The Black Company

I feel a little disappointed with this one. 'The Black Company' comes with a reputation of being a 'grimdark' fantasy from the 80s before the theme or genre became a known thing decades later. Much of what I have heard about this book is that it is very dark, and quite edgy or morally challenging in the ways in which grimdark novels excel at. Sadly, it's reputation is somewhat overblown because I feel this is a by the numbers military fantasy that is quite boring. That's not to say the novel is unreadable - there was enough in each chapter to keep me reading but I think I realised about half way through the novel wasn't going to get better and like a long military campaign it was a case of slogging through it.

The novel primarily fails because it is about a mercenary company who are engaged in a civil war and we realise that both the people they fight for and the people they fight against are evil at worst or just not very nice. So, I am expecting some kind of moral ambiguity, choices which challenge and lots of shades of grey and really they aren't any - the company go from place to place, kill something or end up in a battle and then go to the next one.

Similarly, for a novel which focuses on military it is perhaps notable that most of the novel is incredibly boring with company members sat around playing cards or two wizards fucking with each other with magic (seriously, this little aside which could be a paragraph or two has pages in every chapter and it is so pedestrian. Once you've read about magic frogs jumping on people three times I've had enough....). I've read that perhaps Cook was referring to the boredom of his own military service and how a lot of it is just hanging around. Likewise I have read that it is a statement on his experience in Vietnam and not knowing whether one is fighting for good or not, or whether it is just pointless. The problem is you have to search really hard to get anything out of this - sure I can get a read out of pointless and endless war but it just simply isn't engaging as a reader. Even the big battles towards the end feel like they are off-screen - there is no sense of blood and mud and piss. There is no dynamism to the action sequences, indeed, often one feels like The Black Company are totally superfluous, rather than an elite mercenary group with a history of thousands of years.

The book is structured in that each chapter reads like a self-contained short story with an overarching plot tying things together. My problem with the book is that I felt the self-contained nature of the chapters detracted from the book and my experience felt disjointed and the book felt incredibly linear as if it was episodic. The plot basically is that The Black Company are protecting a leader in a city on the brink of civil disturbance, a monster is released and The Black Company engineer maintaining their honour by getting out of their contract by arranging the death of their employer. They are hired by an enigmatic faceless leader (whose voice changes telegraphing the most predictable reveal ever). They take them to the 'North' to fight for them in a civil war.

The employer is one of the Taken - twelve supervillains all with magic or extraordinary powers, who serve The Lady (a queen of magical evil) who is keeping her even more evil husband The Dominator underground. The rebellion against her are known as the Rebel with an inner Circle of leaders (not the most imaginative!) The Taken have the potential to at least to be interesting and are given 'very scary' sounding names like 'Howler', 'Limper' and 'Soulcatcher' etc. There is a sense that none of them like each other much and it all reads like a childish family feud rather than incredibly powerful villains with ever shifting alliances using The Black Company as a tool.

As the novel progressed I found myself increasingly annoyed with The Taken. They are so much more ridiculously powerful than everyone, including The Black Company (except for when they're dragged into something The Taken could do if they could be bothered). They kind of spoil the fun because all the action appears off screen or they do all the hard work that you know, the main characters in the novel should be doing. At the same time, despite being able to fly, assume different forms, steal souls or change the weather or whatever they also feel useless. They are neither gods that should be in the background or particularly vulnerable.

At the same time the Rebel are pretty anonymous too unless a character is the title of the chapter. This is my biggest problem with the book - the world building is atrocious. There is no sense of a vibrant living world where things are happening away from the characters. Motivations are absent. People and humanity and perspectives are absent. Characters are one dimensional. Action happens in cities but the cities may as well be made of cardboard as there is no life to them. We get no sense of the people, their lives and what the war means to them.

STOP READING IF YOU WISH TO AVOID TRIGGERS RELATED TO SEXUAL VIOLENCE

And so on to the grittiness - where I think the novel gets it's reputation from is because of some of the things that happen could be considered quite unpleasant to read or portray a world which is dark. Again, it does this, but it is all off-screen. Now I don't necessarily 'need' to read scenes of torture etc. but if you're going to include things like a mass murder of prisoners or the rape of prisoners you should at least write it so that it carries an emotional weight for the perpetrator and victim. You don't need it to be graphic but when you write a sentence like, 'and then the captain made sure no one in the garrison was left alive' and then move on it feels like casual callousness, rather than a cold callousness. It's hard to explain but even if a character is amoral or desensitised I need to understand as a reader the character is desensitised rather than barely caring. There's a strong implication of a child being raped by multiple soldiers and the lead character fantasises about raping children too. Along with the observation of the raping of female soldiers this is thrown out so casually and never developed it all feels edgy pointlessness.

I mean the novel isn't totally awful, but it was one that I was kind of hoping to conclude. I'm struggling where it has it's fans and since there have been about a further ten books I'm assuming the author found his feet with the setting and characterisation. But in summation, it fails to be exciting as military fantasy, it's morally and intellectually lightweight despite the premise being ripe for it. The characterisation and world building is poor and there is a sense that the characters really don't matter because all the important stuff is being done by someone else, somewhere else, for reasons you don't know.