The Silent Blade - R.A. Salvatore
Apparently, I lied. I forgot I had one more in the hopper before moving on to a couple non-fiction. I’ll bury this posting on the weekend because I’m relatively sure people care less about these book reviews then Ms. L cares about the Mets.
The Silent Blade is the first book considered outside the “Legend of Drizzt” cycle and is, instead, the first book in the “Paths of Darkness” cycle. This seems to be the point at which Salvatore and and Wizards of the Coast realized they had about twelve marketable characters stacked up inside one ten book set and it was time to split them up. This book serves to do that and also serves as the fantasy world’s study of PTSD and how different characters deal with it.
On one side, you have Wulfgar whose spent the last six years being tortured by the demons. Not symbolic demons… actual demons. After being sprung from hell he’s mentally ruined. We find out some of the tortures visited on him — including being given illusions of freedom to the point where he believed he’d escaped only to watch his friends massacred by demons. He’s watched succubusses (hm… what is the plural form up succubus? Succuben? ZING!) assume the form of Catti-Brie and then turn back at the moment of passion. He’s watched the same succubuses give birth to his twisted half-demon spawn only to be murdered by Errtu. In all… he’s had a rough go of it. He’s not dealing with freedom particularly well — continually flashing back to his problems and putting his friends in danger.
On the other side, you have Artemis Entreri. Entreri was brought to Menzoberranzan to live with the drow where he discovered that, even though he’s spent his entire life tuning his senses and becoming the most finely honed warrior on the surface, he’s barely as talented as the lowest of drow commoners. Visiting Menzoberranzan allows him to look at himself in a huge mirror and he doesn’t really like what he sees. He returns to the surface realizing that Drizzt may have been right and the life he always led was kind of pointless.
By the end of the book, relationships have been reshuffled as the agonizingly long dance between Drizzt and Catti-brie and their maybe/maybe-not relationship continues… almost to the point of ridiculousness. At this point, the two have been “friends” for something like twelve years, including having spent six years together as pirate hunters on the Sea Sprite. All this time, the reader’s to understand that Drizzt longs for her. Six years on a boat and spending all their time together and nothing happened? Their relationship never progressed? Really?
This is a good book for what it is, as long as one goes in to it with very little hope of a resolution of anything. If anything, this book sets in to motion a lot of obvious stuff that the reader can infer from the last set of books. Drizzt and Artemis will fight again. Jarlaxle’s quest after the Crystal Shard. Wulfgar’s need of some alone time to deal with his figurative and literal demons. And the Friends’ return to Icewind Dale. It’s a table-setter for Spine of the World, The Sellswords Trilogy, and Sea of Swords. It’s pretty much designed to divide our main characters in to three different books and set them on their own paths. High time, too, as any more fights between Drizzt and Entreri are just overkill. We get it… you want to kill each other for metaphysical, philosphical reason.
As for the divergent paths… I’m curious to see if Salvatore has the ability to make his non-drow characters interesting — because to this point they’ve all been a supporting cast. Whether or not Wulfgar can carry a whole book on his own remains to be seen.