And when they die (And they are always dying - it is a book of the fallen, after all) it is as if a real person is dead. You don't cry and wallow and say that was beautiful, what an affecting book – you cringe and swallow and make funeral preparations, and wonder what they left you in their will.
There are Houses – of Dark, Light, Shadow, Death, Life, and so on – but these aren't necessarily antagonistic, in fact as the series progresses so do the various alliances. The methods employed by Light are as horrific as those employed by Dark – war. The immortal Tiste Andii, the Children of the Dark (and their leader, Anomander Rake) are in many ways more pitiable than the humans – they have been so battered by their history, they have lost the will to live. Though war is common in these books, it never loses its horrific-ness. There is no attempt to legitimise war – even though most of Erikson's most likeable characters are soldiers. (In this world, Everyman is a soldier – a frightening metaphor for the saying that to live is to fight.) Instead, the only stable moralities are those of necessity and compassion. I have deliberately avoided calling the book gritty – a phrase that, to me, implies a general hardening and detachment in the characters ability to deal with suffering. For Erikson, war is uniformly gruelling, there is no suggestion of sado-masochism, of pleasure in pain – killing is a soul-destroying thing, yet it is the only thing people can do in their desperate attempt to stay alive. The heroic bit of war is not in victory, but in the soldiers' acceptance of its necessity, even as they see its inherent wrongness. This makes the books war scenes much more potent and disturbing than those of many other fantasy novels. (Don't shrug innocently, Terry Goodkind - I am pointing at you.)
A dying soldier in most books has the (dubious) satisfaction of dying for a Cause. A dying soldier in the Malazan books knows only that for him, the killing has finally ended, and that Hood will get him. It is a world Yossarian would approve of in its frightening meaninglessness. There is always a superficial reason for a death – usually because of one or more of the plots laid by all the powerful characters. But it is still eventually meaningless, nothing is achieved except a complexifying of the intrigue – the stakes are raised again, new alliances are formed, new players enter, but nothing changes for the soldiers.
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