Shadows Linger by Glen Cook
My rating: 4 of 5 stars A Neat Sequel Glen Cook’s second Black Company novel, Shadows Linger (1984), shares many features with the first book, The Black Company (1984). Croaker the physician/annalist is still the narrator, now about 40, writing the deeds of his mercenary band of brothers as they’ve become weathered by a few years working for the bad guys. After the devastating trap-battle at Charm that climaxed the first novel, in which a quarter of a million soldiers died, mostly on the rebel side fighting, apparently, for freedom and right against the “wicked” Lady and her armies and Taken (enslaved) wizards, the Company has been sent running around the Lady’s expanding empire dealing with pockets of rebel resistance. To do this they employ any stratagem no matter how ruthless or low (“We never play fair if we can avoid it”) but stop short of committing atrocities. Croaker and a few of his closest colleagues fear being subjected to the Eye of the Lady, which would lay bare all their secrets, like the fact that they’ve known for some time that their comrade Raven deserted to protect his deaf and mute ward Darling, who in reality is the reincarnated White Rose, who 400 or so years ago led a rebellion that defeated the Lady and her even worse and more powerful husband the Dominator and left them imprisoned in the Barrowland. Another secret is that Raven came into possession of papers among which is presumably written the Lady’s secret name, the knowledge of which would give her enemies power over her. If the Lady were to discover any of the above, it would be the end of the Black Company. This novel then starts surprising a reader familiar with the first book, because whereas that one is comprised of seven novella-like chapters that cohere together as a composite novel and are all told in the first person by Croaker, this one is comprised of forty-nine short chapters that alternate between Croaker’s first person narration and his third person narration from the point of view of a cowardly, sneaky, self-serving guy called Marron Shed, who keeps an inn called the Iron Lily in the worst slum of the small provincial northern town of Juniper. Croaker’s chapters depict the progress of the Black Company from far away towards Juniper, while Shed’s chapters depict the doings of Raven and Darling in Juniper, as they’re living in Shed’s inn while Raven tries to organize enough money for another big escape. The nature of Raven’s money-making, its dangerous effects on the local community (and potentially the entire world), his co-option of Shed into his ventures, the connection of all that with Juniper’s cult of the Catacombs-buried dead and a mysterious and dread black castle whose alien architecture has been growing right across from the town, the way Croaker came to be able to narrate chapters from Shed’s point of view, the way Shed/Raven/Darling’s story strand and Croaker/Black Company’s strand come ever closer to meeting, the potential presence of the Dominator, the possibility of the Lady and or her Taken cottoning on to the truth about Croaker and Raven and Darling, all lead to funny, suspenseful, and memorable scenes. The two exciting climaxes of the absorbing novel occur in a big battle scene described obliquely and a small skirmish experienced directly. Cook works into his entertaining story moral conundrums and crises, both for Shed and for Croaker. Croaker and his closest mercenary brothers are growing weary of working for what they increasingly feel is the wrong side instead of doing something to leave the world a better place, but then a mercenary’s life and work consist of shutting off moral considerations and fulfilling his contract and doing his best to stay alive and to stay loyal to his brothers: “He dehumanizes the world outside the bounds of his outfit. Then anything he does, or witnesses, becomes of minor significance as long as its brunt is borne outside the Company.” Shed, “that frightened little man,” meanwhile, is a fine point of view character, perversely fun, almost sublime in his reprehensible ability to land on his feet and talk and fake and improvise his way out of pinches. He couldn’t finally find a spine, could he, in such a way that Croaker would go to the trouble of writing him into the annals of the Black Company? In such a way that he would become an example for Croaker to follow? Fans of hard boiled, humorous, violent, vivid military epic fantasy, of which Cook was a forerunner whose influence is evident in the work of, say, Steven Erikson, should like this book, but should start with the first in the series. Cook’s prose reads like terse, vivid, violent poetry, and he’s good at writing characters at sea in a morally ambiguous world, at times with an ironic wit. Here are some choice lines: --“The children’s heads popped from the weeds like groundhog heads.” --“It was a day ripped full-grown from the womb of despair.” --“There is no vengeance as terrible as the vengeance a coward plots in the dark of his heart.” --“I felt like a roach fleeing a man who hated cockroaches and had his stomping boots on.” --“Oh, ‘twould be marvelous if the world and its moral questions were like some game board, with plain black players and white, and fixed rules, and nary a shade of grey.” View all my reviews
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