Glen Cook – The Black Company (1984) Review

8.5/10

A fantasy epic that is told a little bit as a puzzle. We are dealing with a fairly regular fantasy land here with a dark lord and a resistance and everything, but with minimalist prose Cook tells us the story from the perspective of a medic named Croaker in a mercenary company. With Croaker as POV, we are two steps removed from the epic events in the world. We don’t follow the kings or princes, we don’t follow the big heroes, we don’t follow the captain of Croaker’s company, we just follow this medic Croaker who watches whatever is going on around him in the mercenary camps and in the streets. From his narration we can puzzle together the situation.

What I immediately love about Cook’s writing is the expert way in which he weaves continuous world-building into the narration by Croaker. Croaker is not explaining everything about this fantasy world that he lives in and why should he? This is the normal world for him. We see the world through his eyes and have to use half a hint here and a description there to get a proper feel for the place. Within the first few paragraphs of the first page of the novel, we get a pretty detailed view of what kind of world we are in, what kind of wild magic can happen in it, and the disposition of the characters towards these events. Cook’s writing is so economical that you could dissect these paragraphs for all the world-building they imply, and still read them as pleasant, flowing narration. Before the end of this first page I knew that I had struck gold, no matter what the rest of the story would bring. 

And what the story would bring is a highly unorthodox approach to fantasy. The Black Company are not the good guys. They are hired by the worst would-be tyrants. We don’t follow any heroes because from the Company’s philosophy, it’s all relative and each side considers itself in the right. But still, the Company arguably got hired by the worst people. Meanwhile, Croaker narrates with a sarcastic outlook the political decisions on the battlefields and the banter between his fellow sellswords and the hilarious practical jokes between the mages in their squad (I loved the ongoing feud between One-Eye and Goblin). 

Cook’s writing style is so terse that the chapters occasionally feel like summaries of chapters. It raises a couple of recurring complaints from readers, namely that the events are hard to follow sometimes and that the lack of description makes the immersion harder. With enough attention paid, one can follow the story perfectly well, but I do think that I could have used a bit more description as it would have enhanced the mood setting and it would have made scenes make a deeper impression on me. Description can also signal what’s important for the story and the characters, and as that signalling was minimal, that left me without a good feeling for what the story was going for. I’ve heard that as you get deeper into the series, it gets easier, and indeed later into this first novel I got better footing and began to enjoy the story more and more. The characters gain more and more depth and the creepy wizards and magic become very intriguing.

It is often said in reviews and discussions by people who are more knowledgeable than me, that Cook in effect wrote fantasy in the form of Vietnam war fiction. I believe it. You enter this book like a recruit knowing nothing and slowly piece together what is happening. Instead of airplanes and napalm we get flying carpets and killer mist banners. Croaker’s limited perspective affords him only hints of the decisions that are made by the leaders and politicians above him. His more immediate concern is the dirty business of his missions with his fellow mercenaries, and the conflicted feelings he has about that business and the tenuous feelings of brotherhood with others in his squad. They’re bastards all, but humanity can still be found. They even adopted a little kid.

Odds are that you’ve read Steven Erikson’s Malazan Book of the Fallen before this series, but The Black Company came first and its influence on Erikson’s series is quite obvious. The Malazan books aren’t all about military fantasy, but the chapters with the marines, those are clearly inspired by Cook. There is one major difference, though. While Erikson’s big dense novels exist on the brink of collapse through sheer storytelling mass, like swollen red giants nearly imploding into black holes, Cook’s novels are sleek and fast. Cook channels the roots of the quick fantasy storytelling of sword-and-sorcery, and he wrote in a time when he could revivify for fantasy the speed and gruesomeness of sword-and-sorcery. And so he created short, quick-moving novels of dark fantasy that would be a stepping stone towards the grimdark movement of the late 1990s and early 2000s.

Advanced level fantasy in neat little packages. They don’t write them like this anymore.