The White Luck Warrior, or Epoch Epicness

R. Scott Bakker's The White Luck Warrior is the second book in the second trilogy of a trilogy of trilogies. Got that? If not, its the fifth book in a series of nine. The first three books were mind alteringly awesome. They follow a Holy War and the rise of a messianic figure who, in the fourth and fifth books, unites mankind against the threat of a second apocalypse.

If you haven't done so, read the first trilogy. It has monks who are bred for intelligence and agility, sorcery, wars on an epic scale, and a background story that both spans millennia and influences current events intimately. It literally spans epochs and is epic.

That being said, the second trilogy is a little more muddled as a whole, and more polished in a few specifics. Bakker commands adverbs, adjectives, and proper nouns as if he's conducting music. Just listen. Here a small band of scalpers are fending off an attack.
"He does not fight as scalpers fight, matching skill against ferocity, hammering strength against wild velocity. Nor does he dance as Pokwas dances, trusting ancient patterns to parse the surrounding air. No. What he does is utterly unique, a performance written for each singular moment. He throws and snaps his body. He moves in rings and lines, so fast that only inhuman screams and slumping bodies allow her to follow the thread of his attack."

Parsing the surrounding air? Its beautiful, and at times heartbreaking. With his command of the language when Bakker writes about evil it really feels... evil. Very, very evil. Which is a problem in the White Luck Warrior because there is a lot of it. All characters are moral shades of gray or black - so who's the good guys? After finishing the book, I was left with the feeling that we are. The readers. We are the ones who are still able to judge right from wrong. This is incredibly important because the way Bakker writes makes it imperative that we judge or the book loses meaning. The entire series is very cerebral - it deals with intense and often dark themes. There are times in the White Luck Warrior where out of 10 pages, 7 will be internal narrative which gets a little tiring.

To sum up, the White Luck Warrior was good. There was a little too much internal monologue, and often I came away from a particularly harrowing narrative feeling almost guilty for reading. However, when Bakker writes about action or the few times that unequivocal good triumphs it is downright beautiful.