Reply below. On 9/27/2018 3:03 PM, Lawrence Jenab wrote:
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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.
The names have clearly been changed in the Senjak/past portion of the story. We know both the Lady's and Soulcatcher's true names. Lady is clearly the one identified (eventually) as "Credence" in the story. Laissa is presumably Credence, not Ardath, as she doesn't read as the oldest daughter, which leaves Soulcatcher to be one of the two sisters left behind. Furthermore, this backstory explains why Soulcatcher suggests to Croaker in tBC that the Lady killed one of her sisters: presumably she believed that Laissa may have survived being dumped off, but was conveniently dead when the Lady returned. Cook experimented more and more with this kind of subjective narrative in Glittering Stone, especially with Murgen, and he hints at Croaker deliberately editing his account; by giving us a Croaker filtered more by external agencies than by his own careful deliberation, he gives us a different sense on the same events. (No need to prefer the new sense over the old, of course.)
I agree with others who lament the absence of any meaningful action by anyone in the Company. There's a few hints here and there at things going on, especially with the Captain (who gets more development here than in tBC) and, around the edges, with figures like the Lieutenant and Candy. Most of that is focused on the previously published material, though. 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. I found the last Garrett to be very similar to this one (too much so, perhaps, even down to the Mischievous Rain/Furious Tide of Light similarities as well as all the kids and animals running around. But there's also very, very clear elements pointing to influences from anime (heck, the contest in the last Garrett is straight out of Battle Royale, not that that was the first version of that story), from the three-eyed cat to the kids that aren't really kids to Mischievous Rain's clothing. I'm not saying, "hey, the age-asymmetrical sex stuff is OK because it's present in anime," but there's a clear context here and I'm guessing some of us (me included) are not in a great position to pick up on it.
The postscript's writing style, while distinct from any of the Black Company books, is as cogent and polished as ever. So Cook's clearly experimenting. I'm not ready yet to reach any conclusions about how well it works; I've massively changed my mind about Murgen and Sleepy as narrators in the years since I first encountered them. What's clear is that the Croaker we're seeing here isn't one who can pretend that his story isn't personal, like he does in the early books. If Pitiless Rain is indeed going to be the story Croaker never shared with his Company brothers about his youth and his initial joining up with them, then the shift may be very deliberate. I am suspicious about the implications of the "port of shadows" as a Dominator escape-route in conjunction with Kina and Booboo, especially what it may suggest about who Croaker is and who he may be descended from. David