Posted by Roz Kaveney
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The Black Company series has reached its twelfth volume and is well into its fifth decade. What was once innovative—its gritty amoral approach to military fantasy—has blossomed into a subgenre, Grimdark. Almost inevitably, the series’ constant expansion of its canvas from campaigns across a single continent to hard-fought journeys across and between several parallel worlds has shifted its emphasis from battles, sieges, and urban insurrections to exploration both of those worlds and their back histories. From Cook’s earliest fantasy novels—the Dread Empire sequence—he has laid a heavy emphasis on a sense of history as a vast abyss of time filled with unending but constantly changing conflict: Individual characters pass from our view into death and loss—by Lies Weeping only three characters from the first book, The Black Company (1984), remain and all three are more or less both immortal and undead—but war remains his constant narrative focus.
To recap, the Black Company is the last extant of various free companies of mercenaries which waged campaigns across a vast Southern continent. It has largely forgotten its original purpose, in spite of trying to maintain detailed chronicles. (One of Cook’s narrators, Croaker—the original one and still one of the constant voices of the books—is both surgeon and annalist.) In the first book, they took service across the sea on the Northern continent with its dominant ruler, the Lady—who was brutally rebuilding, after an interregnum, the empire established by her rather nastier late husband, the Dominator, with the help of various powerful but enslaved magic workers, the Taken. At first, the Black Company help her expand her realm, but latterly they promote a successful rebellion; this is all rather complicated by the treachery of various of the Taken, attempts to resurrect the Dominator, and the strong romantic attraction between the Lady and Croaker.
Stripped of her magic, but not in any particular way reformed, the Lady joins the remnants of the Company, now under Croaker’s command. They return South in a quest for their own institutional history, constantly recruiting new troops—some of them local military castes descended from earlier generations of the Company—and find themselves at war with an alliance of former members of the Taken, among them the Lady’s sister, Soulcatcher; a group of wizards from a parallel world, the Shadowmasters; and the cultist followers of demon goddess Kina, the Deceivers. [1]
Soulcatcher, who has survived an earlier beheading, abducts Croaker, whose relationship with her sister maliciously intrigues her. Much of the Company is trapped in an extended siege. A remnant commanded by the Lady, who is now pregnant with Croaker’s child, allies itself with the Deceivers, whom she believes she has successfully conned into thinking her an avatar of Kina. In fact, their leaders abduct her newborn daughter to fulfil that role (this reversal rather entertainingly undercuts the White Saviour implications of where this subplot appeared to be heading). Later, much of the Company’s leadership is trapped in magical stasis in a temple complex presided over by an immortal golem, Shivetya, while others act as a secret underground in a city state ruled by the irrepressible Soulcatcher. By the end of the previous book, Soldiers Live (2000), the Company has achieved a Pyrrhic victory over all its major enemies and the elderly and infirm Croaker has chosen to swap bodies with the bored Shivetya in order to keep Kina asleep and Soulcatcher trapped in stasis. Croaker hands his role as annalist to two bickering Mean Girl recruits, the cousins Arkana and Shugrat, while he casts his consciousness back and forth through the history of several worlds.
The original Black Company trilogy—The Black Company (1984), Shadows Linger (1984), and The White Rise (1985)—has been followed by pairs of sequels in which the first volume is largely passage work, setting up situations to be largely resolved in the second—save for a secondary point which becomes a slingshot ending, a hook for our continued interest. With Lies Weeping, this technique runs the risk of diminishing returns, especially now that not only most of the original characters but most of their replacements are dead, and the Black Company is currently not engaged in a war but trying to survive as an armed camp in a potentially hostile alien world. Where once the books operated in terms of pitched battles, sieges, and guerrilla actions, the only set piece combat here is pest control against rampaging apes attacking the crops needed by the company as a food supply.
In prior books, then, our interest was perpetually piqued by a series of puzzle boxes, most of which have by now been opened more or less satisfyingly, and by the vicissitudes of the central romantic relationship, which is by this point over. The relationships of the two new narrators with a young magician haunted by the ghosts of his female ancestors, and a monk sent by his abbot to steal a manuscript that apparently doesn't exist, just don’t have the same emotional weight—especially once the cousins abandon both boys for the long-range reconnaissance mission that takes up the latter part of the book.
Arkana and Shugrat are also less personable than Cook’s earlier narrators, or perhaps it’s that he writes teenage girls rather less well than weary veterans. Their bickering about boys is less entertaining than the novel’s occasional, flirtatiously malicious exchanges between Croaker and Soulcatcher; still, once they and their bodyguard, the enigmatic old cook Jun Go, are flying through mountains and exploring dead cities, they stop bitching at each other and become considerably more interesting.
Meanwhile, various subplots are simmering gently—Cook has always been good at this. The Lady is travelling across worlds back to her former realm, in a probably vain attempt to re-ensoul her daughter, who has been left vacant and comatose after the ejection of Kina. The deal between Croaker and Shivetya was that the golem would take over Croaker’s body in order to die in it—but in fact, this was not the golem’s plan at all, as Arkana and Shugrat find out the hard way in the dead city …
Surprisingly, some of the best passages of the book come in the sections narrated by Croaker as he explores the abilities of his new, largely immobile, body and casts his mind across space and time. For one thing, he has several worlds to watch across millennia. [2] Primarily, though, his astral travels take him rather closer to home, to the backstory of his wife and her sister, and the role of their extended family, the Senjaks, in the rise of the Dominator.
Cook has always been deliberately vague about his shadowy Dark Lord. Now, he finally retcons that vagueness in a way that he would not have done back in the 1980s, making it clear that part of the point of the Domination for its ruler was that it enabled him to engage in sexual predation on an industrial scale, a predation from which even his closest allies were not immune. Soulcatcher and the Lady are the survivors of several other sisters: Their mutual hatred has roots which are centuries old. Cook has dropped hints about all this for twelve books; here is a puzzle box only somewhat nearer to being opened.
In the end, then, Lies Weeping is not an especially good book in and of itself. It’s a mildly entertaining late instalment of a fantasy soap opera to which many of us are profoundly addicted. Cook is a competent enough writer in his dour, sardonic way—his action sequences are decently blocked and his characterization rich enough that we remember who these people are from book to book. But the point of it all is that sense of life and history, as an occasionally enjoyable endurance test to be gone through with a patience and fortitude that are their own point: Glen Cook is a bracingly grim and bleak writer.
Endnotes
[1] This last group represent one of Cook’s more problematic narrative choices, being based in detail on the British Raj’s propaganda about Thugee—there is an ongoing historiographical controversy about whether Thugee even existed as an organised cult as opposed to opportunistic local banditry, let alone as obsessed with the finer points of ritual strangling of merchant victims with weighted scarves. Cook blithely and, it has to be acknowledged, very effectively appropriates as a major plot point all of the gory details of the legend, both in its propagandistic original form and its mutations in popular culture. [return]
[2] In passing, Cook hints that the world of his Dread Empire sequence
(1979-2012) was the distant past of one of these worlds. [return]
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