In The Thousandfold Thought, R. Scott Bakker comes so close to being crushed under the weight of his literary ambitions that you almost jump for joy to see him emerge at the end of it all relatively unscathed. Bakker has really dared a great deal in constructing this trilogy, and he's violated virtually every rule that fantasy fans have come to expect.
These are, on general principle, good things. In the process some of Bakker's choices have amounted to biting off more than he can chew. But so what? His willingness to do it is admirable enough that when all of the smoke from this book's breathless final chapters has cleared, you'll be happy to give the guy a big hand. An author who strives to take his work beyond the ordinary, and succeeds maybe half to two-thirds of the time, is someone I'm going to be a lot more impressed by than someone who simply takes the easy road and succeeds at formula 100% of the time, solely because all of the roadmarks have already been laid.
The Thousandfold Thought is, interestingly, the shortest volume of the trilogy — only 400 pages compared to The Warrior-Prophet's 600 — but it provides the clearest picture of the intended scope of Bakker's story. (Instead of his usual brief, explanatory appendices, Bakker closes out this book with an aptly titled "encyclopedic glossary" that's 100 pages long!) In The Prince of Nothing Bakker has tried to reframe the typically escapist epic fantasy trilogy concept as a vehicle for an elaborate philosophical exegesis on the nature of belief, knowledge, memetics and free will. In a very real sense this trilogy can be considered the anti-Lord of the Rings or anti-Narnia. Those fantasies, as well as the legions of trilogies and series they have inspired, are rooted in moral clarity. Good and Evil are archetypal to a fault, their distinctions every bit as unambiguous as the understanding of which side we're meant to root for.
In The Prince of Nothing, Bakker does pay lip service to moral-clarity tropes via such entities as the Consult and the No-God. But mostly in his world, beliefs rule believers, not vice versa, and govern their actions. What's empirically true or false, right or wrong, becomes irrelevant in a world where a person's actions are rooted in beliefs, ideologies, assumptions he often doesn't realize he has just absorbed from his culture — an ignorance the Warrior-Prophet Kellhus calls the "darkness that comes before". When entire nations of men are swept up in a frenzy of righteous fervor, all too easily manipulated by leaders who know exactly which hot buttons to push and how hard, the very notion of freethought dies, and people no longer move events but are simply moved by them. And the downfall of civilizations is found in men's insistence on forgoing cold hard truth in favor of taking sides between these conflicting beliefs/ideologies. Gee, fantasy sure was easier to wrap your head around when all you had to do to defeat Evil was toss a ring into a volcano.
I don't think that Bakker is arguing that free will flat does not exist, only that to live in total freedom, utterly uninfluenced by the received beliefs and circumstances of one's culture or environment, is just not possible. Moreover, you're never going to find anyone on any side in any conflict who will say outright, "We're the bad guys!" Bakker explores this premise rather niftily through his creation of the Dûnyain, the race to which Kellhus belongs. The Dûnyain have isolated themselves for centuries and have selectively bred and trained their people to master their desires and circumstances rather than be mastered by them. It is because of his training in understanding human nature that Kellhus is so easily able to wrest control of the Holy War. He knows the importance of perceptions — if someone chooses to think of you as their superior then that's how they'll treat you — and how easy it is to manipulate them. The interesting paradox here is that for all their training, the Dûnyain are in the end at the mercy of events as much as anyone else. After all, Kellhus's whole odyssey began with nothing less than a summons from his father. And the actions of the sinister Consult threaten all.
Yes, Bakker's choice to tackle such weighty themes does make the book an often slow-moving, pretentious exercise in exposition. It's fair to say that not a lot actually happens in the whole first half of the story, which can seem kind of a letdown considering that we've been plowing through a thousand pages waiting for this massive Holy War to reach its gory and apocalyptic climax. Bakker lets the first half of this book take its sweet time. We get some pompous speechifying. The motivations and desire lines of some characters often lack clarity or apparent sense. Drusas Achamian, despite the existential terror he's been experiencing over the looming Second Apocalypse, spends most of his time brooding over losing the love of Esmenet to Kellhus, indicating he rally needs to prioritize.
But when Bakker pulls out the stops in the last hundred pages, the resulting flash flood of action is spectacular enough to offset the mildly disappointing fact that the resolution of Kellhus's primary goal — the meeting with his father Moënghus and the culmination of the saga's themes — is played out mostly through dialogue. Bakker intercuts their scenes with gloriously chaotic moments of battle that often play out like a Heironymous Bosch painting come to hellish life. The end result makes for one of the most freakishly unputdownable conclusions to a fantasy trilogy I've read in a long time. A wildly uneven, overreaching, full-of-itself, and often just plain messy epic The Prince of Nothing may well be. But it's a worthy experience all the same, even if Bakker wound up in the end being just as swept away by the story he set in motion as any of his hapless characters.
Followed by The Judging Eye, the first volume of a sequel trilogy titled The Aspect-Emperor.
