Glen Cook: The Black Company series

[bibliogramma]

Glen Cook

People I know have been raving at me about Glen Cook's The Black Company series for years. So, earlier this year I decided it was time to give them a read. The series is divided into several sections, and follows the history of a mercenary company through about forty years of its history. The company itself has been around for at least 400 years, and the tradition is that one of the company's officers does double duty as the company's Annalist. The conceit of the novels is that in all but one of the books we are reading a section from the annals of the company, and over the course of the series, there are several annalists - giving the novels considerable variation in tone, voice, what kinds of events and observations are selected for inclusion and how they are organised. The exception to this is the fourth volume, which tells of events that happen in the North after the surviving members of the Company decide to travel to the South, where their legends say they came from 400 year ago. The series is constructed as follows:

The Books of the North
The Black Company (Annalist: Croaker)
Shadows Linger (Annalist: Croaker)
The White Rose (Annalist: Croaker)

The Silver Spike (Narrator: Case)

The Books of the South
Shadow Games (Annalist: Croaker)
Dreams of Steel (Annalist: Lady)

The Books of the Glittering Plain
Bleak Seasons (Annalist: Murgen)
She Is The Darkness (Annalist: Murgen)
Water Sleeps (Annalist: Sleepy)
Soldiers Live (Annalist: Croaker)

I must say that I found the series very uneven in terms of readability. The Books of the North were very readable once I got about halfway into book one - the first half of the book was a bit of a slog. Shadow Games was another page-turner, then the series really bogged down for me, until the last two books, which moved at a fair clip.

The story is a complex one, with a large cast of characters, both villains and decent hard-working mercenaries. The characters are extremely well fleshed-out - one of the positive thing about the series is that in between military actions, we get a good look at life as a mercenary - whether officer, grunt, or specialist (i.e., wizard) - under a wide range of circumstances.

In general, I found myself reading this more for the characters than for the story, especially once the action moved into the southern continent and the company comes closer to learning the truth about its origins - which truth, to my mind, was foreshadowed and hinted at far too often for it to be a surprise when the Company members themselves finally discover it. I'm glad I finally read it, and if the long-promised "coda" volume, Port of Shadows, is ever released, I'll certainly read it just to see what happened to the company next.