"Darkness wars with darkness as the hard-bitten men of the Black Company take their pay and do what they must. They bury their doubts with their dead.
Then comes the prophecy: The White Rose has been reborn, somewhere, to embody good once more…"
----
I once boasted to Brian that "I've read pretty much everything." And he asked me what I thought of The Black Company.
"The what?" I asked.
"Just read it," he replied. The word "moron" at the end of this directive was unspoken, but strongly implied.
So, I fired up my Kindle and plunged into The Chronicles of The Black Company, which is really the first three books (The Black Company, Shadows Linger, and The White Rose) of a nine novel series by Glen Cook.
(Ed. note: 10 if you count The Silver Spike.)
Let's start with some basics. The Black Company is a mercenary force of fighters and wizards for hire in a grimdark fantasy world that has, well, issues. Centuries before the action starts in these novels, this unnamed world was in the clutches of an extremely powerful wizard known as The Dominator. The Dominator, his wife - The Lady, and a group of enslaved wizards known as The Ten Who Were Taken ruled the world in a way that many found unseemly. Naturally, there was a rebellion led by a mythic figure known as The White Rose. Ultimately, the rebels were victorious and The Dominator, The Lady, and The Taken were all laid to rest in the Barrowlands, not dead but eternally sleeping, their tombs protected by a network of monstrous guardians and powerful spells. However, our story starts long after something happened. The Lady and The Taken have reappeared, and have been re-establishing their empire from a stronghold in the North. Once again, there is a rebellion. Only this time, there is no White Rose to aid the rebel cause.
The events in all three books are narrated by Croaker, the Black Company's physician and annalist. In The Black Company, the Company is hired by Soulcatcher, one of The Taken, to fight for The Lady against the rebellion. But The Taken spend as much time working against one another as they do fighting the rebels on behalf of The Lady, and the Company find themselves used as a cat's paw in these conflicts. The first book ends with a massive defensive battle around The Lady's stronghold at Charm, wiping out the majority of the forces on both sides of the conflict.
In Shadows Linger, much of the rising action focuses on a Company deserter called Raven and Darling, the deaf-mute child he adopted in the first book. Raven and a cowardly innkeeper end up in a conspiracy to sell the town of Juniper's dead to the alien residents of a growing black castle. A company detachment arrives in Juniper and we discover the castle is actually a sorcerous gateway to allow the Dominator to escape from the Barrowlands and rise again. The Company and The Taken are ultimately able to destroy the black castle and its inhabitants, while Raven learns that Darling is the reincarnation of The White Rose, and flees with her again. The remnants of the Company ambush the remaining Taken, and leave the service of The Lady to side with the rebels.
The events of The White Rose occur many years afterwards. Raven is apparently dead, and Darling is the leader of the rebel fragments. Through a series of historical documents sent to Croaker, we learn how The Lady came to be freed from the Barrowlands, and discover an impending doom: flooding of a great river threatens to open the barrows, finally releasing The Dominator upon the world again. The Lady and the rebels are forced into a truce to join forces in order to defeat The Dominator once and for all.
All put together, this trilogy creates an epic tale in a dark setting where there are few good guys, and fewer good choices. The principal characters are distinct and memorable, and the antics of Goblin and One-Eye, two of the Company's wizards, provide some light relief to the grim atmosphere. Through the story, Croaker's personal relationship with The Lady, a terrifying sorceress of nearly godlike power, deepens and becomes more complex. Cook does a fantastic job of pulling the reader into the personal stories of each character.
There was a lot to like and a lot to dislike about The Chronicles of The Black Company. Let's start with the bad and then see if we can redeem the book with the good.
My main gripe with the book was the author's use of Croaker as the sole narrator. The reader only sees what Croaker sees, hears what Croaker hears, and knows only a little bit of what Croaker knows. Throughout the books, Glen Cook steadfastly refuses to give the reader any kind of Gods-eye-view of the world at large. The reader only knows that the sky is blue or the mountains lie to the east of the plains if Croaker chooses to mention it. And for the most part, Croaker is not big on explaining any of the world's context to the reader. This left me feeling very disoriented through most of the first book, and through the first half of the following two novels as new characters and locations were introduced. Even though I'm a big believer in "show-don't tell" as the best way for an author to describe people and places and events, I think Mr. Cook took this concept to an unfriendly extreme. Throw me a frickin' bone here, Glen Cook.
This disorientation made the early parts of each novel drag a bit for me. Though the plots were interesting, the characters were compelling, the action was enjoyable, and the writing was solid, I couldn't really get into the plot of each book until about two-thirds of the way through when I finally figured out what the hell was going on.
But the last parts of those books. Wow. Once all the pieces come together, each book finishes with a real punch. All of the books were hard to pick up for the first couple hundred pages, and impossible to put down for the last hundred. As soon as I finished the trilogy, I wanted to go back and read it again so I could savor all the richness and nuance of this fantastic world that I missed on the first reading. In spite of its flaws, I believe that The Chronicles of The Black Company deserves a spot on any fantasy reader's top bookshelf as a significant and groundbreaking contribution to the genre.
Rating this trilogy is difficult. I give it one star for frustration, and five stars for its ultimate vision. So I'll split the difference and give it three. Browsing through the reader reviews on Goodreads, it seems that this series draws a bimodal response from readers in the wild. People either love it or hate it, and chances are, you will too.
Editor's Afterword:
Hey folks, Brian
here.
While, generally, I
want Mike's reviews to be able to stand on their own with minimal befuddlement
or meddling from my end, I also felt a responsibility to butt my own 2 cents in
here (yes, I know), and offer an afterthought to this particular review.
Glen Cook's Black Company series, and particularly the first of the books, The Black
Company, are among my most beloved fantasy novels, and it was something of a foregone conclusion that when we were first
discussing the idea of Mike's Geek Reads appearing on the CVG, it was be the
first candidate to pop into my head as a recommendation deserving a
review. I myself first read it some 4-5
years ago, and to say that it blew my mind at the time would be a vast
understatement.
I generally consider
myself to be a pretty intelligent person and an astute reader. In fact, I'm sure I suffer from that
all-too-common geek epidemic of usually believing I'm the smartest person in
the room most of the time. (So far in my
experience, Monster Mike is the only geek I've met firsthand who would ever be
consistently right in that belief.) The Black Company, though, crushed that illusion for me utterly from the
very first word.
And I do mean that
literally: the very first word.
"Legate".
I had to look it up. I can't
remember the last time a novel made me go look up a word, let alone a fantasy novel.
I knew right away I was in for one nutty
ride (™ Vernon Hardapple).
It was more evident
as I read on, these books were clearly far, far smarter than me. I for one loved
that challenge. I glanced through the
reviews on Goodreads for example on MM's recommendation in his review above,
and found there a good deal of teeth gnashing about how the narrator never
stops to explain the world (as per the first chapter of every Encyclopedia Brown book ever). The reader is expected to pick it up as he or
she goes along as though he or she were already part of the world being
describe,d and already had the context to understand the perspective of the
Chronicler . It's a fair criticism and
TBC uses this style of narration to a merciless extreme. There were often chapters I had to stop and
go back to re-read entirely because the proverbial penny as to what was really going on in a particular scene only dropped at the very end of what I
had just read. These are not easy books
by any stretch of the imagination, and they do
make you work for it, on nearly every page.
If you're looking for a bit of light reading, or something on par with
the Dragonlance novels level of fantasy (as a random example), you will be
frustrated and annoyed by the entire endeavor.
I personally was thrilled and delighted in a way I hadn't been since I
got through Nabokov's "Ada ,or Ardor"
alive and in one piece.
I loved the strange
juxtapositions of this setting -- the grimdark world, where there are no good
choices for a ragtag team of "heroes", just trying to get each other
through alive, as well the arcane semi-familiarity of the world, the oddly incongruous
place names (Charm, Oar, Roses), the unique and fascinating approach to how
magic works… The world under the thrall
of the The Lady's legions always seemed so close to being understood, but also
tantalizingly just out of reach.
And the
description… Holy cow. From epic battles that would put the Pelennor
Fields to shame (like the rebellion's final assault on the fortress at Charm),
to the small scale unit actions peppered throughout the books (which at once
deftly encompass both extremes of the brutal and the absurd), one gets the
impression this was written by someone who knows what he is talking about. He's been "in the shit", and that lends a whole level of authenticity to
the action and the shorthand characters speak with, which a shlubby geek like
myself could watch in awe but never hope to emulate. One of the blurbs on the back of the omnibus
refers to the books as "Vietnam War
fiction on peyote" and it's not a moniker I could argue with in the
slightest.
In any event, this brief "afterword" has evolved into a length far beyond what I originally intended. I will wrap up simply by stating the notion I've had on multiple occasions that if Showtime or AMC were looking for a fantasy-oriented serial to convert into a TV show to combat HBO's Game of Thrones domination, they would be hard pressed to pick something more full of awesome than The Chronicles of the Black Company. But hey, what do I know… I'm no TV executive. I'm just some poor geek who keeps giving Glen Cook all my money. *
Gamers! Be sure to check out the The Black Company - OGL Campaign Setting From Green Ronin's Mythic Vistas series!
* Seriously though. I have notes for any network who wants to reach out to me.
Let's do this.
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