The Black Company (1984)

I don't know what to think of this book. It's the grittiest of fantasies, with some really fascinating stuff -- Soulcatcher and the other Taken, the Lady, Raven... -- and some really gross stuff -- Soulcatcher and the other Taken, the Lady, Raven, and just about everyone else. The pacing's odd, but it sort of worked here; the plot takes quite a while to become apparent, but I figured out some important details long before the characters did.

I'm interested in where it's all going, and the moral shades of grey are very murky, which usually proves interesting to me, but... I don't know, it didn't quite work for me, either. Every time I got halfway towards liking a character, they did something grotesque or got killed. That's normally a dealbreaker for me, so the fact that I kept at it might say something positive to you about the whole thing. I'm definitely reading the rest. ( )

A friend of mine recommended this book so... (Oh God how I wish the ellipsis "..." was reclassified to include pauses in speech.)

Ah, military fantasy. Where the men are real men, the men who are not real men are objects of derision, and the peasant women are convenient tools to, by their brutal rape or lack thereof, indicate the good guys, bad guys, seemingly-good-but-just-as-bad-as-the-bad-guys, or indubitably-quite-bad-but-with-a-heart-of-gold guys.

If you can get past the appalling gender and sexuality issues, The Black Company is quite good fun - more sneaky tricks than pitched battles, and while there are no actual good guys, the range of shades of grey is carefully thought out and quite engaging. Overall not a book I'd recommend to someone who didn't already like the genre (it's 80s-vintage and thus even less enlightened than modern stuff) but it's exactly what it was intended to be. ( )

Maybe I'm just not that interested in the band-of-mercenary-men-fighting-a-war thing or maybe it was the writing style that just didn't do it for me, but I found it really difficult to get into this book.

Pros: I do like the intricate history and the background that the author has created; it's a well developed world with rich characters and lore. Cons: There just wasn't much in the plot to draw me in. The story was all right, and even had a few twists to keep things interesting, and yet I had to try really hard to care.

It's not that this book wasn't good, because I like it enough to give it a mediocre to okay rating -- hence the three stars. However, I just couldn't put my finger on anything about the story or the characters that would set it above other dark fantasy books of its type. Maybe I've screwed myself over here, because I've read so many titles in this genre over the last couple of years, my personal bar for quality is now set pretty high. The Black Company was all right, but then there's nothing too terribly memorable about it that would make me gush about this book, say, years down the road. I'll probably continue with this series, but only when I'm done with some of the more high-priority books on my to-read list. ( )

http://speculiction.blogspot.com/2013/01/review-of-black-company-by-glen-cook.ht... ( )