TDL’s Sports, Wrestling, & Otherwise

With a ten-hour round trip train ride, I figured I’d knock another of these books off. This was Salvatore’s attempt at making one of the non-drow characters and giving him his own book. Wulfgar, as you may remember, was the character tortured in hell for six years and eventually left the party because he felt himself a detriment of his friends because he was held prisoner by his own memories. Spine of the World is the second book in the Paths of Darkness cycle (following The Silent Blade, in the spirit of grouping, but sharing no plot at all) and the 12th overall book using these characters.

The book follows Wulfgar to Luskan — a port city full of scum and villany — and his ongoing bout with post-traumatic stress following his six years of torture in hell. He soon finds out that alcohol is a pretty good way to force yourself to live in the moment and forget the past and, as such, finds himself as a bouncer in a local tavern in a seedy part of town working for room, board, and wine.

In an odd sort of way, I think this might be one of the better books since the original set. Salvatore really manages to address an issue pretty relevant in the present day in a fantasy setting. We get a picture of a character we’ve come to care about over the last decade destroyed mentally. The years and torture has caught up with him and all he wants to do is forget, but he can’t. This leads him down a pretty dark path. He becomes an alcoholic and denies his past as a hero. He finds himself in league with shady characters and walking down a path of criminality before hitting rock bottom and beginning to work back to what he was. It’s a story that probably anyone whose battled an addiction could relate to — albeit dramatized and placed in a fantasy setting.

If I had a complaint about the book is that it’s split in to two separate and distinct stories. Chapters alternate between Wulfgar’s story in Luskan and his new friendship with fellow shady Luskanite Morik the Rogue and the introduction of a set of new characters that I found myself struggling to care about. In the midst of this great story about downfall and redemption, I have to keep taking pointless interludes to a story about teenage love and the unfairness of duty. Secondly, once these new characters were introduced and I figured out where the story was going, there was only one of two ways the story was going to end. The characters were obviously inserted for the author to give Wulfgar something heroic to do, but I didn’t need 150 pages of paper-thin, chick-lit “who you should love” vs. “who you do love” plot that’s been beaten to death in movies and books for 100 years. I’ve seen the “young peasant girl loves young peasant boy but is betrothed to the Lord” storyline a million times. The author could have done better.

Never have I seen an author’s best and worst been in the same book, at the same time, sharing the same storyline. The only reason the peasant girl plot didn’t make the rest of the book unreadable was because the Wulfgar stuff was SO good. Salvatore does a great job of putting you in Wulfgar’s head and following his downfall from hero to guy who is almost happy when he thinks he’s about to be put to death. The description of him at the Prisoner’s Carnival after he’s been tried and sentenced to death for something he didn’t do is relatively amazing. He knows he’s going to be tortured to death by these people for the entertainment and he’s almost relieved. First, because no torture they can inflict on his mortal body will be remotely as bad as what he’s already been through. Second, when they’re finished torturing him he will be dead and that will be the end of it. It’s a stunning look inside a completely broken person.

So, if it’s possible to give the strongest recommendation for the book and the strongest recommendation to avoid every other chapter and have it average out to a semi-recommendation to avoid every other chapter like it was on fire, this is it.