Hero of the Imperium - Sandy Mitchell

Ciaphas Cain is a Commissar. One of the hard-boiled, flint-eyed, no-mercy watchdogs of the armed forces. A man who will take on the enemy with a sharpened chair leg to save his comrades, his brother officers and his charges of the 597th Valhallan regiment of the Imperial Guard and so rightly be judged a living Hero of the Imperium. Or so the propaganda would have you believe.

The problem is that this is not what Cain wants at all. He’d much prefer a very, very deep hole (preferably well armoured) that he can duck into and cower in comfortably abject terror until all the loud noises stop. Either that or a fast starship for somewhere a long way away. But this is the 41st Millennium, mankind teeters on the brink of extinction with enemies on all sides; some mortal, others not. A quiet life for this front-line soldier is most decidedly NOT on the cards. No matter how much he wants one.
I suppose it was inevitable that I would eventually review a book from the Black Library before too much longer. I have after all been a collector and painter of Games Workshop’s models for a long time now and always admired the lengths that they went to to create a realistic, believable, above all intricately detailed universe. I know it’s not strictly military history in the conventional sense; it’s firmly in the sci-fi leagues, but it’s still military fiction and written in retrospect, so it is a history – see? So it gets a place in the blog. And if you disagree…. Well, who’s Blog is this anyway? :)

‘Hero of the Imperium’ is first off fantastic value. You get three 200-plus page novels and 3 more 20 page short stories for a tenner. Not bad, not bad at all really. Moreover, Sandy Mitchell is a as good a writer as one would expect – he’s written books, screenplays, magazine articles and other stuff for nigh on 20 years.

Cain is a scoundrel – he might be perched triumphantly on a pile of enemy corpses, but if you nipped around the back you’d find the ladder and note that he hadn’t fired a shot. He wheels, he deals, he bribes and he threatens in an eternal effort to either be somewhere safer or, failing all else, that there’s someone closer to the foe than he is. He is in all truth a bit of a bastard. But he’s funny with it. A futuristic Flashman if ever there was one.
But it’s not all cowardice, duty-dodging and dryly ironic put-downs, there’s some honest-to-God war-fighting in the middle of it, and Goddamn it’s well written. It may be futuristic in terms of some weapons and equipment but you’ve still got rifles, pistols, chemical explosives and swords – albeit two foot long with a chainsaw for a blade. The emotions are the same as well; working on the fundamental view that soldiers will always look, act, talk and fight like soldiers no matter which century they’re in. Same as a rifleman in Afghanistan or Iraq is going to be just as shit scared on his first patrol as a longbowman was at Crecy or Agincourt.

Cain might be a reluctant hero, very reluctant in fact, but when he has no choice he is a superlative soldier and very skilled with it. His is also a dry commentary on his own life – these are supposed to be his memoirs after all and they’re written so well, and it’s so humanly obvious that he is who he is, that you’d be forgiven for believing that when the chips are down this man is you. You don’t want to fight, but if you have to then you’ll get through it as best you can. There’s a bit of the everyman in Ciaphas Cain and that’s why the character is so good.

Maybe he’s not as well-regarded as some who might be termed his peers – Allan Malinson, Mark Bowden, Tom Clancy and Alexander Kent amongst them – but if you want to be entertained and have a laugh to go with your action and sympathy, Sandy Mitchell is hard to beat.

9 out of 10.