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Book Review: The Black Company September 25, 2009
Ocassionally I get the itch to read a fantasy novel for the same reasons that other people my age will stop channel surfing if they come across an old Scooby Doo episode. The Black Company by Glen Cook, though, is different from a lot of others in the genre. It doesn't feature a young hero coming of age and fighting a dark menace that threatens the world. Instead, the book is narrated by Croaker, the aged physician and historian for a group of mercenaries called The Black Company.
The Company is amoral at best, willing to take on pretty much any contract. In fact, for the majority of the book the Company's employer IS the dark menace that threatens the world --a horribly powerful sorceress called The Lady and her group of none too nice lieutenants. You get the feeling that many members of The Black Company are barbarous and devoid of morals themselves, though what it seems to come down to most often is a strange sense of honor requiring them to follow through on the letter of their contract with The Lady.
But what I think really sets the book and its sequels apart is the fact that you soon get the feeling that good and evil are all relative depending on where you're standing, especially if you're just a grunt on the ground in the middle of a war whose overall scope and purpose is outside your ken. Sometimes you're just trying to stay alive. Furthermore, the reader gets the feeling that the Rebel armies that oppose The Lady aren't all noble and pure themselves. It's not light versus dark, but rather gray on gray.
It's also worth noting that while there are wizards and demigods in the book, the way Cook handles them is interesting. They're just people --weird and twisted for sure, but in the end people who are not only vulnerable to weapons but who have their own desires and motivations. A lot of them are killed off in the peripheries of the story which just further reinforces the book's "in the trenches" point of view. So it's pretty good stuff, and a good example of what I would consider "mature" genre fiction.
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Tags: Book Review, Fantasy, Glen Cook, The Black Company
Comments
Posted by Ben on September 26, 2009 12:23 PM:
This actually piqued my interest; I like books where the authors mess around with the canon. How many sequels are there?
Posted by Jamie on September 28, 2009 6:43 PM:
There's about 10 books in the series so far, split up into a couple of groupings. They're mostly short though (200-300 pages or so).