Glen Cook, Borges, Tolkien
February 10, 2002 (2:24 PM) ( link )

Reading continues slowly despite my other obligations. Recently I have been focusing on Glen Cook's The Black Company and Borges's Ficciones.

The Black Company has great atmosphere—not as good as Gene Wolfe's The Book of the New Sun, but compelling nonetheless. It's true, as I read in many reviews of this series, that the book focuses primarily (even claustrophobically) on everyday soldiers caught up in struggles too large for them to really comprehend. In The Black Company, the struggle seems to be between a group of powerful and evil wizards bent on destroying one another. Of course, each one is also subservient to a larger power—the Dominator and his Lady, whose roles I haven't yet quite figured out. And these greater powers have no qualms about using the men of the Black Company without regard for safety.

One benefit of this common-man approach to storytelling is that moments of awe are rare but inspiring. For instance, at one point the Black Company comes into contact with one of the evil wizards who are using them as pawns. Cook gives us this description.

It looked as tall as a house and half as wide. It wore scarlet bleached by time, moth-eaten, and tattered. It came up the street in a sort of shamble, now fast, now slow. Wild, stringy grey hair tangled around its head. Its bramble patch of a beard was so thick and matted with filth that its face was all but invisible. One pallid, liver-spotted hand clutched a pole of a staff that was a thing of beauty defiled by its bearer's touch. It was an immensely elongated female body, perfect in every detail. Someone whispered, "They say that was a real woman back during the Domination. They say she cheated on him."