The Black Company

Business: I’ve been asked to let you know that Mitchell Luthi’s book The Black Hussars is available—quite inexpensively, too! It’s a stand-alone novella set in the days prior to the author’s Plagueborne Trilogy; Amazon lists the following description:

Yaro Anatoly commands the most feared regiment on the continent. His loyalty to the king has seen him wage war in the savage wilderness of Vorgar, the lawless free cities, and in Akasha, the domain of the southern princes.

But when the death of a saint triggers a revolution at home, Yaro finds his own loyalties divided. Can he really serve a king who hates his own people? And who are these new gods?

Now on to the Black Company!

Glen Cook’s Black Company series (1984-85) was something of a landmark in fantasy. On the back of a current reprint of the first three books, Steven Erikson remarks,

With the Black Company series, Glen Cook … brought the story down to a human level, dispensing with the cliché archetypes of princes, kings, and evil sorcerers. Reading his stuff is like reading Vietnam War fiction on peyote.

There’s some truth in that, but it also I think misses some very important things, things a lot of “grimdark” folks also miss.

In a nutshell, the series tells the tale of a mercenary company fighting in one of those interminable, good-versus-evil, wizards-against-sorcerers, dark-against-light wars that have held center stage in epic fantasy since well before Tolkien. What’s different? Well, first of all, the mercenary company aren’t the kings and princes and whatnot who decide policy: they go where they’re pointed, fight whoever they’re aimed at, and generally take orders. Second, they fight dirty. And third, the narrative perspective is right down close to the front lines, where it’s not “and then three thousand brave knights were overwhelmed by thirty-thousand goblins,” but actual guys I know getting cut down and possibly eaten.

Oh—fourth, they’re on the wrong side. They’re working for the powers of darkness, because that’s the contract.

I know what Erikson means, of course, but the reality is that Cook is no less about “princes, kings, and evil sorcerers,” it’s just that they aren’t the principal characters. He doesn’t present a battle as between King A and Sorcerer B, but rather two large masses of half-starved, exhausted, underequipped guys who’re following orders passed down a long chain of command.

An interesting point here is that while Tolkien certainly didn’t do the latter much (although cf. Helm’s Deep), he also didn’t do the former much. Perhaps the big charge of the Rohirrim before the walls of Minas Tirith was Theoden and the Lord of the Nazgûl; on the whole, the hobbits do a lot of POV, and their perspective is small and indirect, just seeing awful things happening. Consider the Battle of Five Armies at the end of The Hobbit, which has just gotten properly started when Bilbo gets bonked on the head and misses the whole thing. Why? Because Tolkien isn’t interested in telling the battle in epic style, but nor does he want to wallow in the blood and grim horror that is any war.

So if Cook is something new (and he is!), it’s not because he avoids princes and wicked sorcerers, nor because he does war on the ground. It’s rather that the Company aren’t morally committed to anything. They don’t fight for or against because of anything they believe, but because that’s the contract, the job in hand. And the effect—here he differs wildly from Tolkien—is to call into question any sense that one side is Good and another Evil. The baddies become almost likable as we get to know them, and the goodies turn out to be claiming all kinds of things and then behaving pretty badly. This is where the Vietnam remark actually does work: the supposed good guys are involved in all kinds of atrocities, and hope nobody will notice because, as long as they’re fighting the bad guys, it’s all fair. Except that, in the end, it does matter which side is which, and that’s the crux of the tale.

Let’s talk style for a second:

The wind tumbled and bumbled and howled around Meystrikt. Arctic imps giggled and blew their frigid breath through chinks in the walls of my quarters. My lamplight flickered and danced, barely surviving. When my fingers stiffened, I folded them round the flame and let them toast.

The wind was a hard blow out of the north, gritty with powdered snow. A foot had fallen during the night. More was coming. It would bring more misery with it. I pitied Elmo and his gang. They were out Rebel hunting.

I wouldn’t say that Cook is a master stylist, not the way Stark or Le Guin are, but this is good stuff.

In the first paragraph, all the sentences are relatively complex in one sense or another, and use lurid imagery embedded in rich verbs. One of these days I’ll talk about Robert E. Howard and Conan, and we’ll see how he has a tendency to use this kind of prose almost without exception. Schematically, it’s what we expect from an epic-fantasy voice, minus those archaisms Le Guin hates so much. The second paragraph is in sharp contrast, going more the Stark-noir route, using the fewest words to say only what’s necessary, and a lot of “to be.”

What’s remarkable, I think, is that the first paragraph, with that high-fantasy sentence structure, uses that vivid imagery to paint a picture of quite ordinary unpleasantness. At base, there’s a storm, the narrator is cold, and it sucks. If you haven’t read The Black Company, you might assume that the “arctic imps” are either florid imagery or some sort of literal monsters who’ll attack soon; in fact, they could be either, and it doesn’t make any difference. Fundamentally, what matters is that the Company are suffering because of nasty weather, but the job has to get done anyway. Probably when “Elmo and his gang” return from “Rebel hunting,” they’ll have lost at least a few, and that’ll matter because they’re Company men, and it won’t matter because men die.

It was all over in Lords when we got there. Nightcrawler had moved fast and had hit hard. You could not go anywhere without finding Rebels hanging from the trees and lampposts. The Company went into barracks expecting a quiet, boring winter, and a spring spent chasing Rebel leftovers back to the great northern forests.

Ah, it was a sweet illusion while it lasted.

In more ordinary voice, the narrator (Croaker, Company doctor and record-keeper) describes without flourish. Note how Croaker doesn’t distinguish between battle and mass executions, and how quickly he moves on to the things that matter most to soldiers on the march: barracks, rest, calm. The final sentence in my view is unnecessary and weakens the whole. If we’ve read this far in The Black Company, we know that if they expect “a quiet, boring winter,” they’re not going to get it; “At, it was a sweet illusion” just sounds mannered. But perhaps it reminds us that Croaker, deep down, is still a romantic.

This passage does point to something interesting in Cook, something I’ve not seen often. Places and people and forces are named in an utterly flat manner, sort of the ultimate antithesis to Tolkien. Instead of each name arising from an extensively worked-out language and history dating back thousands of years, Cook uses what are presumably translations, place-names like Lords or Beryl or Charm. The Company’s people are called things like Croaker and Raven and Elmo, their monstrous sorcerer-leaders Nightcrawler, Limper, Soulcatcher, Shapeshifter. It’s an anti-distancing move that has the reverse effect, like an Orientalist fantasy in faux-China where cities are called North Capital and Western Peace and Above-the-Sea. I like this device very much, so much so that I think I’ll steal it.

In the end, The Black Company may well have signaled a shift, but I’m not convinced that the genre as a whole followed it. An awful lot of “grimdark” epic—GOT, Prince of Thorns, so many others—wallows in the horrors of war and moral ambiguity, but it’s in a funny way the reverse of this. Cook is telling high epic fantasy, full-on Good and Evil with all the trimmings, but twisting the perspective to bring it closer. In Le Guin’s terms, this isn’t Elfland, but it’s not Poughkeepsie either—more like Stalingrad. “Grimdark” epic tends to underscore the distancing (names, monsters and elves and infinite back-history) but remove the strong moral compass (King A is no better or worse than Queen B, but we just happen to be on A’s side).

I don’t know exactly what I’ve learned through this excursus, but I think I am coming to grips with why I don’t like “grimdark.” It always reads to me like bad Tolkien with lots of blood and rape, and in a creepy way we’re supposed to approve the awfulness as evidence of realism. We’re too old and sophisticated for clean tales of Good and Evil, so we wallow in horror and feel superior. Well, I don’t care how you get there logically, but if you’re feeling rewarded when you read a scene of rape or torture, something has gone wrong. In The Black Company, these things do happen, but the best you feel is crushing inevitability, never pleasure.

It’s a dark moral compass, but it still points the way.