Chronicles of the Black Company - Glen Cook

Chronicles of the Black Company

Author: Glen Cook

Genre: fantasy, military

Back-cover blurb:

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...

Orion's Review:

For what is probably the best "military-fantasy" epic of all time - certainly at least one that kick-started the genre, that back-cover blurb is pretty weak.  So perhaps a few more words on in order...

Chronicles of the Black Company collects three of Glen Cook's first Black Company tales, which are sometimes referred to as "The Books of the North"  These books have been around for quite a while and have finally been collected together in this handy omnibus edition.  Orion's purpos in reviewing them now is mainly a hint at what someone could buy him for Christmas...

But, back to the review.  The arc of these books is the entrance of the mercenary Black Company into the service of The Lady, the resurrected and dreaded ruler of a vast and ancient empire; the betrayal of the Company by scheming plotters to the Lady's throne; the Company's defection and championing of The White Rose; and the eventual overthrow (sort of..) of The Lady.

The strength of these Black Company tales - and perhaps the weakness of some of Cook's later books through it's absence - is the narration supplied by Croaker, the curmudgeonly company Surgeon, Annalist, and eventually Captain (although that tale belong to the Books of the South...).

Croaker's narrative establishes the Company as a family - a family of cynical, black-hearted, violent bastards perhaps, but nevertheless, a family.  The wizards Goblin and One-Eye constantly spar like little boys, the common soldier-grunts drink, carouse and gamble, and the officers reveal hints of dark and tragic pasts.  The loyalty of these brothers to each other has sustained the Company through hundreds of years of wandering across the world in the service of various princes and rulers, all of whom inevitably begin to fear the Company and try to double-cross it, to their misfortune.  Croaker is a bit of an old crank and prone to romanticizing, but he is honest with himself (and thus the reader) about the Company, makes the characters believable and appealing, even though you would never want to meet them face-to-face.

These Chronicles feature a fair amount of fantasy under-pinnings - wizards, shape-shifters, and ancient undying evils, but none too large to overshadow the role of the plain, but crafty foot-soldiers of the Black Company.  The Company's world - although not ours - is a fairly recognizable setting where the characters act on very human motivations.

Croaker and the rest of the Black Company are anti-heroes, not heroes.  Of course you find yourself liking them and hoping for their success, but they're really not nice people.  They kill for their pay, they do it very well, and the phrase "rules of war" does not apply in this world.  It is true that the Black Company ends up as the protector of the White Rose, who represents the world's only hope of overthrowing the Lady's tyranny.  But undertaking this role is really a matter of survival after being betrayed, rather than a moral choice.

Cook's strength is characterization and setting.  Croaker is a strong, but cynical character with a somewhat skewed moral compass - as, in fact, are the leads in just about all of Cook's books.  Paradoxically, although Croaker's narration is the focus of the book, this style sometimes leads Cook to skip quickly over the details of what actually is going on, but that's a small stylistic quibble.

FYI, for a different look at the world of the mercenary, try the 1st volume of Cook's sci-fi Starfishers trilogy, Shadowline.

Review grade: A+