Review - As Black As Hell

A review today, only the second ever at the Expanse. This time it's not steampunk, but a blend of modern and magical, and not a game, but a short story, "As Black As Hell", first published in 2006 in Jim Baen's Universe. The author is John Lambshead, host at the fine blog John's Toy Soldiers, and the setting is the world of his Commission.

I'm going to take as my guide John Updike's suggestions on reviewing, found via another fine blog, The Caffeinated Symposium, which does this kind of thing excellently.

I'll say at the outset that I got far more than I bargained for, and that what seems to be science fantasy becomes an exceptionally sharp look at something much bigger. Readers with a connection to a current or former great power especially ought to make a mental note to read this if they have the opportunity. But we'll come to that.

The story transfixed me from the first page, and I managed to break myself away only when I absolutely had to. It begins with a raid and moves quickly on to set up the central pairing. There's a hard edge, even a cruelty.

This opening sequence was never quite what I expected, and every expansion of the scope surprised, with a modern special ops-type team hunting a legendary creature, high-tech mixed with magic, a mysterious agency – also with a link to Texas, if not Austin - and an ancient threat. The key bond is the result of a 'love geas' placed by a character referred to as a 'witch', but the weaponry includes rail pistols. All the while the reader is given just enough to sense the essence of the situation.

The story in my mind really breaks up into three elements: the procedural scenes where the work of the agency is the lead; the scenes in which the main pair – Jameson and Karla - are alone or on the move together; and the reflections on the wider setting, which is the UK of the past few years. The whole thing is held together by recurring motifs and references to the world as we know it, lines from songs and observations on society.

While it's the third set I feel gives the story its unexpected depth, there's no denying the first made a real impression, and in these the writing really flows. There's the same hard edge and terse presentation as in the opening sequence, and a cinematic feel. It's these that make the story a thriller and move events along. From the initial raid scene:

Gaston sat on the floor in the back of a battered van with three others. "For Christ's sake stop drumming your fingers, MacDowell," he said.

"Sorry, Sarge," MacDowell said. He guiltily placed his hand in his lap.

Gaston closed his eyes again. The one thing a soldier learnt was to sleep when he could. You never knew when the chance might come again. The spearmen who followed Achilles knew this, as did the legionnaires who marched behind the Caesars. The important things never change.

The mobile vibrated in Gaston's pocket. He pulled it out and checked the message. It read simply 'She's in.' "Okay, boys," said Gaston. "It's on." He would have preferred to wait for daylight to deal with a Code Z but his orders were precise.

The van might have looked old and battered but the side door slid back in well-oiled silence. The four men debussed and moved purposely towards the cottage carrying bulky equipment. Two of them moved to the front door while the others knelt down in the garden. Gaston inserted a device into the door lock. A light flashed on the equipment, briefly illuminating black body armour, topped by a helmet with a reinforced visor.

What are they looking for?

Jameson did not comment. Code Zs became more dangerous as they aged. Young suckers were more malleable but the old ones were the real prize for the experiment. Mental deterioration set in past a certain age, though. That was why immortal Code Zs did not overrun the world. Some became twisted obsessive maniacs that were too damn dangerous to do anything but destroy–if you could. Most shut down mentally and retreated into non-sentience to become the basis for monster and demon legends.

The second set of scenes are for me the weakest, with one major exception close to the end of the book, which is moving and has a sense of timelessness. In general though, in these stretches I found the storytelling and tone just a little patchy, the humour slightly less effective and the seams more perceptible.

This comes through most in the speech, and speech in general seems to me to have the power to make or break a story. Sense of a right wording is highly subjective of course, but, to give an example, I'm not entirely convinced by the language used by Karla, the bonded character, when what seems like an ability or unwillingness to communicate gives way to eloquence in certain circumstances. It might be that I failed here to understand a concept or missed a key explanation.

There's also a little more detail in speech than might be expected, not to the point of the dreaded 'infodump', but something moving in that direction. In some cases, the speech is a little too full. As per Updike, here's an example from a later operation:

The technician inserted a probe and ran diagnostics. He turned the alarms
off within a few seconds.

"A good system," the technician said, "but no match for the software that I threw at it."

In the tense, hushed atmosphere of the scene, even more tense for an unwelcome guest, this felt a little too much, too 'narrated'. We might expect something more like: "Good system. Software still got it." And given we don't need to know about the software at all, and the success is clear, it would be enough to say "Good system."

Pedantry maybe. Quite possibly. The good news here is that this is really all the negative I have to offer. Things get much more positive from this point on.

Because it's the third set of scenes, as I've hinted, that lift the story from a good read to almost a necessary one. In the notes I was making on a later run I wrote the word "Genius!" and this captures very well the feeling I have.

John suggests that everyone sees something different in it, and I can believe that, but the story is superficially very English. There are the less obvious markers, disdain of learning for example, of sleeping off hangovers in lectures, through to the more obvious, the car the pair use being a Jaguar. Shakespeare is used to telescope history, bring in the 'black' of the title, and set up a far more important telescoping at the very end. The social and financial gulfs that still exist are emphasised more than once, and Mr Blair himself even gets a mention, as well as Hackney, that modern touchstone.

He flirted for four cigarettes with a charming girl from Hackney, any difference in social class submerged in their common exile. They were the dispossessed in the new politically correct society.

Here 'any' looks to me to be the right word, and it seems the point ought to be Jameson's stereotyping of a rapidly-changing district.

Privilege and exclusion is at the heart of a sequence towards the middle of the book involving a diplomatic pass, a gruff police officer, the Queen's bank, an outfitters at which a staff member is assumed to be measuring up commission, and what I took to be a caricature of an underclass. The link between the cars in use and power is even hinted at in passages like "strode back to his motor", as well as in the earlier "gunned the Jaguar up the North Circular", and also in mention of the Hackney girl's fantasies about this particular brand.

Contemporary music is given space to comment, and one quote does:

Then Katie Melua sang how the man with the power who was a charmer with a snake took her half way up the Hindu Kush to show her things she had never seen.

At the very end of the book many of the multiple strands that run through the story are tied up. The family history of two of the characters is made suddenly clear, and the sharp distinctions we've been led to believe exist become very hazy, but more importantly do so very plausibly, just as they so easily could in real life. In this sense, the story isn't fantasy at all, but a commentary on an existing post-imperial society, the heir to a tradition of expansion and consolidation it is still trying to come to terms with.

If one single phrase from the work sums up this reading, it's the rather prosaic "mock hard-wood furniture from B&Q". Here, in six apparently throwaway words, is a metaphor for the way in which sense of identity can depart from the truth and be made commodity, and how power relationships in history can be hidden in plain sight. The moral in this take is a very powerful one, but I won't spoil the realisation by saying here what it is.

I will say though that if those six words contain so much, here is a story that rewards slow, deep reflection, even if it can also be read as fast, shallow fun.