The White Rose

by Glen Cook

Long before Steven Erikson decided to write the grimmest, darkest fantasy series ever, there was Glen Cook's Black Company series. Cook's protagonists are a band of tired, world weary mercenaries, with all the unpleasant behaviour you'd expect of such people in the real world. In a more conventional fantasy story, these would be the flunkies who get chopped to pieces by the heroes on their way to the final confrontation with the big bad.

'The White Rose' is the last book in the initial trilogy (although the series has ended up going on for another seven books after this one). In the first book 'The Black Company', the company is hired by The Lady, an immortal sorceress recently resurrected from her grave and in the process of restarting her attempted conquest of the world. 'The Black Company' is brilliant from beginning to end, mainly because of the nuanced morality of the characters on all sides (which can for the most part be described not so much as 'grey' as 'light black'), but also because of the cool battle scenes, which are as epic as they come, even in the genre of epic fantasy.

The second book, 'Shadows Linger', was a total disappointment in comparison to the first. I couldn't tell you exactly why, because I remember very little about it. Fortunately the last entry in the trilogy, while not as good as the first one, was still worth reading. It ties up all the loose ends and finishes off the Lady's war in grand fashion (but of course leaving enough open plot threads to carry on the series). It doesn't measure up to the first book in terms of cool sorcery battles, or in terms of the characters, which more or less resolve themselves into good and evil categories by the end. Still, there were enough cool plot ideas to make it an entertaining read, and Cook has an original style and has designed an original interesting world, which he has only begun to start showing us at the end of the first trilogy. I'll get the rest at some stage, but it's not at the top of my list.