Midnight Tides

Expanding even more the world of this already mammoth of a series, The Malazan Book of the Fallen‘s fifth volume, Midnight Tides, is an epic about zealotry, suffering, lack of compassion, and the intrinsic problems of a capitalist culture. Steven Erikson continues to build complex societies and tragic characters, cleverly mixing humor, drama, and action with social criticism in a narrative that is as intricate as it is engrossing.

The story here takes place before the events of the first novel, Gardens of the Moon, and introduces even more characters and locales to an already impressive political landscape. The protagonist is Trull Sengar, a Tiste Edur (think grey-skinned elves and you’ll be fine) who one day watches ships from the human city of Letheras hunting seals at a forbidden site and suspects this may be a prelude to war. So, to gain an advantage against the military might of the Letherii, Trull is sent along with his three brothers, Fear, Rhulad, and Binadas, to the north: their goal is to acquire a mysterious artifact their religious leader saw in a dream. Meanwhile, in Letheras, Tehol Beddict, a bankrupt man sleeping on his own roof, is hired by three women from lost tribes conquered by the Letherii to destroy the country’s economy from the inside. Tehol’s brother Brys, however, is being promoted to the post of King’s Champion and may make matters more difficult for him, while his other brother, Hull, is traveling to warn the Edur of Letheras’ military campaign.

The book’s main themes are built by the constant juxtaposition of both cultures, criticizing the Edur’s theocracy and Letheras’ imperialism. If the Edur are being shackled by the arbitrariness of religion, forced by custom and faith to partake in self-destructive behaviors, the Letherii are slaves to profit, chained to an unsustainable system that requires constant growth: they must either expand or collapse. If in Letheras, gold means power, making the rich untouchable inside their exquisite mansions, protected behind impenetrable walls and private armies, while people on the streets are dying of hunger, in Trull’s tribe, they use coins to cover the body of their dead in a strange ritual that, in a tense scene, goes horribly wrong and permanently twists the body of one of the main characters: in Letheras, a sign of inequality; with the Edur, a symbol of death and corruption.

The Letherii’s whole society is built around the notion of debt. Letheras is a world where political decisions are made in favor of big companies instead of the common people; where the few accumulate wealth while the many starve; where attributes like hard work, diligence, and ambition are worshipped because they give hope to the lower classes and sugarcoat the nature of their labor; where most people are forever destined to struggle to pay increasingly expensive bills and give their whole sweat, happiness, and health not to make the world a better place, but to make the rich even richer. Just imagine the horror of such existence, the anguish of realizing you’re stuck in a necrotic society with no chance of escaping, where you’ll toil and suffer so that others can afford to eat food coated in gold. Now you can give a sigh of relief because this is all fantasy and fiction, and there’s no such place as Letheras on the maps, I’ve checked.

Midnight Tides, however, is constantly trying to trick us into believing that there is an allegorical nature to its setting, inserting concepts such as “manifest destiny” into the Letheras’ foundation while discussing how a country may disguise its imperialistic drive as a “noble quest for freedom”, even though this is something that has never happened in real life:

“Friend, my people believe in the stacking of coins. One atop another, climbing, ever climbing to glorious heights. The climb signifies progress, and progress is the natural proclivity of civilization. Progress, Binadas, is the belief from which emerge notions of destiny. The Letherii believe in destiny – their own. They are deserving of all things, born of their avowed virtues. The empty throne is ever there for the taking,” Hull says to Trull’s brother in one scene, finishing his point with, “We have a talent for disguising greed under the cloak of freedom. As for past acts of depravity, we prefer to ignore those. Progress, after all, means to look ever forward, and whatever we have trampled in our wake is best forgotten.”

A malicious person, then, could claim that the details in Midnight Tides‘ worldbuilding work as fantastical representations of our own society. The penalties imposed on criminals in Letheras, for example, could function as a metaphor for a justice system that finds it much more desirable for a person to be rich than innocent: the sentence in Letheras always comes in the form of gold coins to be paid, with the unpaid amount being tied to the back of the criminal, who must now swim down a river while carrying the bag – and so eventually drown because of his debt. There are even public bets on who will die on the river, which makes total sense, as we should never miss an opportunity to turn a profit. But don’t be tricked, this is all fantasy and fiction, and no one in real life is swimming down a metaphorical river with a bag of debt pushing them down. And you’ll always receive the same treatment as Elon Musk in a trial. Trust me.

The main character in Letheras is Tehol Beddict, a mysterious man who has mysteriously lost his fortune after acquiring it even more mysteriously. Tehol is as eccentric as he’s arrogant – someone Benedict Cumberbatch could play in his sleep – and he gains a new purpose in life when he’s approached by members of the tribes assimilated by the Letherii. His mission is to do Godzilla proud and destroy the financial district, achieving the inconceivable: making a lot of powerful people lose a lot of money. This leads Tehol to enlist the help of his even more mysterious and eccentric servant, Bugg.

The dynamic between these two characters is often hilarious, built by the stark contrast between their deeply insightful monologues and their ridiculously nonsensical exchanges. At times, Tehol will make this very long speech (which really is  very long, so bear with me and trust that it’s a valuable means of using your time) just to explain the inner workings and contradictions of Letheras to his companions:

“… the assumption is the foundation stone of Letherii society, perhaps all societies the world over. The notion of inequity, my friends. For from inequity derives the concept of value, whether measured by money or the countless other means of gauging human worth. Simply put, there resides in all of us the unchallenged belief that the poor and the starving are in some way deserving of their fate. In other words, there will always be poor people. A truism to grant structure to the continual task of comparison, the establishment through observation of not our mutual similarities, but our essential differences. ‘I know what you’re thinking, to which I have no choice but to challenge you both. Like this. Imagine walking down this street, doling out coins by the thousands. Until everyone here is in possession of vast wealth. A solution? No, you say, because among these suddenly rich folk there will be perhaps a majority who will prove wasteful, profligate and foolish, and before long they will be poor once again. Besides, if wealth were distributed in such a fashion, the coins themselves would lose all value—they would cease being useful. And without such utility, the entire social structure we love so dearly would collapse. ‘Ah, but to that I say, so what? There are other ways of measuring self-worth. To which you both heatedly reply: with no value applicable to labour, all sense of worth vanishes! And in answer to that I simply smile and shake my head. Labour and its product become the negotiable commodities. But wait, you object, then value sneaks in after all! Because a man who makes bricks cannot be equated with, say, a man who paints portraits. Material is inherently value-laden, on the basis of our need to assert comparison—but ah, was I not challenging the very assumption that one must proceed with such intricate structures of value? ‘And so you ask, what’s your point, Tehol? To which I reply with a shrug. Did I say my discourse was a valuable means of using this time? I did not.”

But at other times, Tehol will have these bizarre exchanges with Bugg, which get even funnier when we realize that even if their madness started as a hoax – to confuse the others, encouraging them to underestimate the pair – it has now become an intrinsic element of their personality, preventing them from acting in any other way. When Bugg offers tea to Tehol, for example, this is what follows:

“Tehol collected his cup and carefully sniffed. Then he frowned at his manservant. Who shrugged.

‘We don’t have no herbs, master. I had to improvise.’

‘With what? Sheep hide?’

Bugg’s brows rose. ‘Very close indeed. I had some leftover wool.’

‘The yellow or the grey?’

‘The grey.’

‘Well, that’s alright, then.’ He sipped. ‘Smooth.’

‘Yes, it would be.’

‘We’re not poisoning ourselves, are we?’

‘Only mildly’”

However, it is not long before Tehol and Bugg find other equally insane characters and we begin to suspect that Letheras may be a sanatorium in disguise. Very unlike ours, this is a world gone mad. Portrayed as a ruined empire that is crumbling from within, but tries to hide it with increasingly public displays of power and wealth, Letheras often surprises us with the terrible state of its foundations: we always expect they’re really bad, but holly molly, they’re worse.

The only character that appears minimally sane in Letheras is the young Brys, who is promoted to the king’s personal guard just before the start of the war against the Edur. Brys always appears dislocated in the city, with a sense of honor that doesn’t seem to be sufficiently valued and a serious countenance that ends up sounding comic when juxtaposed to that of his often-insane interlocutors. His best friend, the old sorcerer Kuru Qan, for example, has the highest military rank in the city… and seems on the verge of senility. As usual within Erikson’s work, Kuru Qan’s manner of speaking is very particular, with the character always analyzing out loud whether what was just said to him is pertinent or not before answering the person he’s talking to.

On the Edur side, we’re introduced to a society similar to the Teblors’ in House of Chains: a theocracy that values ​​war and has very misguided notions about its gods, which eventually leads them to commit terrible acts and face horrible consequences. The Edur are also, just like the Letherii, deluded as to their own importance, believing themselves superior to all.

Here, the main character is Trull, who is the worst thing anyone can be in a theocracy: he’s a skeptic. Trull is a sower of doubts, someone hellbent on uncovering the truth, even though it may endanger his life. Trull, however, is also a passive individual, always expecting others to act based on the questions he’s raised, especially his brother Fear. This is his great tragedy: Trull seeks to find what is wrong with his world, knowing that the path his people are treading will only lead them to pain and suffering, but he rarely acts to change that outcome, limiting himself to point out the mistakes made by others.

His initial antagonist is his younger brother, Rhulad, who, impatient and mostly inconsequential, is the type of person who always takes reprimands as personal attacks instead of life lessons. Rhulad, however, is perhaps the character most filled with pathos in the novel, stirring up our pity with his naively arrogant posture: we can clearly see how he’s very much over his head and heading blindly to a bottomless pit. His arc is much more complex than it appears at first, too, eventually growing to become the dramatic focus of the book.

Now, the bridge between the Letherii and the Edur is symbolized by the relationship between Hull Beddict and Seren Pedac. The former, Tehol’s brother, is a Letherii who feels betrayed by his own people and so now wishes to betray them himself and reveal its military secrets to the Edur. Seren Pedac, in turn, is a guide who takes human caravans to the Edur and tries to avoid meddling with political issues. The romance between these two characters is seen as impossible by both and it’s not difficult to understand the reason why, as they both connect the two warring cultures, but in the opposite way: while Hull’s mission is destructive, fueling the flames of conflict, Seren’s work is peaceful and conciliatory. The climax of their journeys, then, ends up reflecting the nature of their goals.

Midnight Tides, after all, is not always a subtle book, even playing with the name of the Sengar brothers: while Trull has a similar sound to the word “true” – the truth being what he seeks the most – and Fear exposes the element that most dictate the character’s actions, the way Rhulad’s name sounds will also come to carry great narrative meaning. The only name that seems random is Binadas, but he is the least developed of the three brothers, remaining always apart from his siblings.

But this is a complex, layered narrative that can be deceptively subtle, too, such as when it frames the pattern in the metaphors employed by a certain character as a big clue to their true identity (rewarding attentive readers). Irony is also often used here to construct the symbolism of the scenes: when an Edur cries out to his servant “We are not the same, slave! Do you understand I am not one of your Indebted. I am not a Letherii,” the following sentence, “Then he sagged in a rustle of coins” directly contradicts the Edur by comparing him with the Letherii criminals in the river, for example. Meanwhile, the incredibly cinematic scene at the climax where a single gold coin rolls on the floor is also deeply charged with symbolic meaning, creating an image that is as memorable as it is haunting.

In Midnight Tides, even the main set pieces are built exceptionally well: the first moment of retribution, when the Edur send a monster to avenge the taking of the seals, for example, seems to be taken out of a horror story: working with the idea that horror tends to be much more effective when it’s just suggested, we have the main characters only hearing the distant cries of despair from the victims and feeling the monster’s oppressive aura. The descriptions of violence, meanwhile, follow the “surgical” pattern of the rest of the series, focusing on the bones and organs affected by each hit, much like with Homer in the Iliad.

Midnight Tides is a powerful novel that gives us a terrible warning: “Civilization after civilization, it is the same. The world falls to tyranny with a whisper. The frightened are ever keen to bow to a perceived necessity, in the belief that necessity forces conformity, and conformity a certain stability. In a world shaped into conformity, dissidents stand out, are easily branded and dealt with. There is no multitude of perspectives, no dialogue. The victim assumes the face of the tyrant, self-righteous and intransigent, and wars breed like vermin. And people die.”

In other words, even worse than being ruled by power-hungry religious zealots, such as the Edur, and unhinged capitalists that would consume your life whole for just a couple more gold coins, such as the Letherii, is to be ruled by both. But luckily for us, this would never happen in real life.

March 11, 2025.

Review originally published in Portuguese on March 20, 2017.