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Title: Bleak Seasons (Glittering Stone (Paperback)) by Glen Cook ISBN: 0-8125-5532-5 Publisher: Tor Books Pub. Date: 01 January, 1997 Format: Paperback Volumes: 1 List Price(USD): $5.99 |
Average Customer Rating: 3.8 (10 reviews)
Rating: 4
Summary: Not the best of the Black Company, but still very good.
Comment: Glen Cook's Black Company novels are some of the best fantasy books on the market. Gritty, fast-paced, humorous, and realistic, the books are definitely page-turners. When I was just getting into Bleak Seasons, I was disappointed to realize that much of it would concern the same events that occurred in Dreams of Steel, but from a different perspective. It was better than I expected though. Some questions from the previous book are answered while new questions come to light. Cook's dark humor, largely absent from Dreams of Steel, is definitely back in Bleak Seasons. I also love the mysterious voice (I won't spoil it by revealing who the voice belongs to) that welcomes Murgen back when he has his mental trips into the past. Black Company fans will enjoy the book. Readers unfamiliar with the Black Company owe it to themselves to get the first book, The Black Company, and read the entire series.
Rating: 2
Summary: In Terms Of Writing An Apt Title
Comment: In terms of writing this is by far Cook's weakest outing to date, offering appeal to only the most die hard followers and fans of The Black Company saga. Compositionally, there has been a slow but steady decline in the quality of writing since the precipitous cliffhanger in "Shadow Games," followed by the slipshod, tattling end to "Dreams of Steel." While the bulk of the narrative to these books at least offered the usual solidly written if loose, action-driven fare found in previous novels, their narratives undermined only by manipulative, bald and barely credible conclusions, here Cook's style of approach has turned incoherent, rambling and confused.
As an earlier reviewer has noted, in "Bleak Seasons" a shift takes place in perspective, moving from the richer, multiple points of view of previous novels to the singular vantage point of a new annalist, Murgen. Neither the character nor the approach taken in presentation is successful. Compared to Croaker or even Lady, Murgen remains lackluster and hard for the reader to relate to. In large part this is do to the often slack, uncohesive approach that Cook pursues in presenting this character and his narrative, Murgen beset by some vaguely explained nightmare that has him shifting temporally between past, present and future events. In our introduction to the novel, the voice speaking, only after several dozen pages becoming identified as Murgen's, takes the reader through a wandering, barker-like tour of Dejagore, whose siege had been concluded previously in "Dreams of Steel." Temporally, this is initially confusing, nor are matters truly clarified in the next fifty to eighty pages as Murgen's narrative shifts in and out of the past, sometimes the future, often in a dreamscape where reality remains intangible and events come into question. This manner of storytelling continues to dog the narrative throughout the novel. Perhaps in conception Cook perceived rich possibilities for this approach, but if so, either due to inability or slipshod writing, the author is never able to capitalize upon the resulting tangled, twisted and evasive point of view, with the plot suffering accordingly. Further, personal events, such as Murgen's falling in love with Sahra and her subsequent murder, are handled so briefly and summarily that the reader is unable to develop any real emotional attachment to Cook's newest central character.
Nor does a return to the siege of Dejagore avoid anticlimax. As the reader is already aware of the outcome from "Dreams of Steel," the rehash of events from within the walls of the city never becomes truly dramatic, enervated even more by Murgen's confused mental state and the shift back and forth between events past and present. The end result is extremely episodic and interruptive, at times devolving into incoherence. And the periodic and unexplained announcements, such as Blade's defection to the Shadowmasters, do little to alleviate the seemingly loosely predicated and often unclear elements of the narrative. There is a lot of exposition taking place here---telling rather than showing---always a potential problem in the author's earlier books, but in this novel running amok, with a lot of extraneous matter, such as One-Eye's arms factories, being dropped upon the reader without either preface or later integration into the story. And, as other reviewers have noted, major characters have undergone changes in personality only briefly touched upon and never fully explained.
While Cook has always played fast and loose with his characters and plots in the past, he at least has been able to maintain some linearity and plausibility in the development of his stories. Here, however, his tale begins to disintegrate into elements that fail to attain coherence or credibility, in large part due to how he has chosen to present his story through the multiple and temporally shifting viewpoints of his narrator. As Murgen's experiences remain attenuated and muddled, so too does the narrative. The end result is a very poorly written book that I nearly abandoned part way through. Only my enjoyment of his previous novels, modest as their entertainment value may have proven, and an accompanying attachment to The Black Company and its characters, provided the will if not the desire to continue on in the hopes that this entry would prove a brief aberration. However, after reading the synopsis of the next installation in Cook's saga---"She Is The Darkness"---it would appear that the author has chosen to persist in pursuing Murgen's multiple, temporally shifting viewpoints. As Cook was unsuccessful in his efforts here, I can't say I am excited by the prospect of his continuing this device in the future, and will likely leave this series until I have exhausted other resources of reading. This is a shame, as the earlier books of The Black Company were entertaining, if rather light and facile in reward.
Had I been allowed, this book would only at best have merited one and a half stars; I'm being generous with two as this is one of the worst books I have read in the past several years. While I am sure there exists poorer fare out there, I am certainly in no rush to encounter them. The only unequivocally good thing I can say about this book is that at least Tor or the author have chosen to find a new cover artist---the previous artwork was appallingly bad.
Rating: 5
Summary: A cult classic and the dark side of Steven Brust
Comment: Imagine reading a series in which Steven Brust decides to explore the dark side of Vlad Taltos, and you have The Black Company.
The Black Company is an easy to identify with group for anyone with a career in law enforcement, the armed forces or health care. It's a series of books that captures the general feeling of those branches of service in which the constant exposure to the dark side of humanity numbs the senses and shapes the character into states of lower emotional connection to the world.
The Black Company is a group of misfits that have nothing in life but their brothers in The Company and whatever miserable situation they find themselves in at the time. The Company is life. The Company is the air that they breathe. And the Captain, the Lieutenant, and the Annalist and Standard Bearer are the people that hold the torch that leads the way into ever plunging darkness.
And it is that feeling of impenetrable doom mingled with the Company's "make the best of what life throws at us" attitude that is the reason that the reviews on all the Black Commpany books bring out such a wide variety of opinions. If you haven't lived this kind of life, you won't get these books, or enjoy them.
The people in the Company are at the end of society and have nothing else to do but put one foot in front of the other and hope that they stay alive just one more day, so that at least they can be miserable instead of dead.
Bleak Seasons is my favorite of all the Company books, and is in many ways like the rest of the Black Company series. It is a sarcastic, down to earth tale of the worst possible situation anyone can find themselves in, a siege, in which at least five different groups of people are forced to live together under the worst of circumstances, and where atrocity is a way of life.
There are the mandatory evil wizards all about, except with the refreshing angle of Cook's narrative in which we actually get to see and hear some of their more human sides: their doubts, their weaknesses, and the torment that goes with the territory.
Also refreshing is the mortality that Cook bestows all his characters with. Despite their awsome power, some of these wizards are quite afraid of dying, and are not exempt from making mistakes, or misjudging the unintended consequences of their actions. Because Cook takes us there, we see a fresh approach to the usual machinations in the fantasy genre.
Looking for dark plots? There aren't many, other than just plain darkness, dark humor, and doubt. Instead these bad guys are trying to get land, riches, and rule the world, much like modern day governments and tyrants.
So, you will either love it or hate it, and for good reason. These books aren't for everyone.
Cook thrives on describing the subtle but interesting relationship between those who are miserable and those who know how to make the best of being miserable. The difference is that the latter survive, while the former are trampled. The Company always survives as it is always better at handling misery by finding a little sunshine in the worst possible setting, through dark humor, liquor, dirty tricks, and if it is inevitable by figthing harder and smarter than its opposition.
But that simple premise is lost on many who are looking for something else in their reading. And that's fair enough, for this is not a series penned after Dumas or other precursors of the modern fantasy/adventure/swashbuckling genre.
More interesting is that here in this book, Cook steps away from Croaker and Lady, the usual protagonists, and focuses on Murgen, a less than enthusiastic character who finds himself in the unexpected position of being in charge under the worst possible set of conditions. His unorthodox style, dry wit, guaranteed bungling, and his solutions to problems, wrought by trial and error and obssessive reading of the Company diaries, The Annals, lead him to an interesting set of adventures during different time lines, which make Bleak Seasons a nice departure in this classic, but cultish series.
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Title: Silver Spike (Chronicle of the Black Company) by Glen Cook ISBN: 0812502205 Publisher: Tor Books Pub. Date: 01 August, 1989 List Price(USD): $6.99 |
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Title: White Rose (Chronicle of the Black Company) by Glen Cook ISBN: 0812508440 Publisher: Tor Books Pub. Date: 01 March, 1990 List Price(USD): $6.99 |
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Title: Shadows Linger (Chronicle of the Black Company) by Glen Cook ISBN: 0812508424 Publisher: Tor Books Pub. Date: 01 March, 1990 List Price(USD): $6.99 |
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Title: The Black Company (Chronicle of the Black Company) by Glen Cook ISBN: 0812521390 Publisher: Tor Books Pub. Date: 01 August, 1996 List Price(USD): $6.99 |
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Title: Fool's Fate (The Tawny Man, Book 3) by ROBIN HOBB ISBN: 0553801546 Publisher: Bantam Pub. Date: 03 February, 2004 List Price(USD): $24.95 |
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