Chronicles of the Black Company by Glen Cook

I checked this out during finals week. I got hooked on reading during any school-related downtime: between classes, on the train, on buses, and such. Just as finals week started, I needed new books. That sounds ominous, like I was going to be reading books instead of studying. I did that too, but as it happens, I'd already completed the important exam on the morning of the day I'm talking about. I just had one more exam. Like I said in one of my earlier posts, this was actually the day that Ray Bradbury died, but I didn't know about that yet. I had actually considered checking out a Ray Bradbury book for a completely unrelated reason (something had reminded me about The Martian Chronicles and how I think I judged it unfairly back when I read it). The only reason I didn't was that I didn't know which one to choose. I moved on to William Gibson, but again, I didn't know which one to choose. Then I saw The Space Merchants, which I'd seen rated very highly. I already liked Frederik Pohl anyway, so I grabbed that one and kept looking for more.

Last summer, I took a class focused on teaching writing, primarily to high school students. I have no plans to become a high school teacher, but shut up. I had like ten reasons, and nine of them were related to financial aid. But shut up. The class ended up being very interesting. Anyway, at some point, people were chatting about books either before or after the class, I forget which. There was a guy next to me who was apparently into fantasy genre books. We talked a bit, and I forget exactly what books we discussed, but I mentioned that I read science fiction, but that I hadn't read what would be considered "fantasy" in a long time, then asked what he would recommend I should read. He mentioned Glen Cook's Black Company series. I saw this, looked at how long it was (it's three novels bound together in one book) and thought that I'd be annoyed if I tried this and didn't like it (I almost always finish fiction if I start reading it—a book has to be incredibly bad for me to drop it and return it to the library unfinished, in fact, I can't remember the last time it happened). I almost left it there, but I thought about why I'd picked it up in the first place and tried to remember why the hell I'd asked that dude for a book recommendation. I couldn't remember, but I decided that something at the time must have convinced me he had decent taste. So that's how I ended up reading this.

The title on the the cover is "Chronicles of the Black Company" and I guess another publisher titles the same set of three books "Annals of the Black Company." Whatever. There are more books in the series and I'll probably read them, so I guess that says something for the quality of the writing. The individual books are, to avoid confusion, The Black Company, Shadows Linger, and The White Rose.

This is definitely an unusual take on the whole fantasy genre thing and it definitely works. By now, I suppose that these books could be considered fairly old, but they're much more recent than most of the fantasy novels I've read, excepting a shit-ton of Dragonlance books. I don't know what to compare it to, but until I started this paragraph, it didn't even occur to me to compare the Black Company novels to anything, so—whatever?

My main qualm is that I think I can imagine the books being better, which is weird to even claim as a qualm in the first place. So I'd better try to be more specific. The books almost immediately take a sort of ostensible construction, a persona. The story is meant to be gritty. It's narrated by a member of a band of mercenaries and he acts as annalist for them. So the books from the reader's perspective are following the exploits of this mercenary group, and the narrator is also supposed to, as one of his jobs, be following the exploits of the same mercenary group. It should be a good fit. Instead, from the first book onward, the narrative gradually becomes more and more about the narrator himself, and less about the Black Company as an entity. This does make is a bit charming when he notes members of the company complaining that he puts himself in his annals too much, but it really is a flaw that marks the whole work. It also leads to the infamous (or at least I think it's infamous) diminishing returns sequelization problem. The Black Company is better than Shadows Linger, which is better than The White Rose. Unfortunate, because the third one, by virtue of some of the events that take place, seems like it should be the most climactic. Also, the narrator (the character that gets too much focus) is one of the least interesting major characters in the books.

Despite all that, I still want to read the rest of the series. In fact, despite all that, I'd still say that these are very good books, perhaps even great ones.