book 5 of The Black Company

by Glen Cook

isbn: 0812533828
subject: Nonfiction, General Science
finished: 6/22/2002

To put it bluntly, starting here the Black Company series sucks. The first part of Shadow Games is really a denouement for the previous book, and it's good -- things happen for a reason and they follow logically from the personalities and politics. The second part of the book begins a long slide into a sort of narrative quicksand that plagues this and, unfortunately, the next five books in the series. To make a long story short: the Company wants to get to Khatovar and a tremendous number of obstacles present themselves. Although some of the episodes are entertaining, the problem is that they feel artificial and irrelevant to the larger story. Even worse, a few books later, Cook begins introducing a series of increasingly unlikely plot devices that give certain characters near-omniscient knowledge. This creates two problems. First, it undermines the myopic "in the trenches" atmosphere that was one of the strongest features of the early BC books. Second, it requires Cook to invent ever more bizarre reasons to explain why this or that person's omniscience failed to register an important event in order to maintain a semblance of tension in the plot. This gets old quickly. In some of these books (which I am not going to bother writing about individually, except for the last) we learn that both individuals and large groups of people have been not-so-subtly manipulated by powerful interests -- gods, for practical purposes -- in order to drive them this way or that. This seems to me like the pinnacle of lazy authorship and, in fact, on closer reading only really serves as a device to create a back story or to get the right characters to the right places at the right times in order that the various love / hate relationships can eventually be resolved, permitting the series to end.