, which it is similar to in tone and philosophical musings. If a reader likes Dune, I don't really see them not liking TDTCB. However, the second book is by far the best. After reading the third you may feel a little sold short (as in very little is resolved apart from the war itself).

Not sure why a Bakker fan would also like Ayn Rand. Bakker loathes her and the one time I met him, he spent a good ten minutes tearing into Rand and her adherents (including one T.G.). It was very entertaining.

Wert, you MUST expand upon the last stentence of that post...

[Kalbear]

SPOILER: More for Kellhus through the series

Kellhus has faced what, the skin spies? That's it. He hasn't faced the No-God directly, he's not faced the Generals. He's only faced the lesser constructs - and these are constructs that are more than a match for common man but hardly monsters of combat. In the world of the 3 seas, war is intellect - and Kellhus is above all the best intellect in the world.

I do want to see him find a worthy adversary, but remember - he almost dies in the second book. And that was just to random schlubs. That was admittedly before he learned the trick of teleportation, but we've only seen him with that trick for a short time. Who knows what'll happen when he has to fight against the rest of the Anasurimbor, or the actual powerful Consult things?

I guess, to me, I'd rather have one rationally explained uber character than a host of vaguely thought-out uber characters. To you, that makes Kellhus a Mary Sue because he can do everything better than anyone he runs into. To me, that just means that the Erikson books are chock full of those.

So far, we've only primarily focused on one side of the conflict. The first series deals with Kellhus' rise to power. We've yet to see him actually face his true adversary. I can understand you not liking that aspect, but it seems really weird to be annoyed that he can do anything but be fine with the multitude of gods and ultrapowerful random conan clones running around in Erikson's world. Are you upset that the Crippled God hasn't been beaten yet?

[Nerdanel]

In addition to Kellhus being the bad guy, I also think he doesn't dominate the plot to the extent he and most readers think.

Don't read the following unless you have read Warrior Prophet:

SPOILER: Warrior Prophet

I have figured out how the No-God gives Kellhus covert help in this book. In that battle on that battle plain whose name I can't remember, the victory of the battle boils down to one whatshisname's charge. During the charge there is a mysterious and unexplained scene where that person is felled from his saddle by a blow and sees his own corpse. I think that man actually died and was resurrected by the No-God to turn the tide of the battle. Remember, the No-God gets the souls of all those who die on that plain.

Kellhus was baffled by how his prophecy about the battle turned out so exactly right since he knew that future shouldn't have been able to determine the past. It didn't occur to him that something greater than him was meddling with things. The No-God is the darkness that comes before.

There's more into this but it's been a while since I read the book and I don't want this post to grow into encyclopedic measurements.

[Relic]

nerdanel - that never occured to me. going to have to go re-read that part of the book tonight

[shortstark]

am i one of the few people who liked the first book from start to end? i didnt even think it was slow...

weird

Loved it from the start, read the prologue online and ordered the book from amazon.ca, couldnt wait for it to be available in the UK, have not found any of these books to be slow at all, but they do require careful reading

.

[Arakasi]

SPOILER: stuff

You're right that above all Kelhus is the best intellect in the world. And that is a big problem I have with the series. Rake and Karsa and others are easier to take because there is no sense of intellectual superiority going on. When Rake meets with others at the start of Memories of Ice at the big meeting of various powers, it is very clear that he is one amongst equals. He doesn't stand above Caladan Brood or even Silverfox. He has his powers, he has his sword, but he can not just intellectually overpower people like Kelhus can. When he speaks of Osric, he speaks of an equal with a different agenda to what he has. Kruppe is the closest to that type of character that Erikson has, and to me he is one of my least favorite in the series, despite his quaint dialogue. When Karsa threatens Heboric with physical violence, Heboric throws it back in his face with his wit.

On the subject of the near death, meh. I'd hardly call the near death in the second book a huge thing. I've always felt it was cheap when an author makes a situation where a person suffers and then afterwards everything is better. Sure he was near death, but since that got him far more power in the end it doesn't really work as a setback. At least give the event some more personal consequences. The event was needed for Kelhus to gain control over the crusade (iirc) and thus it happened.

Yes to me it is better having many characters with such power, because they happen to cancel eachother out. Just like in the Illiad where various gods on both sides of the conflict meddle and interfere and negate eachother. It creates a balance between the two sides. I even find this an issue in Tolkien at times, where in LotR it almost feels like a field trip at times as Aragorn, Gimli and Legolas merrily slaughter thousands of orcs and other Mordor forces. Now with Erikson yes you have powerful forces who do slaughter lots of forces. But at least they are on opposite sides and they will meet. And not all will walk away standing. Like I said in the Erikson thread, the fellow who posted here about TRG says that there were clashes and some of the main characters are going to die.

I'm sure the No God will be the one to oppose Kelhus, and I'm sure in the end it will be a good conflict (well I hope so, unless Bakker just has Kelhus' towering intellect trick the No God. Something that happens pretty commonly in books which have battles between mortals and gods, even Erikson. Tolkien did it, many others have.) But when that happens to be the only conflict of equals in the series, it is not enough for me. I don't like how Kelhus just dominates everyone in the series with the possible exception of a god.

The Crippled God like you said hasn't been beaten, but he's had setbacks, his forces have had victories and his forces have had defeats. Kelhus in 3 books has been tortured once. Whoopee.. Like you said in the other thread I've lost faith in the author. I don't feel that Kelhus has any credible adversaries and a book about a main character without adversaries has 0 interest for me. 3 books is too much writing to go through without any foe in sight for him. Reading a book rooting that the main guy dies horribly is no fun for me, as is reading about the two characters I like being repeatedly humiliated and put down by Kelhus. It goes back to what I said in the first paragraph here. Even if he is the bad guy, even if he is destined to be the foe of the No God, I can't enjoy a series where there is such a difference of intelligence between him and everyone else he faces.

[Xray the Enforcer]

nerdanel - that never occured to me. going to have to go re-read that part of the book tonight

agreed.

[Nerdanel]

I agree about careful reading being a requirement.

Hint: Pay attention to unexplained italics, where they occur, and what they say. I think they mean...

SPOILER: Warrior Prophet

...that the No-God is speaking through someone (some ONE, not a huge mass of Sranc). For example, in the chapter I talked about earlier, that one person's faithful retainer says something in unexplained italics when he dies and that one person whose name I can't remember is surprised because he didn't think the dead person thought that way.

[aeu]

Meneldil,

I'll say you're pretty much at the end of the "slow" part. Just continue a little bit and things really do pick up, as others have said.

I agree with those who said that the first book was the best of the three. Two and three were so-so, with a decent ending to the trilogy, but Kellhus becoming more uber by the minute took a lot of joy out of the series for me.

Nerdanel,

That's an interesting idea, it might explain some of the questions about Kelhus's accomplishments. But:

SPOILER: Warrior Prophet

Aren't the No-god's minions trying to kill Kellhuss a couple of times during the series?

[Baeraad]

Arakasi, I agree with you on pretty much everything you've said so far.

SPOILER: Kellhus

You can put me solidly in the "Kellhus is a freaking Sue" camp. For those of you who claim that he's supposed to be the villain... sorry, based on what? The man is a freaking prophet of the gods! That's how much of a Sue he is - he starts out just preying on the stupidity of religious people (so that Bakker can point out how religious people are stupid) and then he finds that he actually is a prophet, on a mission from the gods with glowy hands and everything (so that Bakker gets to heap yet more honour and power on his protagonist). He gets to eat his cake and have it too.

Concerning the argument that Kellhus is going to run into much worse things, so even though he's strolled through the last two books without ever breaking a sweat (that part at the end of WP was part of his master plan - no, he didn't like it much, but he did it intentionally to himself and he was never in any danger), he will soon come up against the big guns, and then he'll need all the awesome powers he keeps gathering.

Again, based on what? The Consult are afraid of Kellhus. They aren't sitting around cackling about how they'll soon unleash their full power and then he'll fall like the frail mortal he is. They're practically panicked and are all out of weapons to use on him. From what Cnaiür said, they're going to end up being manipulated by him soon enough. And then there's the rest of his people. Once they involve themselves, it'll definitely be a done deal.

The only thing left is the No-God, and from the looks of it, he's got some issues. Who's willing to bet that the end of the story won't be that Kellhus figures out how to use those issues against him, and the No-God spends the rest of eternity as Kellhus' doormat, same as everyone else?

Bakker has a point with writing Kellhus like this, yes. He seems to be trying to write a number of ordinary fantasy clichés, but setting them in a realistic world and giving each of them some kind of cynical twist - so, for instance, the world-saving Mary Sue hero is a manipulate sociopath. But you know what? That doesn't make it better. I hate Mary Sues because they're Mary Sues, because they should not exist, not because they live in unrealistic worlds or because they're all alike. In fact, this really bugs me with Bakker, because he seems more interested in making his oh-so-profound observations about literature and the human condition than in actually telling a good story.

The heart of it is, to me, this - Kellhus is infallible, not because of his fancy breeding and training, but because Bakker won't allow him to be less than fallible. I wouldn't mind if he was just more powerful than anyone else in his world, as long as he was still subject to the rules of that world - for instance, the one that says that sometimes people are unlucky, and sometimes they make mistakes based on faulty information, and sometimes they just have a bad day. Kellhus is always perfect. No amount of breeding-for-perfection can account for that. That is the exclusive result of being an author's darling.

This is what saves Karsa Orlong, in my mind. He's probably stronger than everyone else in the books, but he still gets clobbered, and trapped, and just generally kicked around. He gets bad breaks, same as everyone else. He isn't stronger than the world itself. Kellhus is.

[Werthead]

I can understand Bakker hating Ayn Rand. As a philosophy Professor (I'm pretty sure he's one anyway), any suggestion that Ayn Rand is a philosopher grates on him. Alot. I used to post on Three Seas alot when he used to post there, and he had nothing but contempt for her.

This is putting it mildly.

Wert, you MUST expand upon the last stentence of that post...

Hmm. I think it was July last year. I met up with Caladanbrood from this board and Malazanempire and we got our copies of The Thousandfold Thought (which hadn't been out long) signed by Scott at Forbidden Planet in London. It wasn't a massively popular signing, only half a dozen people or so, so we cornered Scott for the last half-hour of the signing, whilst he was signing backstock for the store. If I recall the discussion ranged across the following topics:

* the coolness of certain online critics (Dylanfanatic and Stego were mentioned, I think Jay Tomio as well).

* the validity of an author's intent versus what the reader takes away from the book (Scott believes that an author can put any idea or philosophy he wants in a book, but it's what the reader picks up on and takes away from the book that is important and measures if the author was successful or not).

* how great Steven Erikson (Bakker thinks Deadhouse Gates is a brilliant novel but had some minor issues with Gardens) and George RR Martin are (he's in awe of GRRM's way with character but had a few issues with AFFC and the expansion of the POV roster, something Scott did himself in TTT and then edited out because he thought it distracted from the existing POVs).

* Scott breaks the spines of a book the second he starts reading it, as he believes books (or at least reading copies) are there to be read, not kept in pristine condition against the odds.

* Scott dislikes Goodkind and Rand, calling them the only writers he's happy to bash (and acknowledges that it's irrelevant due to their immense popularity). He pointed out that no-one in philosophy takes Rand seriously or teaches her works at university level, at least not in Canada (although, as Goodkind fans have pointed out, this may be because to Objectivists Canada is a fascist demon-worshipping, baby-eating nation).

* Work on The Aspect-Emperor was proceeding well at the time and he was having enormous amounts of fun writing the book.

[lokisnow]

the first book isn't much of a book aside from Cnaiur and Achamian, I think i skipped around to read the stuff I was interested in before going back to finish the dull stuff with Emperor Cranky Pants.

The second book (which was set up by the 900 page prologue, aka The Darkness that Comes Before) is much better and Kelhus becomes a truly fascinating villain. There's some great imagry and battle descriptions here and just infuriating to watch two favorite characters be so thoroughly ensorceled and become much weaker less interesting characters because they no longer have any agency in the story, they only do what they're bid. Started the third book, had an absolute blast reading through the longer entries of the encylopedic dictionary and feel much less need to finish the book because of it.

[MeanMrMustard]

I decided not to read his books after someone posted something about his academic interest in Heidegger.

[Arakasi]

I don't really have much more to say on Bakker, and Baeraad's post sums up some other thoughts I have. I do think he is an immensely talented author, maybe more so than almost any writer in the fantasy genre currently writing today. Technically how he writes really works well, in prose and dialogue and description. Better than Martin or Erikson imo because he doesn't have the weaknesses in writing that I think those two do at times. However I just can't enjoy the series because of the central protagonist and how his relationships are handled with the characters and world around him. I understand what he's doing and it is an interesting idea, but ultimately one I have zero interest in reading. He's a young author though and I look forward to the next world he works on after this one.

[Kalbear]

A couple things:

Mary Sues are traditionally characters that are speaking with the author's voice. Kellhus clearly isn't doing that.

Mary Sues are also traditionally liked by people - 'everyone' likes them. Again, Kellhus, one way or another, is clearly being portrayed as the Bad Guy.

You can reasonably say that Kellhus as the 'hero' is a really flawed concept and pisses you off, and I think that's a fair argument; I would give it more than what amounts to 1 1/2 books of an Erikson novel before deciding that he's not going to run into any problems. But it doesn't really make sense to call him a Mary Sue; while he's good at everything, better than any normal human, it's clear why that's the case and it's also clear that others who come from the same background are at least on his level. Much less any Consult or other races. It mostly bugs to use that term, to tell the truth.

[Arakasi]

As per the wiki on the subject Mary Sue (sometimes shortened simply to Sue) is a pejorative term for a fictional character who is portrayed in an overly idealized way and lacks noteworthy flaws. There are many many variations on the Mary Sue, but to me the heart of the subject is the lack of flaws. (as well as him being the best of everything. Nothing I read of Kel made me think he was only good at something) I agree Bakker is flipping the example on its head by making him an unsympathetic character, but the Mary Suedom for me stands. I gave it as much as I could Kal, and asked friends I trusted if the rest of book 3 got any better in that regard, but didn't get a positive response there. So like the last 2 WoT novels, book 3 remains unfinished on my shelf. Anyways I should stop posting here so I don't troll up the thread. I've said my piece.

Edit: used a derogatory word, been reading too much forum stuff on FoH. Sorry.

[Kalbear]

Uh, he's an amoral sociopath. I'd call that a noteworthy flaw. I'd also say that because we know this and because he is shown as such a bastard, he's clearly not being shown in an overly idealized way.