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Lightreads's Reviews > Chronicles of the Black Company
Chronicles of the Black Company (The Chronicles of the Black Company, #1-3)
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Well, that was . . . testicular. Military fantasy about a company of mercenaries, with one of those completely flat, non-ideological conflicts where we’re told X and Y persons are evil, but we have no context for any of it. So what you have left is a bunch of battle summaries (boring) and some local color (all men, don’t ask about the women. Just don’t’).
I think my real problem is that this is told by the company doctor writing the history. He freely admits that he is eliding and prettying things up. Fine, that’s how stories work. But what he actually does is say, “okay, yeah, all my friends are rapists and torturers and killers, but that makes me uncomfortable so we’re not going to mention those parts and instead, I’ll tell you about our cutesy little magical duels okay?” (Seriously, he has a whole page on this exact explanation). And then the book is cutesey magical duels and non-ideological battle summaries.
And I’m pretty sure if you want to swallow that down, you need to actually like the 98% elided bland military fantasy Cook wanted to write. And I didn’t.
I think my real problem is that this is told by the company doctor writing the history. He freely admits that he is eliding and prettying things up. Fine, that’s how stories work. But what he actually does is say, “okay, yeah, all my friends are rapists and torturers and killers, but that makes me uncomfortable so we’re not going to mention those parts and instead, I’ll tell you about our cutesy little magical duels okay?” (Seriously, he has a whole page on this exact explanation). And then the book is cutesey magical duels and non-ideological battle summaries.
And I’m pretty sure if you want to swallow that down, you need to actually like the 98% elided bland military fantasy Cook wanted to write. And I didn’t.
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by
ambyr
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Aug 27, 2011 03:44PM
The conflicts do get more nuanced later on in the series; Cook is pretty clearly processing his own feelings toward his service in Vietnam, and they seem to change as time passes and gives him more emotional distance. Which is not a recommendation to read further if you didn't like the beginning books.
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I wondered. I looked ahead at summaries of the later books, and they seemed to be dealing much more directly with the question of their loyalty, what side they want to be on as well as what side they are on, all that. Funny thing about Vietnam -- it surprised me when you said that, because though I figured Cook must have served, there was something . . . inauthentic about the militarism. For whatever authenticity means from my perspective. Something very storybook and simplified and prettified about it. I dunno. Like you said, I just may not be interested enough to keep going to the bits where he really digs into what he wants to do, instead of dancing around it.
Oh, I agree, it is somewhat storybook. But to me it's more interesting than a lot of prettified war stories because, hmm, I don't think it's glorifying war, I don't think it's saying war is pretty, I think it's saying, "these are the stories soldiers tell themselves to let themselves keep fighting, even though they really shouldn't," and I find justifications interesting. But it also probably helps that I read the books a dozen years ago or so, early in my reading career, and I guess early in the fantasy genre's plunge into gritty-for-the-sake-of-gritty. I don't know if they'd hold up as well for me without the nostalgia field. Probably not.
Okay, you just said what I was trying to. I deleted the word "glorifying" from my review about four times because no, that's not what it's doing. A second cousin, maybe, and I think you put your finger more precisely on what.
I haven't read these in years (um. possibly over a decade?), so my memory may be off, but I did think these were interesting as a rare example of working class pov fantasy. Also, yeah, the grittiness was in striking contrast to the high fantasy popular when they first came out.
