Fantasy: Contemporary

The Black Company is gritty-as-can-be swords-and-sorcery fantasy, written years before that became a trendy idea. The “Company” of the book is a group of mercenaries that hires on with a powerful sorceress known as The Lady, and does various unpleasant jobs for her high command, a circle of grotesque and generally nasty wizards called The Taken. Imagine if the Lord of the Rings were told from the perspective of a group of Sauron’s hirelings, and you might have a sense of what to expect. Except, here, there isn’t much chivalry from anyone -- the “rebels”, while less defined, aren’t much more savory than the Lady’s minions.

The writing, accordingly, has a bracingly hard-boiled flavor. The story’s narrator is the Black Company’s chief medic and historian, a man named Croaker. He entertains few illusions that his brothers in arms are “nice people”, as they go from territory to territory, pacifying the inhabitants in the traditional manner, but there’s a sort of professional honor code that holds the company of rogues, fallen men, weirdos, and thugs together. They might be fighting for money, but they operate with discipline, take care of their own, and display occasional human decency. In a world where the unimportant often end up dead in piles as the armies sweep through, that’s better than nothing.

Overall, I really enjoyed the Platoon-meets-Lord of the Rings feel. The writing is a little choppy, though, often skipping past major events with a terse summary, or dropping in new characters with minimal introduction. But, the style fits well -- Croaker isn’t a guy who believes in the glory or righteousness of the cause and he’s patched up the wounded so many battles, he has little taste for describing what happens on the field, but, at the same time, he feels that what happens to him and his comrades ought to be recorded. I found the simple immediacy refreshing -- even in a fantasy world, the experience of ground soldiers might be universal, including their distance from the politics of everything. That said, some of the anachronisms got a little annoying: I wouldn’t expect someone in this world to know about biological evolution or use the term “sandbagging”. On the other hand, I suppose the use of spellcasters in the lines would enable soldiers to employ somewhat more “modern” tactics.

Other aspects of the book aren’t as ground-breaking. Once you get past Cook’s different take, the world-building and plot fall into familiar molds. But the action, initially aimless, begins to take on a purpose, and I got caught up in the story around the midpoint of the novel. The climax features an epic siege battle as good (and ghastly) as any in fantasy. I also enjoyed the endless bickering between two rank-and-file wizards, who seem to devote more energy to petty magical squabbles with each other than doing their jobs. I don’t know how well Cook maintains the strengths of his grunt-level perspective in subsequent books, but I’ll have to check out the next one. You can certainly enjoy this entry as a standalone work, if you choose not to go further.

Audiobook notes: I thought the narrator did a competent if uninspiring job. He sounds a little “older” than I would expect Croaker to be, but, then, it’s not clear how many years after the fact he’s supposed to be telling his story.

Shades of Grey takes place in an absurd dystopia that resembles a mix of Brave New World, Kafka, and Monty Python. In the book's reality, it's centuries after some ill-defined cataclysm, and the world is now full of strange things like living roads, man-eating trees, small gravity-defying relics, and wandering balls of electrical energy. More significantly, humans are now divided by their ability to see different parts of the color spectrum, and some colors have interesting physiological effects when looked at.

The characters of the novel live in a dysfunctional collectivist society that assigns social standing by color, has a less-than-awe-inspiring Big Brother figure, and is bound by all sorts of ridiculous, Kafka-esque rules -- e.g. cars aren't allowed, except for Model Ts; everyone must pretend that certain people don't exist; and manufacture of spoons is forbidden (turning them into a valuable “beige market” good). The protagonist, Eddie Russet, is a guileless young man determined to be a good citizen and secure himself a socially advantageous marriage to a certain tiresome young lady. At least, he is until he meets an low-caste young "grey" named Jane, whose brand of civil disobedience might be better called just "disobedience".

Fforde's sensibilities are an interesting mix of laugh-out-loud-funny and a bit dark. There's a lot of subversive fun mixing the social rigidity of its characters with their self-serving schemes to exploit loopholes in the rules and/or manipulate others, but there's also a discomfiting bite in the obliviousness with which most of them accept (or even embrace) their society's injustice and warped logic. Humorous or grim, though, I enjoyed Fforde's inventiveness and the process of discovering how everything in the world fit together, which held a few hints at the larger history. From time to time, we get Canticle for Leibowitz-esque references to things left behind after the collapse of our own world, interpreted in a way that's half loopy, half insightful.

That said, the overall story, themes, and writing aren't quite as original as the setting. Towards the end, things start to fall into molds that'll be familiar to readers of more traditional escapist fiction, which leaves some of the initial potential for satire and mind-bending on the table. Still, I liked the creativity quite a lot, and who knows what Fforde might do with the forthcoming sequel.

It's my firm opinion that you have to pick up the audiobook to really get the full effect of the cheeky British humor. The untroubled tone the narrator gives to Eddie (speaking as he is from inside a carnivorous tree) is an amusing fit, as are the voices of several other characters.

This novel was a bit different, but mostly different in a good way. Having read dozens of fantasy books set in quasi-European worlds, I appreciated finding one set in Africa. The cultural attitudes reminded me a lot of the Sudanese in Dave Egger's wonderful book, What is the What, so I felt immediately drawn into Okorafor's world. That world, to be sure, is a pretty grim one, full of prejudice, superstition, ethnic violence, misogyny, and other problems that plague modern Africa. The "post-apocalypse" setting is a little unclear -- all we really know is that it's sometime in the future, various bits of technology are still around, and that some sort of now-mythical past event brought about a new (or maybe not?) magical order to the world.

The heroine resembles a typical fantasy heroine in generalities. She's an outcast for reasons of birth, has latent magical abilities that gradually come to the fore, and is stubborn and persistent in the face of tradition. But, more than the archetype, she has a believably human and conflicted voice. The other characters and cultures felt suitably complex, too, and different enough from my own experience that I became absorbed in the world. Be warned, some the themes are pretty mature, from scenes of violence and rape to some frank sexuality, so this isn't a novel for readers looking for lightweight escapism. Even the friendships between characters are infected by social attitudes -- the protagonist has to battle her own lover’s idea that it’s somehow not right for female sorcerers to be more powerful than male ones.

I did have my frustrations. The storytelling could have used better editing in places, and in later parts of the book, magic begins to be relied on too heavily as a plot device, at the expense of organic character development. The setting never entirely made sense to me, either. The levels of technology and magic are a bit inconsistent, and the minimal establishment of background history made the import of different events unclear. And I’d take a point off for the stilted use of “prophecy”.

Still, I’m not sure that these issues detracted too much from my overall appreciation. Onyesonwu’s story feels like a humanization of a myth -- the raw, unfiltered version prior to its formation into legend. Even a world in which magic is real might still be like our own in that heroes are flawed, “evil” is something that resides in all people and can’t just be blamed on a select villain, and powers don’t always make sense, even to those wielding them. Worth reading if you’re looking for a serious-minded fantasy novel set in an interesting world.