Speculative Fiction Junkie

K.J. Parker

K.J. Parker's latest effort, The Company, has received high marks from people whose opinions I hold in high esteem. Unfortunately, I did not find it nearly as impressive as most did.

The thing that drew me to this book was its unconventional premise: a general returns to the town he grew up in to convince the handful of former members of his legendary company of soldiers to reunite and move to an island. I thought this sounded very interesting and had the potential to be a sort of new slant on Lord of the Flies (interestingly, not everyone agreed that the premise was promising. see this for more).

This unique premise is the first thing that The Company has going for it. The second is the way that Parker has structured the book. Most chapters begin with an anecdote from the history of the company or one or more of its members. Thus, the reader is presented with a story from the past followed by a bit of the main story, then another tidbit from the past followed by a little more of the main story. These anecdotes were the most interesting part of the book and served to slowly reveal some of the incidents that gave rise to the interpersonal problems and divisions that plague the reunited company in their attempt to get their colony up and running.

This book's fatal flaw, in my opinion, is not that the project to colonize the island ultimately fails, it's that the company's history doesn't really affect the characters in their present endeavor except in rather static ways. Let me try to explain. The way Parker intersperses tales of the past in the main story suggests that the history retold will have some great impact on the present. But it really doesn't, other than in the sense that one guy's rather selfish and and another makes a cowardly decision and these facts cause the group to fail to get along. But this isn't a product of the company's history per se; it's a product of the fact that one guy is kind of selfish and another could sometimes be a coward. Since these historical anecdotes figured so prominently in the story but didn't really serve that much of a functional purpose, the result is a rather large letdown. Now, I know that some might undoubtedly ask, what purpose do historical anecdotes in a novel ever serve, if not to tell us who the characters are, and will ask further that since The Company does the same, what's my problem? These are fair questions, but all I can say is that in the final analysis, I felt that the history and the main story arc were too disconnected and this more or less ruined the book for me.

Once one concludes that the interplay of past and present in the book doesn't really deliver, there isn't really much left to say. The difficulties faced by the company that are recounted in the book are in large part mundane aspects of the colonization that aren't especially interesting (e.g., "oh no, the grain is out in the open and it's about to start raining"). And most of the non-company characters are poorly developed. The wives, in particular, seemed to have almost no purpose in the novel.

Rating: 5/10

The True First

The Company was first published by Orbit in 2008.

[This review was not based on a review copy]