‘The Company’ – K.J. Parker (Orbit Books)

I tried to read one of K.J. Parker’s ‘Engineer’ books last year but just could not get into it. While it had everything that I like about fantasy (apart from dragons, at least in the bit that I read) it felt like an incredibly dry read to me, loads of great stuff there but nothing that really hooked me. If that wasn’t hard enough to get past there was also what felt like far too much talk of technical engineering stuff for my poor ‘non-technical’ brain to handle. I know the books are about an engineer but even so… It got to the point where I was never going to finish the book so I put it down for something else instead. All this was at the back of my mind when an advance copy of K.J. Parker’s ‘The Company’ came through the door a couple of weeks ago but what swung it for me was the ‘military fantasy’ slant and the fact that it’s a ‘stand alone’ novel. If I didn’t like it then at least I wouldn’t be left wondering how the story ended! As it happened, I was left with pretty much the same problems as last time. At least the story was good though…
The war is over and General Teuche Kunessin is gathering together his old comrades in arms in order to start the new life that they had promised themselves during the fighting. A deserted island is the ideal place for them to set up their new home and Kunessin has left no stone unturned in making sure that they have everything that they need (up to and including wives!) However, an unexpected discovery casts a new light on everything and secrets, which the colonists brought with them, threaten to shatter everything they have worked for…
In much the same way as the ‘Engineer’ book came across, ‘The Company’ felt to me like a book where a great deal of potential was being hidden by niggling little things that were conspiring to stop me reading. The tone felt as dry as before, there was a lot of momentous stuff happening but it didn’t feel as if there was. While some scenes were suitably climactic it just seemed to emphasise how the rest of the book could have been… (Although to be fair some of these scenes are actually quite hard hitting once you’ve got to know the characters). There also seemed to be a lot of importance placed on describing exactly ‘how’ things were made or built and it felt like this was getting in the way of the story itself. While it was good to see how a boat was built or a fence put up, too much detail meant that there wasn’t enough time for me to really get to know the characters and this sometimes made their actions a little hard to grasp (as well as obscuring the bonds of friendship that made A Company ‘tick’)… All this is a shame because when you get past this, the actual story is well worth reading.
‘The Company’ isn’t so much a ‘fantasy story’ as a story based in a fantasy setting. There is a sense of a much wider world out there but the story concentrates on the characters and how they interact. I’ve already said that the dynamic behind A Company could have been better explored but the dynamic behind the colonists, as a whole, comes across fairly well with character traits introduced at certain points to explain actions and keep things ticking along in the plot. You would have thought that founding a colony would be fairly straightforward (albeit hard work) but the author leaves us in no doubt that it’s anything but straightforward if your colonists are either harbouring secrets or are just plain psychotic! There were some twists in the tale that I definitely wasn’t expecting and this was what kept me reading…
‘The Company’ isn’t just a story about colonists though; a series of flashbacks, to the war, cast some light on why the veterans have ended up the way they are (but not really enough for me) and set up events that will take place on the island. Some brutal stuff takes place in these flashbacks and Parker excels here in his ability to shock the reader not only with violence but also with it’s unexpected results…
Despite the dryness of the book, and an inclination to spend too much time on minutiae, ‘The Company’ is a book that kept me reading right up until the very end and that’s where my problem lies. There was enough there to keep me going but not enough to keep me interested, consequently I was left feeling strangely cheated at having spent the time on it in the first place…
If you’re a fan of K.J Parker then I think you’ll find plenty to enjoy here but maybe ‘The Company’ isn’t one for a casual reader…

Six and Three Quarters out of Ten