What on Earth is Red Reading This Time: The Chronicles of the Black Company

As I've mentioned more than once in this blog I'm not a fan of the grimdark direction Fantasy and Science Fiction has gone in the past couple of decades. My quotable quote on the emphasis on personal suffering by the protagonist and a high body count among the supporting cast has been "If I want that out of a story, I'll watch the news."

So why did I find The Chronicles of the Black Company by Glen Cook so interesting?

The Chronicles contains the
first three books in the series.
Official pic is from Amazon because
I was lazy and didn't want to take a
pic of the book myself.

That I'll never know for sure, but I think some of it has to do with Glen Cook's writing style. He writes in a sparse style of prose that suggests a background in newspaper reporting, but from what I can tell he hasn't any training in that area. Glen's writing style does evoke a bit of Stephen King --who did have some experience as a newspaper reporter in his youth*-- and Fritz Leiber, whose Fafhrd and Gray Mouser short stories did influence him.**

Another reason why I guess I feel comfortable with these books is because of the very nature of the story itself. The Black Company is a mercenary company in a similar vein to the Free Companies of the Medieval and Renaissance eras; they are professional soldiers who accept a contract and follow it loyally, despite any misgivings they personally have. The Black Company is likely a bit more professional in stance and loyalty to a contract than historical Free Companies, but that professionalism is rooted in Glen Cook's own experience with the navy in the Vietnam war era. (Yes, Glen is a few years older than my mom.) I suppose you could also argue that his experience working at a General Motors assembly plant has an influence as well, where you do your job even if it's not the most mentally stimulating thing out there.

I'm not giving away any spoilers here when I say that the Black Company accept a contract that turns out to be held by the big stereotypical "evil empire" of this fantasy world. The members of the Company don't like it, but they honor their contract. I suppose you could call the series grimdark because of the nature of that internal conflict, but the Company's moral quandry is lessened quite a bit because the "rebels" they frequently fight against are little better than the "evil empire" itself. This isn't a matter of the rebels going down to the level of the Empire to survive, but rather the rebels are almost trying to outdo the Empire in morally reprehensible behavior. 

In this world, which evokes a lot of the Sword and Sorcery subgenre, the members of the Company are loyal to each other and to the contract, which keeps them together as a unit. 

I led him back to the fire and settled beside him. "What's the matter? What happened?" I glimpsed the Captain from the corner of my eye. One-Eye stood before him, drained by a heavy-duty dressing down.

"I don't know, Croaker." Goblin slumped, stared into the fire. "Suddenly everything was too much. This ambush tonight. Same old thing. There's always another province, always more Rebels. They breed like maggots in a cowpie. I'm getting older and older, and I haven't done anything to make a better world. In fact, if you backed off to look at it, we've all made it worse." He shook his head. "That isn't right. Not what I want to say. But I don't know how to say it any better."

"Must be an epidemic."

"What?"

"Nothing. Thinking out loud." Elmo. Myself. Goblin. A lot of the men, judging by their tenor lately. Something was wrong in the Black Company. I had suspicions, but wasn't ready to analyze. Too depressing.

             --From The Chronicles of the Black Company, Shadows Linger, by Glen Cook. pp 244-5

Yes, people do die in the books, but in a mercenary unit it's established up front as fact of life. There's no excessive body count for drama or gravitas, and the members of the Company basically try to keep themselves as far away from politics as possible. Well, that doesn't exactly happen, but they do try.

The protagonist in the story is Croaker --not his real name, but the one he enlisted with in the Company-- who is the Physician and Annalist of the Company. If you remember your Top Gun, everybody has their own "name" or handle within the group: One-Eye, Silent, Goblin, Elmo, Raven, Otto. I always wondered if that aspect of Top Gun was the most fake, but apparently that's not the case. At the same time, the names in The Black Company are more accurate than what you find in Top Gun because they're more ironic or snarky or referencing a screw up rather than the dramatic sounding Iceman or Maverick. After all, a physician named Croaker evokes black humor in spades. 

***

War is war. Fighting is fighting. And The Chronicles of the Black Company don't try to sugarcoat it. The first novel, The Black Company, starts so abruptly without much of a lead-in that you're thrown into the deep end of the pool before you realize what's happening. It took me about 40-50 pages before I kind of caught up with a background as to what I was reading, although people who have performed some military service or grew up in a military household will probably have an easier time of it than I did. The setting may be Sword and Sorcery, but the people evoke a more modern military viewpoint. Not necessarily the official modern military, where author Myke Cole described the modern US military as basically driven by rules, not gung ho fighting. 

Still, in spite of this trilogy being everything I ought to not like in a SF&F series, I did like it. I'm not sure what that says about me, but I guess in the right conditions I enjoy a Dark Fantasy series. Maybe it's because the story is never quite hopeless in scope, unlike some other grimdark stories. Or that Glen Cook doesn't take perverse delight in killing off characters that you cheer for. 

As you may have surmised, The Chronicles of the Black Company leans hard into the Military F&SF subgenre, and I've seen it noted more than once that Glen Cook's books have a cult following among the military. I can certainly see why, but one thing that I did note is that the first three books in the series don't hew toward a political standpoint that some other Military F&SF have (such as John Ringo's Into The Looking Glass or Robert A. Heinlein's Starship Troopers). The focus of the story being on the Company itself and their reactions to the world help tremendously in that regard. Croaker himself is a likeable protagonist who tries to make sense of the bigger picture but recognizes that's of secondary importance when fulfilling your contract and staying alive are of primary importance.

One thing that I did note is that there's a dearth of female characters in the story. Yes, I know, there's The Lady and the White Rose as well as a few others (sorry, spoilers there), but for the vast majority of the novels the fact they are women is almost incidental. The Black Company is pretty much an all-male outfit, but the very nature of The Lady and The White Rose is such that people in the world don't think of women as a weaker sex and that "fighting is man's work". 

The stories were written in the early to mid 80s, and yes it shows. I'm still surprised that I missed these stories when they first came out because there weren't nearly as many SF&F novels released back then as there are now, but I might have dismissed them when the back blurb begins with "Darkness wars with darkness as the hard-bitten men of the Black Company take their pay and do what they must. They bury their doubts with their dead." But I also think it possible I missed these stories because I was busy reading the "classics" from an earlier era: Michael Moorcock's Elric and Corum stories, Robert E. Howard's Conan stories, and the old Grand Masters of SF (Asimov, Clarke, Bradbury, Heinlein). The F&SF of the 70s/80s that I did read were of the Epic Fantasy variety, such as Terry Brooks' Sword of Shannara, Raymond E. Feist's Riftwar Saga, David Eddings' The Belgariad, Dennis McKiernan's Iron Tower Trilogy, and Fred Saberhagen's Book of Swords. 

Mea culpa on my part, because I think I'd have liked it back then.

Will I pick up the other books in the series? Probably not. I'm happy that the trilogy ended as it did. Sure, there are some loose ends, but I'm comfortable with it as it is. 

*Stephen King, On Writing, pp 55.

**I found this out when I began writing this post, and when I discovered that interview I linked to above I thought "Oh. Of COURSE. That makes sense." It's become more difficult to chase down copies of the Fafhrd and Gray Mouser books, which is a shame. They kind of stood somewhere off to the side in their own snarky little corner away from Tolkien's good and evil epic fantasy and Michael Moorcock's antihero counterpoint, although the stories were closer to Moorcock than Tolkien by far. 

EtA: Grammar corrections.