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Well. It's certainly nice to hear from Croaker again, especially in the
timeframe that produced the best BC novels (i.e., before they headed
south). And there is much here to enjoy. Croaker turns a great phrase,
and the cast of characters in the BC universe is simply a joy to experience.
That said, however, this was a strange and unsatisfying read for me. Glen
has made some odd narrative decisions, most of them unsuccessful. I've
never been a fan of the "unreliable narrator" tactic, unless it is
brilliantly implemented, which isn't here. Instead, we have Croaker
confused, worrying about his unreliable memory of the few items of
information he *is* able to get his hands on, chewing on his frustration
for 400 pages and then never managing to put the threads together before
having his memory of the relevant period wiped entirely. So, for example,
instead of a resolution, we get what appears to be a deliberate undermining
of what we thought we understood about the identities of the Senjak
sisters. (FWIW, my understanding is that Mischievous Rain is the Lady,
either in person or as her sorceress avatar, and Laissa somehow ends up
being Soulcatcher, despite having been dead for quite a while. Please
correct me if I'm wrong.) The whole story ends up feeling like a barely
remembered dream, and not a particularly pleasant one, never my favorite
storytelling tactic and IMO totally at odds with the blunt and prosaic
narration of the best Company novels, in which the straightforward language
is in deliberate contrast to the inflated prose of other fantasy novels.
I might be wrong about this, but I also didn't like that so much of the
book consists of recycled short stories. It never felt to me as if those
stories were intended to be, or even worked as, parts of a larger
narrative; instead, it feels like Glen tried to take a shortcut by gluing
together material he already had lying around and trying to force it into a
longer story. This just did not feel like a story that needed to be told;
it felt instead like a book that needed to be delivered, and this was the
easiest (maybe the only) way he could do it. This may be just a
superstition of mine, but any novel that begins and ends with disclaimers
about how "we're pretty sure 80% of this is wrong and the 20% of it that is
right doesn't line up with what we thought we knew" is probably headed off
the rails.
I agree with others who lament the absence of any meaningful action by
anyone in the Company. Their role is usually to do – directly,
practically, and forcefully – here, they are merely done unto. While (in
other books) their employers may try to keep them in the dark, they are
crafty and resourceful and figure out a way to decide their own fate.
Here, they are essentially passive, sad, and frustrated, until the entire
incident is simply erased from their memory. I'm not saying it's
impossible to write a good book from that perspective, but this wasn't it.
Frankly, I found it very frustrating to read about the Captain, Lieutenant,
One-Eye, Silent, et al, doing nothing, hanging around the periphery of a
story that ultimately is never really told because Croaker has no idea
what's going on and never finds out. Croaker's occasional lament that he is
"forgetting his usual narrative method and instead focusing entirely on
himself and his own confusion" feels like Glen being defensive about a weak
story as he is writing it. And what I always like about Glen is that he is
usually, emphatically, the opposite of defensive.
I also agree that there is an unpleasant undercurrent of creepy sexual
behavior. I don't object to that at all as part of a story in which it
makes sense, but here it just seemed intrusive and gratuitous. Pedophilia,
necrophilia, rape, religious prostitution, a "slutty" local morality, etc.
are just strewn around the story, seemingly lurking in every shadow of both
the plot in general and Croaker's imagination, to no narrative purpose I
can detect. And in that context, repeated scenes of Croaker's six-year-old
daughter snuggling in bed with him are maybe intended to stand out as
"healthy" by contrast, but instead just kept me asking, in a book brimming
with references to pedophilia, why am I constantly being reminded of this?
Unfortunately, this all seems to fit a trend in Glen's most recent novels
(including the most recent Garrett and Instrumentalities installments) –
longer, slower, less action, more rumination, looser stories, longer
digressions, more highfalutin prose, frequently murky faux-noir language
(where we are supposed to figure out from what is omitted what is really
being said, but in a way that doesn't quite land), an emphasis on
melancholy bordering on sentimentality, and a weird and persistent
preoccupation with age-asymmetrical sex.
The one thing that did work here, at least for me, was how Glen
communicated Croaker's gradual acceptance and then cherishing of a domestic
life amidst the violence and brutality of the Company's world. There was
real poignancy in every step of this acceptance, given that Croaker was
sure it would be taken away from him eventually. I think this emotional
arc would have been even more effective if it had been drawn against a more
typical Company story, rather than this one of enforced passivity, where
Croaker really had nothing else to focus on. That lingering, somber note
of love and loss is really what stands out for me after putting the book on
the shelf. In a better novel, it could have been devastatingly effective;
here, it's the only coherent and affecting piece of an otherwise mixed up
story, so it just sort of sits there.
My $0.02.
Larry
