Temperance was Malkasian's 2010 book; I'm mostly working forward from the beginning of her career. It has a title that is odd for a book focused on interactions among people - temperance is a personal, internal virtue, the desire or urge to not do things. And Malkasian's characters, to my mind, are always intemperate - balls of emotion running about at high speed, emoting madly and expressing their roles in the plot and theme at top volume. Temperance is close to being a formal allegory, but it's not an allegory of temperance: it's an allegory of wars of choice and tribal allegiance and hatred of the other. Yes, if all of her characters were much more temperate, the plot of this book would never have happened, but I have to think that they wouldn't be Cathy Malkasian characters in that case.
Descriptions of the book I've seen tend to start with the second section, eliding details of the setup that Malkasian makes very clear and stark - possibly to play up the allegory. But Malkasian does come from children's animation; she's always very clear. Her villains are hugely monstrous, undeniable. Her heroes are damaged, at least half-broken, tentative, whimsical, confused. All of them are odd, in most terms of the word - Malkasian's worlds are fabulistic constructions filled with quirky people, like something you stumble across on an obscure channel one early morning by accident.
So: Temperance begins with two young women in a wood. Minerva is real: short, homely, conflicted. Peggy, on the other hand, is only ambiguously real, less so as the book goes on: tall, beautiful, focused. They are watching their "Pa," who is the actual father of neither of them. He's a large, seemingly middle-aged man: bald, angry, energetic, massively destructive. He travels to local villages, declares that "the enemy" is attacking, whips the locals into a fervor, and recruits them for his great civilizational project. He's building a gigantic "ship" out of stone - so, a castle, actually - to be called Blessedbowl, where his chosen people will be free forever from the obviously horrible depredations of these unknown enemies.
There are no enemies, obviously. Any atrocities they supposedly did - murders, burning of villages, rape of maidens - were all done by Pa. In Malkasian's world, he's essentially a force of nature, not a person: he can't be directly stopped or contradicted; no one even seems to be able to realize he's the one who does all of this.
People in Malkasian's books, I'm coming to believe, are all pretty dumb, to make her plots work. Maybe I should say "easily led" or "blind to their own faults," but they're bone-deep stupid on top of that, with massive abilities to ignore or misunderstand the clearest things standing right in front of them.
Pa cuts down trees, rants and rages, and fights a young man who tries to save or protect the two women. The young man is beaten nearly to death, but spared, after a maiming, by Minerva's intervention. She drags him into Blessedbowl, nurses him back to life, names him Lester, tells him stories to replace the memories he lost in the attack.
The book skips forward thirty years, and is narrated after that short initial chapter by a block of wood. (I'm not joking, and it's thematically relevant. But it is yet another bit of quirk in a story already loaded down with quirk.) Pa is nowhere to be seen - like Moses, he did not enter Blessedbowl, but unlike Moses, he's said to be still out there, fighting the enemy and sending back dispatches from his war.
Minerva invents all of those dispatches; she's the internal head of this society, under only Pa. Most of the people in Blessedbowl are stupid and easily led; a few are stupid and power-hungry and cunning, plotting to take Minerva's power for their own deeply stupid and destructive ends. None of them have two brain cells to rub together; none of them seem capable of going outside in the rain without looking up and drowning.
The bulk of the book follows the parallel tracks of Lester and Minerva. Lester is finally getting some of his memories back, which are vastly different from the self-serving stories Minerva has been telling him for thirty years. If this were a realistic world, he'd also have severe brain damage from the gigantic dent in his skull, so he's lucky in that if nothing else. Minerva is trying to hold together her society of the just-stupid and the stupidly-destructive, and her ways of doing so are running down.
Oh, and our narrator, the block of wood, is first Lester's artificial leg, without any agency. But then Minerva carves it into a little doll, and it can run and have its own adventures - yet another kids-animation touch.
Eventually, several characters leave Blessedbowl, and Pa re-enters the narrative, seemingly no older and obviously no different than he was a generation before. (Well, of course. If he's not really a human being, if he's a personified spirit of war or whatever, why would he age?)
I said Temperance was close to an allegory, but what I mean is is that Pa is clearly allegorical, and Peggy tends strongly to the allegorical, and the wooden doll and Blessedbowl, too. But all of the other pieces don't slot in neatly, especially Minerva and Lester, who are somewhat Everypeople but too specific and too much leaders for that to work well. I can't quite explicate how those elements come together in the ending, but the wooden doll, Pa, and Peggy (possibly the spirit of learning or knowledge or just actual information rather than lies and destruction) have a very symbolic multi-page sequence that leads to the end of Blessedbowl.
But most of the people of Blessedbowl are completely blindered: they have no useful skills, no knowledge of reality, no shown ability to cope with anything whatsoever. Their capacity for creating food falls apart in the course of the book. As far as I can tell, they'll probably all die - either slowly of starvation or quickly by battling in ever-smaller factions over this massive upheaval in their lives. They are very stupid.
So, yay! The wooden doll has a happy ending, and Pa is somewhat banished after destroying all of the "books" in Peggy's "library" - whatever that one last fit of pique and mindless destruction really means - and Minerva and Lester reunite. They also have no skills to survive in this new world, so let's end the book quickly before they starve to death, too.
It's fairly easy to be allegorical but very hard to be an actual allegory. Everything has to map precisely for the latter; it's a finnicky, rigorous form that has vanishingly few successes and piles of half-baked failures. Temperance doesn't try to be a formal allegory, which is good. But it comes closer than most allegorical things do, which is not necessarily good. Malkasian's art is lovely and organic here, soft pencil lines and mostly amusingly-drawn elements, and that covers over a lot of the gaps in her allegorical project - we readers want Lester and Minerva and the doll to find happiness, want Pa to be finally destroyed or beaten, so we'll fill in the bits in our own heads as needed to get to that point on the page.
I found Temperance deeply frustrating. I wanted to figure out what these allegorical elements meant - what the idea side of the allegory was - but I don't think Malkasian built the book that way. I think this was a somewhat delayed rant against the Gulf War, and the us-against-them mindset in general, and that Malkasian's anger and disgust curdled many of the elements here - those deeply stupid people, the ways her main characters are nearly useless, the senseless, aimless, unrelenting destruction. In the end, I don't think it works as an allegory, only partially because Malkasian didn't want to make it all neat and clear.
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