A review by trike
The Black Company by Glen Cook
3.0
I’ve owned a number of Cook’s books for years — decades, actually — and have never gotten around to them. I finally decided to give this one a listen and I’m glad I did.
At first this feels like a collection of short stories, but somewhere around the 2/3 mark it coalesces into a cohesive story that you realize was there all along. I think this novel and the sequel, [b:Shadows Linger|400881|Shadows Linger (The Chronicles of the Black Company, #2)|Glen Cook|https://images.gr-assets.com/books/1436464351s/400881.jpg|1761500], are fundamental to both the extreme grimdark Fantasy that followed and the “drop you in the middle of the world without explanation” type of stuff, the current king of which are the various Malazan series. I wonder if authors like Joe Abercrombie, Steven Erickson, Ian Esslemont, Mark Lawrence and Brent Weeks would have careers if not for Glen Cook. I see a lot of George R.R. Martin’s A Song of Ice and Fire in the annals of The Black Company, too.
That said, although this seems to be a foundational work for quite a lot of unromanticized modern Fantasy concerned with grit and grime, I merely liked it rather than loved it. I do appreciate that it is lean and unfussy. Unlike the busy blather of the Brent Weeks book I recently read, Cook gets to the point. And a very sharp point it is.
However, due to that leanness, the secondary mystery running through the story was something I figured out fairly early on. I’m sure if I had read this 35 years ago when it came out (1984), I would have been more impressed. Now I’ve consumed far too many stories to be easily fooled. But it was still a decent reveal, in that it supports the tone of irony and things not always being what they seem. I just wish it hadn’t been so obvious and simplistic..
Other than that it’s a decent story. I’ll probably listen to the sequel, too.
At first this feels like a collection of short stories, but somewhere around the 2/3 mark it coalesces into a cohesive story that you realize was there all along. I think this novel and the sequel, [b:Shadows Linger|400881|Shadows Linger (The Chronicles of the Black Company, #2)|Glen Cook|https://images.gr-assets.com/books/1436464351s/400881.jpg|1761500], are fundamental to both the extreme grimdark Fantasy that followed and the “drop you in the middle of the world without explanation” type of stuff, the current king of which are the various Malazan series. I wonder if authors like Joe Abercrombie, Steven Erickson, Ian Esslemont, Mark Lawrence and Brent Weeks would have careers if not for Glen Cook. I see a lot of George R.R. Martin’s A Song of Ice and Fire in the annals of The Black Company, too.
That said, although this seems to be a foundational work for quite a lot of unromanticized modern Fantasy concerned with grit and grime, I merely liked it rather than loved it. I do appreciate that it is lean and unfussy. Unlike the busy blather of the Brent Weeks book I recently read, Cook gets to the point. And a very sharp point it is.
However, due to that leanness, the secondary mystery running through the story was something I figured out fairly early on. I’m sure if I had read this 35 years ago when it came out (1984), I would have been more impressed. Now I’ve consumed far too many stories to be easily fooled. But it was still a decent reveal, in that it supports the tone of irony and things not always being what they seem. I just wish it hadn’t been so obvious and simplistic.
Spoiler
The rebels the Black Company are hired to fight are desperately searching for a kid who will unify their side, a Dalai Lama-type child known as the White Rose. The Black Company has a deaf girl who tags along with them who gets a lot of page time devoted to her. You don’t need to be William Goldman to put two and two together.Other than that it’s a decent story. I’ll probably listen to the sequel, too.