Glen Cook – The Silver Spike (1989) Review

8.5/10

No matter what you might have heard about this book, I am here to tell you that this is excellent fantasy and totally worth reading. It’s true though: this is not everyone’s favourite entry in the series and much depends on when you pick up this book in the reading order, about which opinions are divided. The popular The Books of the South omnibus places it as the 6th novel in the series – a mistake, I believe, as this will make the book feel like an afterthought of events from the 3rd novel, The White Rose. Therefore I read it as the 4th novel, making The Silver Spike a very natural and worthy continuation of the narrative that we’ve been following all along.

And who wouldn’t want to read more about characters such as Raven, Bomanz, Darling, Old Father Tree and everyone’s favourite villains, the Limper and Toadkiller Dog? So much material that Cook introduced in the third book gets more time in the spotlight through this novel, lifting up all those ideas from throwaway articles to important parts of the series to stick around in the reader’s memory. An oft heard complaint about this novel is that it doesn’t introduce any new fascinating locale, but we get more of the Barrowlands and the Plain of Fear with its weird mantas and talking menhirs, and those were too good to just throw away after book three. The Plain of Fear remains a fascinating place and I was glad to spend more time with its denizens.

Cook has a winning formula of characters here. You didn’t really think the Limper was gone, did you? He never is, and Toadkiller Dog remains a fascinating enigma. Raven continues to be a subversion of the kind of hardened lone wolf warrior such as Aragorn, but the reason he is alone is because he is a miserable asshole who cannot handle human relationships. Since Croaker is gone off South, much of this novel is narrated by Case, a rather simple-minded soldier who took care of Raven in book three and stuck around. His emotional intelligence is greater than Raven’s, though, and his opinion about Raven and the man’s dysfunctions is given to us unedited.

Cook proves himself a master of character voice. Case has his own recognizable speech patterns and can be very witty, doing much the same of what Joe Abercrombie’s characters would do later on in his First Law series. Besides Raven, Cook also shows Darling, Silent and their companions from an outsider’s perspective, from old wizard Bomanz’s, whom Cook also gives another distinct voice. None of the major characters of importance are regarded head-on in this novel but always sideways through the eyes of a bystander, allowing Cook to subvert classic hero tropes and prick through some illusions of heroism. 

Newcomers are a group of four grave-robbers who try to steal the silver spike. This may be the most exciting part of the novel and really comes to the fore in its second half. A bunch of back-stabbing doofuses, really, except for Old Man Fish who is scary. They are the cause of a lot of mayhem as they retreat to the city of Oar. This storyline really shows how Cook has come a long way in maintaining a high pace while also making the narrative a smoother reading experience than the first novel. The pressure keeps building in the cooker that is the city of Oar, throughout the entire novel. All powers converge to it and chaos happens.

I loved this novel, just as much as I loved all the other Black Company novels. The writing is witty and strong, with great command over tone and voice. The fantasy is imaginative, the plot is without bloat, the final chapters are incredibly dramatic and there is even interesting character development in the small amount of pages that we’re given. It again reminded me a lot of Steven Erikson’s Malazan Book of the Fallen series in tone and approach, with the convergence of powers in the city at the end.