The Black Company

The Black Company is a military fantasy novel filled with unlikable characters and strange worldbuilding. The book manages to make these things part of its identity, but unfortunately fails to develop most of its characters and to make some parts of the story engaging.

The Black Company is a private military group. When the story starts, it’s hired to contain riots in the city of Beryl, but soon the situation in the city starts to escalate rapidly and get out of control, leading them to make a complicated decision: if they want to stay alive, they must toss honor into the fire and betray their employer. The betrayal, however, doesn’t improve their situation by much since they immediately get another irksome contract: they must now work for the Lady, a mystical being that threatens to conquer the whole world.

The members of the Black Company all receive nicknames. Sometimes, they are ironic (“Mercy was our nastiest platoon leader”), sometimes, they are just fitting (“He just grinned. Silent he is and silent he stays”). The book is narrated in the first person by the company’s medic and historian, Croaker.

Croaker writes the events in the annals of the Black Company, but the novel doesn’t double down on this point: the book doesn’t have the form of a diary and it never indicates when Croaker wrote those words, which can lead to some confusion. Right at the end of the first chapter, for example, Croaker states how his friend One-Eye “never figured it out”, regarding the particulars of a certain death. But two-hundred pages later, he says how One-Eye “had it figured out” while talking about the same subject – the “never” part of the first sentence, then, loses its initial scope, as if Croaker were referring to that particular moment or day alone. On the other hand, the last events narrated in the novel don’t make sense to be written at that particular time, since The Lady could have easily got access to that information and severely punish everyone involved.

The Lady is basically that setting’s big villain. She’s the tyrant that wants to rule the whole world for all eternity: a queen, not dark but beautiful and terrible as the dawn, tempestuous as the sea, and stronger than the foundations of the earth! And the main characters are all working for her, assisting her in her plans to vanquish the rebels or any other opposition.

Croaker is bothered by this, but not enough to make him go convince his captain to betray her as well. He understands they’re all working for the villain, that the Company is doing evil things and making the world worse, so he’s often making excuses for their actions, trying to justify their loyalty to the Lady. Sometimes, he’ll describe the rebels as just as evil as her, making problematic equivalences in an attempt to say “Okay, she’s bad, but look, they’re all the same. The rebels fight for freedom but they also commit atrocities. They’re just like their slavers.”

There are times when he explains it’s nothing personal, just business. as if it somehow made it better. The company is not doing it because it believes in something, but for the money and a sense of accomplishment. He even tries to relativize good and evil: “There are no self-proclaimed villains, only regiments of self-proclaimed saints,” Croaker says, “Victorious historians rule where good or evil lies. We abjure labels. We fight for money and an indefinable pride. The politics, the ethics, the moralities, are irrelevant.”

What makes Croaker an interesting protagonist is this contradiction: he claims morality and ethics are irrelevant, but he’s the one that is always bringing them up, trying to justify himself as if they were in fact very important.

The Black Company is comprised of a very bad group of people. Bad enough that their captain – called Captain – is described by Croaker as a “secret romantic” simply because he doesn’t have “much stomach for plunder and rape.” The second chapter focuses on their new recruit, Raven, whose first big scene has him brutally choking a woman to death in front of them:

“Raven squeezed, forced her to her knees. Her face purpled, bloated. Her tongue rolled out. She seized his wrist, shuddered. He lifted her, stared into her eyes till they rolled up and she sagged. She shuddered again, died.”

The sentences are short to give each of them impact, the focus on her facial expressions makes the death brutal, while the detail that he was staring into her eyes hints at sadism, with Raven wanting to be the last thing she sees. He’s admitted into the Black Company shortly after.

Raven is said to be a paradigm for the Black Company, its personification. He’s violent and ruthless, taciturn and inscrutable. In his first scene, Croaker notices “ice” in his eyes and “evil” in his smile. His face is described as “ghastly” and his effect on people is usually to make their blood “flee” their cheeks. You’re supposed to think he’s still human only because he has a soft side when it comes to children, drawing a line when they’re about to be tortured or raped. On the same token, you’re supposed to sympathize with the Black Company in these scenes, when they fight to protect children: after all, they’re the rare instances in the novel when their actions are commendable.

The other element that makes them feel a bit more nuanced is their bonds of friendship. The members of the Black Company treat each other like family: they’re constantly fighting and teasing each other, but are always there for one another no matter the situation. If one of them is killed or hurt, they’re dutybound to hunt the perpetrator. If one of them is in need of something, they give it without asking too many questions. They’re horrible to everyone else, but to each other, they are warm and even gentle.

Unfortunately, their development stops there. Despite being in a company of thousands of recruits, Croaker only mentions the same five, six names through the course of the book. You have the Captain, One-Eye, Silent, Goblin, Elmo, and Raven. All other characters are barely mentioned, but this focused approach doesn’t make these five or six characters shine. The problem is that the reason why Raven is the paradigm for the Black Company is that they’re all alike: taciturn, ruthless soldiers. They have some individual quirks – which usually give them their names – and one or two have a revenge story going on, but at the end of the day, you expect them all to react in the exact same way to the same events and they don’t disappoint: they all fit into the type of the tough soldier.

This also ends up hurting the pacing of the novel, as each time the story stops to show some of their more “relaxing” moments, when they’re playing cards or teasing each other, it fails to add anything new to the characters. The jokes here stay always the same – One-Eye cheats at cards, Silent stays silent, Raven is menacing, and so forth – because the characters are too flat to surprise us or subvert anything. It makes these moments repetitive.

Even though Croaker is interested in his colleagues’ past lives, he knows better than to prod them for answers. He only tries to decipher his new employer – one of The Lady’s Generals, called Soulcatcher – and Raven, because he’s new and so a curiosity. But the protagonist is rarely successful, which means that most of the characters in the novel – especially if they’re in the Black Company – remain shallow. Croaker says:

“When I reflect on my companion’s inner nature’s I usually wish I controlled one small talent. I wish I could look inside them and unmask the darks and brights that move them. Then I take a quick look into the jungle of my own soul and thank heaven that I cannot. Any man who barely sustains an armistice with himself has no business poking around in an alien soul.  I decided to keep closer watch on our newest brother.”

The last sentence creates a bit of humor by contradicting the conclusion of the rest of the paragraph. Croaker is an ironic and sarcastic narrator, always ready to give a witty remark about their situation – especially if it’s hopeless. This means that the book is packed full of gallows humor, with the protagonist and his companion constantly joking about how they’re going to die horribly at every moment.

There’s also gore, suffering, and death, with Croaker not mincing words when talking about the aftermath of some battles, but sometimes using some poetic language when describing the carnage, writing that the streets of Beryl were “carpeted” with corpses, for example.

There’s a moment in which they come across a horrific scene of a massacre, a village burned down, littered with the bodies of children. They’re pissed off, so it’s telling when Croaker writes, “The cursing and weeping resolved into a scene fit to disgust anyone tainted with humanity,” as it reveals how he sees morality as a weakness: for him, humanity is something that “taints” a person. That explains why he’s so contradictory when it comes to judging the events he witnesses, claiming they don’t affect him, when they clearly do. When he’s nauseated with what he’s seeing and can’t deny it, for example, he tries to explain himself to us, claiming that anyone would feel that way in that situation: it’s not that he’s weak, it’s the event that is too overbearing. Croaker tries to paint himself as a strong, stoic man that feels no emotions, but fails at every turn.

Croaker is also a physician, which usually means that he’s almost never in the front lines fighting enemies. This makes the plot force him into some climactic situations – he’s only there because he’s the protagonist – and also makes the huge epic battles in the novel feel less exhilarating, as we are not thrown into the middle of the chaos, but kept at a safe distance, seeing it unfold from afar, from the point of view of the person who is tasked to mend broken bones and lie to dying soldiers to give them a little bit of hope before the end.

It’s an interesting choice that gives the book a more melancholic, brooding atmosphere, but one that also makes the narrative a bit less engaging. You are not given too many reasons to care about the characters, since they’re all flat and repetitive – tough soldiers must already be your thing if you are to really like them – and Croaker doesn’t care too much about the plot either: the six chapters of the book all deal with isolated problems in the war that – save rare exceptions – are introduced in those specific chapters.

If a chapter is named after a rebel General, this character will only be introduced in that chapter, because Croaker didn’t care about that person before. This gives an episodic structure to the book, but also makes the story feel a bit scattered. Without an engaging plot, fascinating characters, or thrilling battles, we are only left with Croaker and a somber mood.

There’s a big mystery surrounding the Lady, with Croaker trying to guess what she looks like and what her real intentions are, but it doesn’t lead anywhere surprising. She looks like and behaves precisely like you would expect an evil Galadriel to look like and behave. Soulcatcher is a bit more interesting in his characterization: his face is always hidden by a black morion and his voice changes after each sentence – they say he speaks with the voices of the souls he caught. All this gives him an unnerving and menacing aura: you fear what you don’t understand, after all. But at the same time, he’s seen giggling at his victories and turning his back to Croaker to hide his face when drinking tea, which also gives him a good dose of foolishness.

Finally, The Black Company deals with the worldbuilding in an interesting way. We are thrown into that strange world without a guide: we don’t know how magic works, we don’t know the name of important places or their history, we don’t know how their society is structured, and so forth. And because Croaker doesn’t care about those things, we leave the book without this knowledge as well. Since some elements of that world are a bit weird, feeling out of place – despite the general European medieval setting, the big bad guys fly around in magic carpets, for instance – this gives the novel a strange, otherworldly feel.

Despite some problems, The Black Company accomplishes most of what it sets out to do, using its unlikable cast of characters and brutal setting to tell a military story that is hard to read and stomach.

May 05, 2021.