Reviews in Brief: Glen Cook’s “Annals of the Black Company”

Annals of the Black Company is undoubtedly Glen Cook’s best-known and most popular series, and one that I have been reading as new books came out for a good long time. Having been housebound for a couple of weeks recently, I sat down and did a Black Company marathon: all ten books, one after another, in the recent omnibus editions coming from Tor.

A quick sketch: the story opens with the Black Company, the last of the Free Companies of Khatovar, in service to the Syndic of Beryl. Whatever its original purpose, the Company has become a mercenary outfit, with a reputation for deception, misdirection, general trickiness, and avoiding fighting whenever possible. And a long string of successes. Enter Soulcatcher, one of the Ten Who Were Taken: potent wizards now serving the Lady, an even more potent wizard who is building an empire in the north. The Company enters Soulcatcher’s service, the Syndic having somehow departed the realms of the living, and the Company’s contract with him therefore void.

The methods of the Company carry over into the methods of the storytelling. Almost all of the books are first-person narratives, which gives us a couple of things to note: the narrators, first Croaker, Company physician and annalist, then Lady, Murgen, and Sleepy, succeeding annalists, are not always reliable. Sometimes they don’t know what’s happening elsewhere; sometimes, like Croaker, they just don’t want to tell us what’s going on; and other times, as in Lady’s case, there’s some vanity involved. The result is a narrative that doesn’t always wind up in the place where it seems to be going.

The second thing of note is the way Cook uses the diction: it changes from narrator to narrator, so there is no mistaking the somewhat abrupt and cryptic Croaker for the more fluid and thoughtful Sleepy.

Ten volumes is a lot to deal with in brief, but I’ve reviewed the full series at Green Man Review. Those reviews are:

The Chronicles of the Black Company (The Black Company, Shadows Linger, The White Rose)
The Books of the South (Shadow Games, Dreams of Steel, The Silver Spike)
The Return of the Black Company (Bleak Seasons, She Is the Darkness)
The Many Deaths of the Black Company (Water Sleeps, Soldiers Live)

And a footnote: I am wildly enthusiastic about the cover art for the reissues, done by Raymond Swanland. It fits the mood of the stories perfectly.