Night of Knives by Ian Cameron Esslemont – review

Night of Knives is a really intriguing book to me because I have gone back and forth on it, and some of the baggage that comes with it is rather unique.  It was not a book I’d have described as “top shelf” in the year it was released, but it is one I find myself rereading. Among the characteristics that Night of Knives can claim is that it’s a prequel, one whose source material was written by a different writer (in published form, Esslemont is very much credited for the blueprint from the beginning). It’s also a shared-world piece that is part of as high-profile a series as epic fantasy has seen in the last few years.

For the uninitiated, the book is an extension of Steven Erikson’s Malazan Book of the Fallen sequence. The review will probably make little sense to those who aren’t familiar with the series, and while attempting to encapsulate the series would be a book in itself (one I wouldn’t mind researching/writing, at that!), to those who haven’t read it (and for some reason haven’t stopped reading this blog post), I would sum it up thusly:  it is, quite simply, a major work in the Epic Fantasy pathos, a work that I have often described as something equivalent to taking all the Shared-world, RPG-styled, PNP, game-based books, adding them up, and then retroactively adding editorial and creative evolution that didn’t really occur over the last twenty years, and what you have is this era’s answer to sword and sorcery but with the day-time dramatics that epic fantasy inserted into our medium over the same time period. In short, it’s a hell of a lot of fun and utilizes a portion of fantasy that I’d thought had told all the stories it could.

I mentioned some words above that have stigmas attached to them, which in some eyes would be in fact extra separate stigmas in a genre that suffers from a stigma as it is. One of these is “prequel,” a term that has come to almost have a negative connotation itself due to its use in film. The danger of a prequel (so-called or not) is that not only is the work going to be compared to the source material, but it is also going to have to satisfyingly depict events that have been interpreted, imagined, and rendered in thousands of different way by thousands of different minds. One of the more successful prequels I’ve read is The First King of Shannara by Terry Brooks, a prequel that took elements that occurred in previous books and tied them together. Interestingly enough, this was actually one of my favorite entries in a much-maligned line. Some readers absolutely hate it, which, admittedly, occurs whether a book is a prequel or not, but I surmise that essentially semi-retconing gaps filled in by the reader in an unsatisfactory way had a lot to do with it.

Now let me deviate for a moment….

NOTE: I’m not a big spoiler warning advocate, but if you haven’t read the book or the Erikson books, you may want to stop now. I’m going to mention what most functional people would have gotten rather quickly in the series but for the wide-eyed–you are warned!

Erikson’s Malazan work features perhaps the largest relevant cast I have read in fiction. Through reading the first eight books and constantly finding new favorite characters chapter after chapter, two have risen to the top for me as the most intriguing. Erikson’s lynchpin is a military company of humans (and its descendants) that keeps the series grounded amidst a real high magic, high wonder, incredibly expansive environment. However, the two I choose as the characters who catch that human quality most to me are two newly “ascended” gods:  Shadowthrone and Cotillion. This duo I count already amongst the most intriguing fantasy characters in recent times. They are the Pullo and Vorenus if they achieved godhood; Odysseus; Roddenberry striving to go where no man has gone before. Two hustlers with a long view who took over an island, carved out an empire, gave up what most would describe as the pinnacle of what mortals could achieve, and ascended to godhood–and damn it not by accident, they planned it! So much of the series is fist-raising and screaming “don’t fuck with humanity,” and these two go beyond simply that, they traverse the path of “Gods, you don’t want me to fuck with you.” These two are you and your buddy when you were teenagers. You were all friends but you and this kid saw eye to eye, an unspoken understanding between adolescent minds ready to take on a world you didn’t fully understand, but you carved a path to achieve that goal anyway.

Back on track….

Among other things, Ian Esslemont’s Night of Knives chronicles the long crawl to the first step for the duo of Shadowthrone and Cotillion: achieving the mantle of immortality. The aura around this event is established in Erikson’s novels; their assassinations the subject of rumor, intrigue, and multiple truths. To most characters they are simply dead victims of an internal coup; to some they are travelers of planes, to others they have taken on an almost mythic quality, and fewer know they are now part of the pantheon playing the same game they always have–their own, and they cheat. The choice of title and its relation to “The Night of Long Knives,” I think, speaks easily enough for itself and plays out in the other plot threads of the novels that will give readers a view of even more last first steps . Through the eyes of Temper, you will see a soldier’s and a friend’s reflection on one Dassem Ultor, a character we know in the Malazan universe as the former First Sword of the Empire–these two men even make the new gods nervous when in proximity. We also see Kiska, a girl who is always trying to follow destiny, and the two guide us through a night called Shadow Moon. It is again apt that it takes place in Malaz city, ending where it began. Our two guides offers us distinct, even opposing looks. One is a young female finding her path and wanting to be noticed. The other is a veteran trying to hide his tracks; but whether rushing in or away, neither can avoid a convergence or fail to be drawn into what is not just a chapter of the Malazan experience, but rather the prologue best served after, or the half-told epilogue that grows in stages. In this I may have underestimated the book on my first read–it is a echo, and what echoes depends on the place from whence you approach Night of Knives. The more books you read by Erikson, the more pertinent this Esslemont chapter becomes.

It is unavoidable to compare the two writers, and in this Esslemont and Erikson are much like Kiska and Temper in that they offer us unique perspectives to what we are all drawn to. The choice of–aside from flashbacks–having a book that takes place in one locale and over the course of one night is is exquisite. In a strange way, what is unbalanced in terms of pacing adds to the atmosphere of the novel; this is one hectic night, and I haven’t event mentioned the overlapping of shadow and reality, or the forthcoming storm of magical, alien-like wave riders! It feels like surplus, but I think Esslemont captures the moment adeptly, chronicling acts that we know are grandiose but giving them the mundane feeling such events have when they actually occur, no matter how legend they become later. It’s a mess, and it reads like one.

In various opportunities and forums, I have remarked that my view of Night of Knives is that it was a potentially great short story made into a slightly above-average novel, and now I wonder if the standard was unassailable to begin with. The best it could have been was being one of the great stories never told that became a good story revealed. The revelation, obviously, is not the draw in the first place; the enactment of those events, and the connection of the dots we the readers created ourselves, were.

I wonder if vanity has concealed a good book from me, and further I wonder if Ammanas and Dancer…I mean, Erikson and Esslemont, have hoodwinked me, push and pull.

* This review originally appeared at my old blog, the now-defunct Bodhisattva, in 2007. It and many of the reviews I did there have been and are going to be relocated to BSC. My personal blog has since moved to Vogue Immunity–a collecting blog. It’s presented unaltered, excluding being edited (believe me, it needs it) for clarity, and minus some intro material that now would no longer be applicable.

About Jay Tomio

...Jay Tomio is the co-owner of BSCreview and BSCkids. You should probably become his disciple through twitter @JayTomio. More fun awaits at Gestalt Mash, Vogue Immunity, and The Malazan Ascendancy.