Complicated Company – The Black Company Resolution

The Black Company (1984)
Written by: Glen Cook
Genre: Dark Fantasy
Pages: 319 (Mass market paperback)
Series: Book 1 of The Chronicles of the Black Company
Publisher: Tor

Why I Chose It: So my 2019 Resolution was to revisit Glen Cook’s series The Chronicles of the Black Company, beginning with… well, The Black Company.

As mentioned, I remember these books only vaguely, but they made enough of an impression on me that I’ve been carting six of them around for decades now.

I’m rereading them for two reasons: to see what I missed the first time around, and frankly to see if I want to keep carting them around for years to come.  There will be spoilers.

My expectations going into the first of the series, based on my recall, were thus:

1) This is a book about war. It was in the trenches warfare, not big picture warfare; this was the story for the merc soldiers and the rebels, not the generals. Not the kings. We’re not looking at the chessboard; we are the chess pieces.

2) The magic is peculiar and interesting and very dangerous.

and, 3) Man, I loved Croaker.

That’s pretty much it.

Some spoilers

I expected to get more from this reread simply because the series is so significant in the field—it’s been ongoing since the 80s! That doesn’t happen without a strong audience. It was early grimdark. It took fantasy off its courtly throne and threw the story down into the mud. No peasant boy learning he was the chosen king here.

So I reread The Black Company for the first time in–oh god, I’m old–35 years. What did I think?

Well… I didn’t actually miss as much as I thought I had the first time through. This is a weirdly dense, weirdly structured book.

I remembered fragmentary scenes and thought I’d forgotten or missed the bigger storylines. But no. The Black Company is really a series of vignettes held together by some common pieces—Croaker’s narrative and the Lady’s struggle to reclaim the world. The third chapter was actually published as a short story called “Raker” two years prior to the book’s publication in the Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction.

I remembered that the Black Company was technically on the side of the “enemy”, but it’s really irrelevant since the stakes of these battles are so unclear. The Lady is evil and does terrible things. But the rebels—ostensibly the good guys—don’t really exist on the page except as a force the mercs struggle against.

The specifics of the world-building are all micro, no macro. We get the visceral struggle of battle and camp and the weather that affects the soldiers. We get the buildings they’re in and the buildings they destroy. We get the landscape that they fight across. We get the plotting and the internecine squabbles between the soldiers, and the Taken. It’s great.

The big picture stuff is either vague—oh the Lady has control over half the world—or assumes we already know what the big picture is. As an example, the very first segment lets us know that someone’s released the forvalaka. Oops, that sounds… bad? I guess? Cook just rolls with it, dragging us along and fills in our lack of knowledge in pieces. He does a good job, but there’s really only so much you can explain in fragments of conversation and actions and sometimes you just want a straight-forward sentence that fills you in. But then, sometimes I’m a lazy reader.

I can remember, now that I’m reading it, how startling this all was. Because I was reading other books of the type that Diana Wynne Jones would go on to gently mock in Tough Guide to Fantasyland. Books that had carefully picked chapter headings about the world, or the newbie character who needed to have long explanations about the situation handed to him, or god help us all, whole chapters that were straight-up histories full of Random Capitalization and Portents & Prophecies.

And here came The Black Company where Cook throws you right in to Croaker’s first pressing issue (already in motion) where he realizes some innkeeper is poisoning his fellow soldiers.

That said, Cook does fall prey to the random capitalization of vague words coupled with odd names that sometimes make the pages look like word salad.

Two of the Eighteen of the Circle—Feather and Journey—privy to Rebel strategies were honeymooning near Charm. (paraphrased)

You get interrupted while you’re reading and you pick the book up and it’s all Capitals Coming At You.

The Black Company is also in first person, which used to be unusual for second-world fantasy.   (Though in the eighties, I feel like we just called it all fantasy or sword and sorcery!)

There’s definitely a lot to admire in this book and I’m committed to reading on, but I think without the resolution, I might have stopped.

I miss the clear overarching plot of more traditionally structured books. Here, Croaker meanders like an ant between humans…hopelessly small, gathering crumbs, and never seeing the whole. He’s a journalist of sorts, but he’s the embedded kind, not the investigative type. He’s more likely to spin a story about what he saw than he is to figure out why this happened or what it means. At the end, he’s made a significant discovery and choice, but at the same time, his choice is to be silent. Also, he’s not the only one who’s made the discovery, so his revelation is not particularly satisfying.

I came into the book remembering that I loved Croaker. Hey, you know what? I don’t. I just don’t. The first time around, well, he’s the protagonist! I love him! Of course I do! Because when I was a kid, it never really occurred to me that I didn’t have to like the protagonist. I just had to be interested in him or his surroundings. And yes, I’m using him in this review a lot because well, this book is also a sausage fest. I didn’t notice it so much in the 80s, but now? When I read more books about women than I do about men? I missed the women.

I mean, they are on the page. There’s the Lady, of course. Insanely beautiful, evil, apparently intrigued by Croaker’s weird crush on her, powerful and trying to fight her dormant husband. There’s SoulCatcher, one of the Taken, who masks herself so the mercenaries all assume she’s a man. (Even in the 80s, I knew she was a woman. Who masks themselves in this group of men unless she’s a woman who didn’t want to deal with bullshit? I knew. Which meant one of the “big reveals” falls flat.) There’s the rebel captain who’s captured, tortured, and turned into a Taken. And then there’s Darling, the Plot McGuffin masquerading as a girl.

There’s a weird plot glitch that left me as confused this time as I was the first time around. Around page 225-230 in my copy, there’s a pivotal argument/battle between several of the Taken that Croaker is witness to. And I am never sure where the lines got drawn. Partly because there’s either a freaking typo or Cook chooses that moment to use a different nickname for one of the Taken. So the whole final vignette, which depends on the fallout from that scene is a little … off. I know that SoulCatcher’s working against the Lady, and that SoulCatcher tries to kill Croaker first, so that he can’t inadvertently reveal what he knows to the Lady, but… you know, I don’t know what he really knows, because something about that pivotal battle between the Taken is screwy. Anyone want to explain it to me? I’m all ears.  Or have a different edition?

Cook often has segments which seem to contradict themselves, and I don’t know if I should blame Croaker, the editors, or Cook. As an example, at the final siege, between pages 259-261, Croaker narrates:

The wings were commanded by Moonbiter and Bonegnasher, two Taken I’d never encountered.

A little later, he tells us:

Moonbiter attacked, crossing with a picked force. His assault was so ferocious he drove the pioneers back over the second trench. He destroyed their equipment, attacked again. Then the Rebel command brought up a strong heavy infantry column. Moonbiter withdrew, leaving the second trench bridges ruined.

A paragraph or so later:

Through that day, neither the Taken nor the Circle unleashed their powers.

 

Okay, so… I’m not sure what Moonbiter did then? Partly because I don’t know what his powers are? I get bogged down by my own lack of information.

The world-building bugs me. Older me, not conditioned to care desperately about every protagonist she runs across, is just kind of side-eyeing the book, going but what’s the bloody point?! Where’s the goal line?!? Win this battle AND THEN WHAT?? What does the Lady want besides to Rule the World? Don’t ask me, I don’t know, Croaker’s an ant.

I actually anticipate/half-recall this problem falling away as the books progress. We learn more as the series goes on. But it is making this resolution a slow start.

Next up: Shadows Linger