First-person description of life in the front lines of a huge fantasy-world war
Written: Dec 15 '01
Product Rating:
Pros: Well-written. Cynical, but appealing. First of a trilogy, but a good story all by itself.
Cons: If you want acts of conspicuous heroism in the defense of Justice, you'll be disappointed.
The Bottom Line: A fresh look at the concept of the Huge War Against the Evil Empire - from the viewpoint of the soldiers working for the Evil Empire. Worth a look!
lorendiac's Full Review: Glen Cook - The Black Company
The Black Company is a mercenary outfit composed of several hundred men as we first meet them, which has been roving from one commission to another for something like four hundred years. They are supposedly the last of the Free Companies of Khatovar. We are told this, but very little more than that, concerning this unit's origins.
This is one of the things that Glen Cook is good at doing: Dropping hints about more background history for the world he has created than he ever spells out for us, leaving our imaginations to fill in the blanks. J.R.R. Tolkien did something similar in The Hobbit and the Lord of the Rings; the difference being that Tolkien had actually been working out the history of Middle-Earth for many years and had notebooks full of material. But with some authors who indulge themselves this way, including Cook, I suspect they just invent these little snippets of information as throwaway lines without actually knowing any more than we do about what really happened four hundred years ago.
At any rate, this entire book is narrated by the Black Company's chief surgeon and physician, Croaker. In a modern army he'd be called the unit's chief medical officer. In this book, he is never actually called an officer but it is made clear that he is one of the senior personalities the Captain of the Black Company calls upon for advice at regular intervals.
Let's get the obligatory Tolkien comparisons over with: There is indeed a vague resemblance to the Lord of the Rings template, with the story being set in a large world with a detailed history (even if most of the details are kept out of sight) and very powerful bad guys playing power politics and fighting wars with allegedly good types who talk about bringing down the inhumane tyranny. Lots of magic is tossed around by both sides. But I should warn you that when you get beyond those superficial details, the feel of this first volume of the series is about as unlike Tolkien's tales of Bilbo Baggins and Frodo Baggins as the first volume of any fantasy trilogy possibly could be.
Tolkien's heroes were obviously the "good guys." They had character weaknesses, they occasionally had sharp differences of opinion, but by and large we felt that Frodo and his buddies were Heroic. Their enemies, Orcs and the Black Riders and the mad wizard Saruman and Sauron (evil entity lurking behind the scenes) reeked of evil. You always knew where you stood with these people. Despite personality flaws to make Frodo et aliae more human, we knew their hearts were generally in the right place. The world of the Black Company, however, is depicted in shades of gray - and usually a rather dark gray.
Following the unpleasant events in the first chapter of the book, the Company sails from the southern continent to the northern continent of this world for the first time in their unit's history. We are never shown any maps, but I envision this as being something like moving from Africa to a huge landmass along the scale of Eurasia, with the difference being there was evidently no way to get from one to another by land bridge. The northern continent (never named) is dominated by the Empire, which is run by the extremely powerful ageless sorceress called the Lady. No other name is ever provided for her; this world is one of those where a sorcerer who knows the true name of a rival can use it in a spell to kill or otherwise harm her. This explains why the top subordinates of the Lady also use codenames. Centuries ago, the Lady and her late husband (the Dominator) had managed to enslave ten other powerful sorcerers to serve them in the wars of conquest that built the Empire. These ten, called the Taken, began using such charming names as Soulcatcher, Bonegnasher, the Limper, Stormbringer, and other titles that suggest good clean wholesome fun and a positive outlook on life.
One reason the Lady needs to expand her army by hiring the tough veterans of the Black Company is that she currently has a civil war on her hands. The enemy is collectively called the Rebel Alliance or simply the Rebel. In theory, the Rebel stands for liberty, equality, truth, justice, civil rights, and all those other splendid things. In a straightforward story, such as the original Star Wars trilogy, these claims would be absolutely true and we'd know who to root for. In this case, however, according to Croaker's rather jaundiced viewpoint, there is very little difference between the average moral level of the Lady and the Taken, and the morals of the inner circle of eighteen powerful sorcerers who run the Rebel. In both cases, there is plenty of brutality and internal backstabbing happening at any given time.
Of course, there are old prophecies that someday the Lady will be overthrown when the White Rose, a brilliant Rebel leader of hundreds of years ago, is reincarnated and does her job all over again. At this moment in time, the White Rose is nowhere in sight, nor does the Rebel claim to have her in their possession. (Stay tuned for further announcements - you just know she'll come back or at least be claimed to have returned at some point in the story.)
Which means it's hard to choose one side over the other, morally speaking. Not that this stops Croaker from worrying about it in his spare time. He is not ecstatic at the knowledge that his unit is now serving a powerful sorceress who (with her husband) conquered and ruled much of the known world, hundreds of years ago, before suffering a temporary setback. On the other hand, he loves old historical mysteries and keeps hoping he'll get the chance to interview her someday to get her perspective on what things were really like in the bad old days. On the other hand, attracting the personal attention of a capricious sorceress is not the smartest thing he could do . . . you get the idea. His encounters with various of the Taken confirm the popular impression that they are not exactly sane and stalwart defenders of all that is good and pure in the world, and since the Lady trusts them as her chief subordinates, what does this imply about her?
Those readers who are hopeless idealists in their hearts (me, for instance) are naturally hoping that somewhere along the line the Black Company will end up fighting for the "Good" side, but in this first volume it's extremely hard to identify such a side. Gradually that will change (in later books), but Cook was trying to make a point here about how people who work for "evil tyrants" are just human beings too, or something along those lines. I'd say he made it. By the end of the book Croaker is directly involved in certain struggles which make it clear that while purehearted "good" guys may be awfully far and few between at the moment, some bad guys are much nastier than others and just defeating them may count as a victory.
An interesting side note: Nearly all members of the Black Company have names that come from common words in the English language (presumably translated for our convenience). The Captain and the Lieutenant are simply called by title. The four wizards who constitute the magical component of the company as we first meet it are called One-Eye, Tom-Tom, Goblin, and Silent. Tom-tom refers to his tendency to beat on a small drum. His brother One-Eye is missing one eye. Goblin is a rather wizened little man, and Silent never says a word. Other names include Nasty, Mercy, Raven, Curly, and so forth. We do meet a couple of soldiers with "conventional" names - Elmo and Otto. We are never told how names are selected, but I imagine they follow the example of the French Foreign Legion where it is taken for granted that a man will invent a new name for himself on the spur of the moment at the time he enlists. It has occurred to me that this tendency to have names come from words must considerably simplify the task of anyone asked to translate this story into other languages for foreign sales. Possibly that had something to do with Cook's decision to have most character names (even outside of the company) follow this pattern. Trying to emphasize how some aspects of the military experience never seem to change much, whether your native tongue is English or French or Russian or Chinese or something else?
On a similar note, we hear very little about religion in this book. Croaker doesn't seem to take it seriously - though he has a personal code of behavior - and he doesn't say much about the religious doctrines followed by anyone else.
The second book of this trilogy will open up several years after the first one ends, and the third one commences several years after the second one ends. This being the case, I believe that if you just had to, you could read the volumes out of order and still feel you had gotten a fairly complete story in each installment - as opposed to a "trilogy" along the lines of the Lord of the Rings, where Tolkien's original conception was simply one very lengthy novel. The LotR was only divided into three volumes as a business decision after Tolkien had written the entire thing and was trying to get it published. His editor had doubts about the high price that would be required for a single volume of such length, with the name of an author who was not already widely known and admired for previous efforts. This is not to say that I would ever encourage you to read this (or any other) trilogy out of order; but merely to reassure you that there aren't such blatant cliffhangers as you have encountered in other trilogies. Each story has its own Beginning, Middle, and End.
We are told that one of Croaker's duties is the keeper of the Annals of the Black Company. We rather get the impression that no other literate member of the company (in a medieval culture, probably a small percentage of their total membership) wanted the job; so Croaker got it by default. His style is not overly poetic, although I like it well enough. His descriptions of people and scenery are quite terse. In some ways his writing style would seem at home in a hard-boiled private eye novel. There are things about Croaker that vaguely remind me of Dashiell Hammett's detective hero the Continental Op, a nameless employee of an agency modeled on the Pinkertons of the early 20th Century, and first-person narrator of two novels and numerous shorter pieces of fiction. (The novels were The Red Harvest and The Dain Curse, if you want to look for them in the library sometime. Highly recommended by yours truly.)
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