<- Remembering The Realms: R. A. Salvatore Part 2
SUBTITLE: The Bad And The Worse
SUB-SUBTITLE: Continuing To Not Beat The "Should Have Made This A Podcast" Allegations
As covered in the previous post, R. A. Salvatore has a lot of strengths as a writer, and the significance of his contributions to Forgotten Realms, Dungeons & Dragons lore, and the fantasy genre at large cannot be overstated. However, any writer with dozens of published titles under their belt is bound to produce some clunkers and develop some bad habits. For your consideration, I bring you the worst of Salvatore's Forgotten Realms writing.
Drizzt Sucks, Honestly
So, I know I've talked a lot about how Drizzt Do'Urden was this big smash hit ultra popular character, and it's true - Drizzt was and remains one of the most enduringly popular characters in all fantasy fiction. However, I think the IDEA of Drizzt - that of a tortured outcast, expelled from his homeland, never accepted or understood by those who he protects, a gifted warrior with a poet's soul - is far more appealing than the actual reality. With the exception of The Dark Elf trilogy, Drizzt is never the best part of any book he's in.
The main problem with Drizzt is that he is, without exaggeration, one of the most powerful people on the entire planet. He's possibly the greatest fighter who ever lived. He's covered head to toe in powerful magical items. He's best friends with King Bruenor Battlehammer, best friends with both the leaders of Ten-Towns and the leaders of the tundra tribes, best friends with one of the largest cities of deep gnomes, best friends with the most respected pirate hunters on the Sword Coast, and in a kinda-sorta situationship with Alustriel Silverhand, Queen of Silverymoon and Chosen of Mystra. He has access to more money than he could possibly ever spend. All of this combines to make him not an especially easy character to relate to, particularly when he's so goddamn dour and whiny all the goddamn time.
The other thing about Drizzt being an unrivalled fighter is that it makes the great majority of his fights (and there are SO many fights in Salvatore's books) boring at best, and kind of mean-spirited at worst. There's just no way to really root for a guy when you know he's going to handily win any normal combat situation you put him in, no matter how many fancy sword-spinning maneuvers Salvatore tries to jazz things up with. I often found myself skimming or even skipping Drizzt's portions of the many, many fight sequences, because who cares?
Speaking of things I almost always skipped: I mentioned Drizzt's act-bumper monologues in the previous post, and I'd like to transcribe a sample from one of those for you here. Before I do, I'll mention that all of Drizzt's monologues have been collected in a book titled The Dao of Drizzt, and you would need to cut off at least three of my toes before I'd ever read that thing.
Quoth Drizzt, from his monologue at the start of Part 1 of The Spine of the World:
In my homeland of Menzoberranzan, where demons play and drows revel at the horrible demise of rivals, there remains a necessary state of alertness and wariness. A drow offguard is a drow murdered in Menzoberranzan, and thus few are the times when dark elves indulge in exotic weeds or drinks that dull the senses.
Few, but there are exceptions. At the final ceremony of Melee-Magthere, the school of fighters that I attended, graduated students engage in an orgy of mind-blurring herbs and sensual pleasures with the females of Arach-Tinilith, a moment of purest hedonism, a party of the purest pleasures without regard to future implications.
I rejected that orgy, though I knew not why at the time. It assaulted my sense of morality, I believed (and still do), and cheapened so many things that I hold precious. Now, in retrospect, I have come to understand another truth about myself that forced rejection of that orgy. Aside from the moral implications, and there were many, the mere notion of the mind-blurring herbs frightened and repulsed me. I knew that all along, of course - as soon as I felt the intoxication at that ceremony, I instinctively rebelled against it - but it wasn't until very recently that I came to understand the truth of that rejection, the real reason why such influences have no place in my life.
These herbs attack the body in various ways, of course, from slowing reflexes to destroying coordination altogether, but more importantly, they attack the spirit in two different ways. First, they blur the past, erasing memories both pleasant and unpleasant, and second, they erase any thoughts of the future. Intoxicants lock the imbiber in the present, the here and now, without any regard for the future, without consideration of the past. That is the trap, a defeatist perspective that allows for attempted satiation of physical pleasures wantonly, recklessly. An intoxicated person will attempt even foolhardy dares because that inner guidance, even to the point of survival instinct itself, can be so impaired. How many young warriors foolishly throw themselves against greater enemies, only to be slain? How many young women find themselves with child, conceived with lovers they would not ever consider as future husbands?
That is the trap, the defeatist perspective, that I cannot tolerate. I live my life with hope, always hope, that the future will be better than the present, but only as long as I work to make it so. Thus, with that toil, comes the satisfaction in life, the sense of accomplishment we all truly need for real joy. How could I remain honest to that hope if I allowed myself a moment of weakness that could well destroy all I have worked to achieve and all I hope to achieve? How might I have reacted to so many unexpected crises if, at the time of occurrence, I was influenced by a mind-altering substance, one that impaired my judgment or altered my perspective?
Also, the dangers of where such substances might lead cannot be underestimated. Had I allowed myself to be carried away with the mood of the graduation ceremony at Melee-Magthere, had I allowed myself the sensual pleasures offered by the priestesses, how cheapened might have any honest encounter of love have been?
A couple of things, before commenting on this: first, I literally picked up The Spine of the World at random. I didn't hunt down this specific passage. Second, in case you've forgotten the synopsis of The Spine of the World, Drizzt is writing this entire rumination in regards to Wulfgar, one of his closest friends, having become an alcoholic in response to having spent six years being tortured by fiends in The Abyss.
WOOF.
I'll offer Drizzt the most tepid of defences here by saying that they aren't usually THIS bad. But hoo MOMMA is this ever a bad look for Mister Do'Urden. Not with a gun to my head could you get me to admit that I fled weeping from a drug-fuelled fuckpile with an auditorium filled to bursting with horny drow priestesses. This is LITERALLY what zero pussy does to a motherfucker!!! This passage REEKS, man. Drizzt's so fucking judgmental, this reads like he's sitting in a backwards-turned chair on stage for a D.A.R.E. assembly at a middle school (which isn't an accident. From the 80s through the early 00s, "nerd culture" was widely perceived by its adherents as being the conceptual opposite of "jock culture" or "prep culture". This meant a proactive rejection of all things that nerds saw themselves as being too good/smart to indulge in - partying, drinking, drugs, and meaningless sex were all seen as things that only knuckle-draggers would partake of. Nerds would sustain themselves on Bawls and Flamin' Hot Cheetos, thank you very much! It wasn't until the late aughts/2010s where, with nerd culture entering the mainstream and massive cons becoming more common that heavy drinking/socializing really became entrenched as a part of the Nerd Experience, so it makes perfect sense for Nerd Culture Goodboy Drizzt Do'Urden to be regurgitating this puritanical slop at the time.)
Although this passage might be worse than usual, it DOES contain all the essential ingredients of Drizzt's pre-act screeds. No matter what's going on in the book, Drizzt makes everything about himself - HIS moralizing outlook, informed by HIS difficult life, and how HIS feelings are so Complicated and Tormented all of the mother fucking time. The more I read through Salvatore's books, the more I had to marvel that they ever survived having such a pathetic wiener as their leading man.
This isn't the absolute worst of Drizzt, unfortunately. For that, we'll need to go to a story published in 1993's Realms of Valor, a collection of shorts that focused on the more physical-action-oriented characters of Forgotten Realms. But before we do THAT...
Now's A Good Time To Mention D&D's Legacy Of Racism
To be clear: this is not a problem that exists solely within Salvatore's writing - both Dungeons & Dragons and the fantasy genre writ large had their problems with how they handled the concept of race before he came along, and many of those problems persist to this day. I'm just bringing it up here because it's the earliest possible appropriate time and it's not going to stop being relevant as I move through this series. This isn't going to be as thorough an examination of this history as others have written, but I feel it's important to have these things at least touched on.
Dungeons & Dragons's original sin with regards to race - which is inherited by Forgotten Realms - stems from conflating "species" with "ethnicity" under the catchall of "race" and then assigning fixed mechanical and moral values to specific races, all without really interrogating how such assignations might mirror and reinforce existing racist stereotypes. For example, the so-called "goblinoid races" - goblins, orcs, bugbears, etc - are "evil" races who are portrayed as warlike tribals who constantly menace the settlements of "good" races (humans, surface elves, dwarves, and so on). Mechanically, they typically suffer a significant penalty to Intelligence while receiving bonuses to Strength or Constitution. Goblinoids are most frequently deployed as level-appropriate obstacles to low-level player characters, meaning that their primary function is to be killed in large numbers and have their most valuable belongings looted. This mirrors popular depictions of indigenous peoples the world 'round, who are often presented as backwards, stupid savages who exist only to be exterminated or subjugated, that people from more intelligent/deserving races might plunder their land and communities. This problematic marriage of racialized aesthetics and mechanics survives into the present day, present even in modern products like Baldur's Gate 3.
Another D&D thing with insanely bad optics is the concept of the Ranger class's "racial enemy" feature, which is a concept so rancid that it's incredible it survived as long as it did (the feature has, as of 5th edition, been restyled as a "Favored Enemy"). Basically, the idea is that a Ranger character either hates or has simply gotten so good at hunting and killing a certain kind of creature that they receive significant combat bonuses against creatures of that type. If you're curious, Drizzt's racial enemy is orcs! He learned to hate orcs from a man who lives in the woods.
Drow, as a race, are another goulash of unattractive racialized tropes. The fact that they're an evil dark-skinned variant of the Aryan-ideal-coded surface elves is obviously one big part of it, but the fact that the drow frequently employ a vast network of underground tunnels to steal/murder surface elf children also brings to mind an enduring anti-Semitic conspiracy theories. And, of course, we can't forget that dark elves being all at once matriarchal, highly sexualized, and utterly morally depraved is more than a little reminiscent of fetishistic right-wing depictions of gender equality movements. They're a fucking mess, is what I'm saying. I mentioned previously that Drizzt's enormous power and privilege make him pretty useless as anything more than a very surface-level allegory for racism, but I think an even bigger obstacle is that the racial baggage of the drow makes any kind of comparison to the experience of real-world racism fully nonsensical. When your entire race are child-killing underground sex perverts - like, your ENTIRE race, the overwhelming majority of your race fits this description - it's kind of extremely silly to act like someone looking at you and worrying that you might murder their children is at all unreasonable.
Salvatore's biggest problem when interfacing with the racial baggage of the drow (and the racial baggage of D&D) is that he never really interrogates it for even a second. He will, however, make occasional ill-thought-out attempts at subverting it. Which brings us back to Tales of Valor.
That One Time Drizzt Really, REALLY Sucked
R. A. Salvatore's story in Tales of Valor, "Dark Mirror", might not be the very WORST story I had the misfortune of reading during my journey back through my collection, but it undoubtedly has the worst, most piss-curdlingly infuriating lib-brained politics of the entire bunch. Which, given that it clocks in at just under 29 pages, is quite a feat. It's also written entirely in the first person from Drizzt's perspective, meaning we basically get 29 full pages of Drizzt's overwrought monologue voice from the pre-act bumpers. Fucking perfect.
Here's the synopsis: set at some point after the events of The Halfling's Gem and before the events of The Legacy, Drizzt is riding around the lands between Mithril Hall and Silverymoon. He comes upon a ragged party of human farmers who are in pursuit of a band of ogres and orcs who attacked their community and kidnapped a handful of their friends & family members. The biggest and most belligerent of the humans is a man named Rico. Remember him! Drizzt agrees to help lead the farmers to the orcs and help them retrieve the hostages safely.
Drizzt tracks down the orc party easily, and despite Rico fucking up his ambush plans, manages to kill a bunch of orcs and ogres and get all of the hostages out. During the battle, Drizzt notices a single goblin running from the orc camp into the night, but thinks nothing of it. After the battle, Rico starts asking Drizzt where someone called "Nojheim" is, revealing that Nojheim is the goblin Drizzt saw fleeing earlier. Rico is adamant that Nojheim be recaptured, saying that he was the leader of a goblin raiding party who the villagers had been holding to await trial when the second party of orc raiders attacked. Drizzt agrees to hunt down and recapture Nojheim.
Drizzt quickly finds the goblin, but is startled to discover that he speaks excellent Common. However, this discovery doesn't prompt Drizzt to ask the goblin any questions, and the next day he returns Nojheim to Rico, who happily throws a rope leash over Nojheim's neck and tells Drizzt to go get a meal at the local tavern, on his tab. Drizzt does so, and while eating is approached by another one of the townsfolk who, after congratulating Drizzt on a job well done freeing the hostages, asks "Did you get Rico back his slave?" This sets Drizzt on his heels somewhat, and he resolves to sneak into the farmhouse where Nojheim is kept to seek answers.
I'm going to now transcribe several selections from their conversation, saving my commentary for after.
"Why did you not tell me Rico's reason for wanting you back?"
"Tell you?" he balked. His goblin accent had suddenly flown. "A goblin tell Drizzt Do'Urden of his plight? A goblin appeal to a ranger for compassion?"
"You know my name?" By the gods, he even pronounced it correctly.
[...]
"I accept my fate," he replied to my unspoken question, though there was little conviction in his voice.
"You are no ordinary goblin."
Nojheim spat on the fire. "I do not know that I'm a goblin at all," he answered. If I had been eating at the time, I surely would have choked once more.
"I am like no goblin I've ever met," he explained with a helpless chuckle. Always resigned, I thought, so typical of his helpless predicament. "Even my mother... she murdered my father and my younger sister." He snapped his fingers to mock his next point, to accentuate the sarcasm in his voice. "They deserved it, by goblin standards, for they hadn't properly shared their supper with her."
Nojheim went silent and shook his head. Physically, he was indeed a goblin, but I could already by the sincerity of his tone that he was far different in temperament from his wicked kin. The thought shook me more than a little. In my years as a ranger, I had never stopped to question my actions against goblins, never held back my scimitars long enough to determine if any of them might possibly be of a different demeanour than I had come to know as typical of the normally evil creatures.
"You should have told me that you were a slave," I said again.
"I'm not proud of that fact."
"Why do you sit in here?" I demanded, though I knew the answer immediately. I, too, had once been a slave, a captive of wicked mind flayers, among the most evil of the Underdark's denizens. There is no condition so crippling, no torment so profound. In my homeland, I had seen a contingent of a hundred orcs held under complete control by no more than six drow soldiers. If they had mustered a common courage, those orcs could surely have destroyed their keepers. But while courage is not the first thing to be stripped from a slave, it is certainly among the most important.
"You do not deserve this fate," I said more softly.
"What do you know of it?" Nojheim demanded.
"I know that it is wrong," I said. "I know that something should be done."
"I know that I would be hung by my neck if I tried to break free," he said bluntly. "I have never done any harm to any person or any thing. Neither do I desire to harm anyone. But this is my lot in life."
"We are not bound by our race," I told him, finding some conviction finally in remembering my own long trail from the dark ways of Menzoberranzan. "You said that you have heard tales of me. Are they what you might expect of a dark elf?"
"You are drow, not goblin," he said, as if that fact explained everything.
Here, Nojheim tells Drizzt that Rico has kept other slaves - all other goblinoids - but that Nojheim is the only one still alive because he's never resisted. Drizzt sits with this for a little bit and makes up his mind that he'll appeal to one of the regional monarch he's friends with (Bruenor or Alustriel) to secure Nojheim's release. Then Drizzt tries to compare himself to Nojheim again.
"You are drow, not any goblin," he replied again, and this time I began to understand the meaning behind his words. "They will never understand that I am not evil in heart, as are other goblins. I don't even understand it!"
"But you believe it," I said firmly.
"Am I to tell them that this goblin is not an evil sort?"
"Exactly that!" I argued. It seemed reasonable enough to me. I thought that I had found the opening I needed.
Nojheim promptly closed that door, promptly taught me something about myself and about the world that I had not previously considered.
"What is the difference between us?" I pressed, hoping he would see my understanding of the truth.
"You think yourself persecuted?" The goblin asked. His yellow eyes narrowed, and I knew that he thought he was being shrewd.
"I no longer accept that definition, just as I no longer accept the persecution," I declared. My pride had suddenly gotten in the way of understanding what this pitiful wretch was getting at. "People will draw their own judgments, but I will no longer accept their unfair conclusions."
"You will fight those that do you wrong?" Nojheim asked.
"I will deny them, ignore them, and know in my heart that I am right in my beliefs."
Nojheim's smile revealed both an honest happiness that I had found my way, and a deeper sorrow - for himself, I came to know.
"Our situations are not the same," he insisted. I started to protest, but he stopped me with an upraised hand. "You are drow, exotic, beyond the experiences of the vast majority of the people you meet."
"Almost everyone on the surface has heard horrible tales of the drow," I tried to reason.
"But they have not dealt directly with drow elves!" Nojheim replied sharply. "You are an oddity to them, strangely beautiful, even by their own standards of beauty. Your features are fine, Drizzt Do'Urden, your eyes penetrating. Even your skin, so black and lustrous, must be considered beautiful by the people of the surface world. I am a goblin, an ugly goblin, in body if not in spirit."
"If you showed them the truth of that spirit..."
Nojheim's laughter mocked my concern. "Showed them the truth? A truth that would make them question what they have known all of their lives? Am I to be a dark mirror of their conscience? These people, Rico included, have killed many goblins - probably rightly so," he quickly added, and that clarification explained to me everything Nojheim had been trying to get through my blind eyes.
If these farmers, many of whom had often battled goblins, and others who had kept goblins as slaves, found just one creature who did not fit into their definitions of the evil race, just one goblin who showed conscience and compassion, intellect and a spirit akin to their own, it might throw their entire existence into chaos. I, myself, felt as though I had been slapped in the face when I learned of Nojheim's true demeanour. Only through my own experiences with my dark elven kin, the overwhelming majority of whom well deserved their evil reputation, was I able to work through that initial turmoil and guilt.
These farmers, though, might not so easily understand Nojheim. They would surely fear him, and hate him all the more.
At this point, Drizzt offers to free Nojheim outright, which Nojheim refuses, saying that he doesn't want to be hunted again. So Drizzt leaves him, and rides for Silverymoon to ask Alustriel to intervene. Alustriel isn't in the city, so Drizzt rides for Mithril Hall to ask Bruenor instead. On the way, he realizes that he should have just overrode Nojheim and resolved the situation diplomatically afterwards, so he rides back for the village - where he finds that Nojheim has been killed, hung by the neck for supposedly attacking his master, Rico, in broad daylight. Drizzt gets angry for a second, but they rides away sadly.
Drizzt's signoff:
Sunset. Another day surrenders to the night as I perch here on the side of a mountain, not so far from Mithril Hall.
The mystery of the night has begun, but does Nojheim now know the truth of a greater mystery? I often wonder of those who have gone before me, who have discovered what I cannot until the time of my own death. Is Nojheim better off now than he was as Rico's slave?
If the afterlife is one of justice, then surely he is.
I must believe this to be true, yet it still wounds me to know that I played a role in the unusual goblin's death, both in capturing him and in going to him later, going to him with hopes he could not afford to hold. I cannot forget that I walked away from Nojheim, however well-intentioned I might have been. I rode for Silverymoon and left him vulnerable, left him in wrongful pain.
And so I learn from my mistake.
Forever and after, I will not ignore such injustice. If I chance upon one of Nojheim's spirit and Nojheim's peril, then let his wicked master be wary. Let the lawful powers of the region review my actions and exonerate me if that is what they perceive to be the correct course. If not...
It does not matter. I will follow my heart.
(One last follow-up to this: in the many books that followed this story's publication, Nojheim comes up precisely once. In Sea of Swords, Drizzt and the gang take shelter from a blizzard in a cave, only to realize that the cave is already inhabited by a couple dozen goblins. Remembering Nojheim, Drizzt convinces the rest of the party to let him handle things diplomatically, and plays up his drow-ness to the goblin leader, claiming that Bruenor is actually a duegar, Regis is a fat goblin, and Catti-Brie is their captive. The goblin buys it, and everyone settles in to wait out the blizzard - until the goblin leader makes the suggestion of raping Catti-Brie. A fight breaks out, and the party kill or scatter all of the goblins. The potential all living creatures possess for goodness never really occurs to Drizzt again in any of the books I read.)
I apologize for the lengthy quotes, but given the subject matter at hand I felt it better to be exhaustive and let the material speak for itself. And what material it is! There really isn't anything that prepares you for the experience of reading about Drizzt Do'Urden becoming a slavecatcher, deciding he's going to resort to Due Legal Process to get the slave freed, and then not seeking any form of retribution or justice when the slave he was trying to free is murdered. It's a display of gutlessness that is truly spectacular to witness.
You can really tell that Salvatore thought he was cooking with this one. And, to be entirely fair, there are kernels of worthwhile storytelling in there. Nojheim's observations about Drizzt's relative privilege as an exotic curiosity rather than a familiar antagonist are fairly salient - but they're also constantly being undercut by racist microaggressions from the narrative regarding the inherent stupidity and malice of all goblinkind, to which Nojheim just happens to be a notable exception. It's pretty heinous to make Nojheim himself affirm that MOST killings of goblins are justified - and extraordinarily heinous to write Nojheim as rejecting his own liberation out of cowardice.
This is one of those stories that basically poisons an entire character for as long as you remember it. Like, Drizzt couldn't even take a hardline stance against slavery. He didn't kill or capture a guy who has taken multiple slaves, killed them, and undoubtedly will again! Drizzt doesn't even attempt to change how he behaves towards goblins except for that one time, nor does he make any effort at rooting out what is pretty clearly a normalized practice in the countryside he patrols. Dude fucking sucks!!!
This post is already hitting a truly absurd wordcount so I don't want to labor this entry any more than I already have. So, let's move away from this truly inept exploration of some pretty heavy topics into a five-book, no-less-inept exploration of yet another: religious faith!
The Cleric Quintet
R. A. Salvatore was pretty busy in the early 90s! From 1990-1991, he published the three books of The Dark Elf Trilogy, but then decided that three books in two years was pussy shit. From 1991 through 1994, Salvatore would release NINE more new Forgotten Realms novels - the four books of Legacy of the Drow and the five books of The Cleric Quintet. Including the last book of The Dark Elf Trilogy, that's an average of more than three books per year. Jesus Christ. (Salvatore wouldn't publish his next Forgotten Realms novel until 1998, after the whole shitshow with Brian Thomsen had been resolved.)
Salvatore started The Cleric Quintet from a completely blank slate, with an all-new protagonist (Cadderly Bonaduce, a young cleric of Deneir (patron god of art, knowledge, and literature)), an all-new cast of characters (including Danica (accomplished monk and Cadderly's lover), the dwarven Bouldershoulder brothers, Ivan and Pikel, and Kierkan Rufo (Cadderly's friend and rival, as well as the primary antagonist of the fifth book)), an all-new setting (the Snowflake Mountains, home to the Edificant Library, Shilmista Forest, and the lakeside city of Carradoon, among other places), and an all-new threat (Cadderly's archmage father, Aballister Bonaduce, and his army of cultists seeking to conquer the Snowflake Mountains on behalf of Talona, goddess of poison). Perhaps you can already tell from reading the list of names, locations, and concepts, but The Cleric Quintet was not very good.
It's quite possible that Salvatore's breakneck pace was at least partially to blame for this, but after re-reading through the quintet I think that it was cooked from first principles. For one thing, the space in which Salvatore thrives is that of globe-trotting, rollicking, action-driven adventure stories, whereas the story of The Cleric Quintet explored many stages of a much more localized regional conflict. For another thing, it's a story that has religious worship at the core of its DNA, but despite gods and worship being an integral aspect of of Dungeons & Dragons, the concept of Religion was, at the time, viewed as being an extremely hostile force to most Forgotten Realms fans following the Santanic Panic of the 80s. And, finally, The Cleric Quintet starred, well, a cleric. Which is a bad decision for reasons that will require ANOTHER lengthy aside to articulate.
An Aside Regarding Clerical Magic In Fiction
Including clerical magic - that is, magic derived from a character's religious or philosophical devotion that typically produces effect such as the healing of wounds, curing of ailments, bestowing of boons, and obliteration of the profane - was non-negotiable for the Forgotten Realms setting, based as it was on the mechanical conceits of the Dungeons & Dragons roleplaying game. Within D&D, character hit points are a vital resource to be managed - combat and dungeon crawling depletes hit points, which (at least as of the 3.5 edition that most of Forgotten Realms is set during) could only be restored via rest, consuming potions, or by spells cast by clerics, druids, and paladins, giving those player classes important utility and essentially dictating their roles during play. Additionally, the specific god or concept from which a character derives their clerical magic further specializes and characterizes them - a priestess of Lloth and a shaman of Gruumsh might both technically be clerics on the character sheet, but they will have access to pretty significantly different magical abilities. You couldn't write stories claiming to be representative of Dungeons & Dragons without including characters who could heal injuries instantly, cure debilitating diseases with a snap of their fingers, and even resurrect the dead. To not do so would be literary malpractice.
Which is a real shame, because that kind of clerical magic is absolute poison to fiction that wants to have any sense of danger or stakes.
The possibility of injury and death for characters is quite possibly the number one source of excitement & engagement within almost all genres of narrative entertainment. Injury, in particular, is incredibly narratively useful as a consequence for dangerous actions. Consider this scenario: Drizzt throws himself into a fight with thirty goblins and looks totally awesome taking them all down, but then the last goblin gets in a lucky jab with its spear that renders his right arm useless - just as three hulking ogres lumber into the room, looking to even the score.
This creates tension! A reader knows that with both arms working, Drizzt could take these ogres to Clown Town, but now things are more complicated. What will Drizzt do? He could:
- Run away, risking a blow to his pride and the possibility that the ogres might harm others in his absence,
- Fight defensively, hoping that one of his companions will arrive before he's overwhelmed,
- Attempt to defeat the ogres through some feat of trickery, or
- Push himself beyond his limits and charge all three ogres headlong despite having only one working arm.
Except just then Drizzt's good cleric friend Glomgorgle Smunt, who we've never met before, waves his sceptre and returns Drizzt's arm to perfect working order in two seconds. "Go get them, Drizzt!" cries Glomgorgle.
That sucks! It would also suck if, in a Sherlock Holmes mystery, a priest could be summoned to resurrect a murder victim, who would then quickly identify their assailant (removing the necessity for Sherlock to perform any impressive feats of deduction). What if, instead of his cancer diagnosis spurring a semi-suicidal narcissistic descent into becoming a meth kingpin, Walter White just found 5th-level cleric capable of hitting him with a quick cast of Cure Disease and then went right back to his gig at the car wash? What if instead of losing his eye and hand in a helicopter crash and spending a decade in a Cypress hospital bed, Big Boss instead got Ocelot to bust out a scroll of Regeneration and showed back up at Mother Base the next Monday? A narrative conceit that renders huge swathes of potential complicating consequences instantly moot is maybe the worst possible thing to have in a story, but unfortunately the Forgotten Realms books were stuck with it.
So how did they get around this utterly toxic conceit? Mostly by mentioning it as little as possible, it turns out - although clerics are considered to be an indispensable part of any Dungeons & Dragons party composition, clerics almost NEVER make it into the main cast of Forgotten Realms novels. Of the sixty books in my Forgotten Realms collection, the five of The Cleric Quintet are the ONLY ones to feature a main character who is a cleric who is in full command of his clerical magic. There ARE other series which star characters who are technically clerics - the Avatar trilogy and the War Of The Spider Queen sextet - but in BOTH cases, the cleric characters are cut off from their magic for almost the entire narrative. That's not an accident!
(The other way healing magic as a conceit gets dealt with is by the poor writers essentially bending the mechanical rules into unrecognizable shapes. Bruenor is mortally wounded at the end of The Thousand Orcs, and spends most of The Lone Drow barely clinging to life, despite having multiple healing spells cast on him daily by two high-level clerics. It's later revealed that although his body was technically healed, his SOUL was the thing that was hanging by a thread, with one ghostly foot already in Moradin's halls - he only fully returns to life after Catti-Brie begs him to come back. In Cormyr: A Novel, King Azoun IV runs afoul of an abraxus and inhales its poisoned breath, leaving HIM barely clinging to life for most of THAT novel despite Lesser Restoration being a mere second-level cleric spell. The reveal is that somehow the inhaled poison had managed to turn Azoun's entire bloodstream into an anti-magic zone, meaning that until he received multiple blood infusions his body would reject all healing magic.)
Okay, Back To The Cleric Quintet
Now, all of that having been said: another of The Cleric Quintet's biggest failings is that Cadderly, our cleric main character, doesn't really acquire any holy powers to speak of until midway through the THIRD book. Up to that point, Cadderly is basically an inventive dilettante - he has a photographic memory and a gift for translations, which gives him a lot of clout and latitude within the multi-faith collegiate hierarchy of the Edificant Library, but in Dungeons and Dragons terms he spends most of the first two books as a Level 1 Cleric with a few powerful magical items. And the way he comes into his spiritual powers is utterly flaccid: Cadderly's mentor, Avery, gives him a copy of the Tome of Universal Harmony (Deneir's holy book) as Cadderly is setting out for Carradoon and tells him to read it. So Cadderly does. And then he reads it a bunch more, until he basically has the whole thing memorized. We, as readers, are never privy to what is actually written inside the Tome, of course - ironically, we have to take it on faith that what's inside is divine and holy and profound.
At no point throughout any of the books do we receive any of the following pieces of information about Deneir or the worship of Deneir:
- Are any days or periods of time throughout the year considered particularly significant or holy to Deneir?
- Does Deneir have any festivals?
- Besides the Tome of Universal Harmony, what other works of art or literature are considered especially significant to followers of Deneir?
- What is the precise hierarchy of Deneir's followers? Do they have a pope equivalent, or is it more regional?
- How might a layperson incorporate worship of Deneir into their life? What are Deneir's daily rituals or observances, if any?
- What are some notable passages from Deneir's scripture, or notable sayings from famous worshippers of Deneir?
Indeed, worship of Deneir seems to be limited to a vague appreciation for and accumulation of art, knowledge, and literature. In other words, the perfect religion to represent if you weren't particularly spiritual and knew that your readers also weren't particularly spiritual and won't care about seeing spirituality represented in more than a gesturing sort of way.
Anyways, Cadderly's frankly lazy study of the Tome of Universal Harmony eventually results in him being granted insane high-level holy powers for basically no reason. He employs these powers to:
- Mind-dominate a powerful red dragon so that it will destroy an evil artifact for him and then afterwards fly him and his friends to his evil dad's evil fortress
- Beat his evil dad at spells
- Beat Kierkan Rufo after Kierkan Rufo becomes a master vampire in the fifth book by chugging down a powerful cursed potion, and
- After his fight with Kierkan Rufo destroys the Edificant Library, raising an entire cathedral named Spirit Soaring from the earth itself. This makes him Old, but he eventually gets better.
If all of that sounds pretty boring and anticlimactic, it really is. I feel a little bad for not pulling out any particularly egregious quotes as I did in previous sections, but that's because it's all kind of glurge and not worth scrutinizing too closely beyond what I've already done. Danica, as a monk, suffers from some weird Orientalist stuff. Each individual book suffers from a sort of monster-of-the-week crisis that makes the flow of the quintet feel stilted and unnatural. If one wanted to, one could probably make a meal of the quintet's wildly inconsistent application of liberal-agnostic morality depending entirely on the whether a given character is a Good Guy or a Bad Guy, but I think one would mostly be talking to oneself in doing so because nobody really cares about these books, me included.
I don't know that any series of books in my collection feels quite as superfluous as The Cleric Quintet. The characters are lifeless, their struggles are mostly meaningless, and their relationships are lifeless. The Snowflake Mountains are a boring location, one that brings to mind every zero-idea-having JRPG-cribbing-off-Dragon-Quest's-notes in existence. Which is a shame! This was a chance for Salvatore to build out a really cool new location while at the same time putting some much-needed narrative meat on the bones of the Forgotten Realms's under-explored religious practices, and he completely whiffed it. Characters from The Cleric Quintet go on to make appearances in Salvatore's other novels (Artemis Entreri brings The Crystal Shard to Cadderly to get help destroying it in Servant of the Shard, Ivan and Pikel Bouldershoulder eventually become fixtures at Mithril Hall, etc), but Salvatore would never attempt anything quite like The Cleric Quintet within Forgotten Realms ever again.
Conclusion
I feel the need to reiterate that despite the ridiculous wordcount of this post, R. A. Salvatore hits a lot more frequently than he misses. It's just that things that are disappointing or problematic are often a lot more interesting to talk about at length than things that are okay-to-good! If nothing else, I hope this series of posts has given you a good sense of Salvatore's strengths, weaknesses, and his place in the grand pantheon of the Forgotten Realms series. Feel free to leave questions or comments if you think there's something I missed - later on in this series I'd like to do a post or two briefly revisiting already-covered subjects.
However, I'm more than ready to be finished with Salvatore for now. Next up: rather than jumping right into another deep-dive on a specific author's contributions, we'll instead have a pair of posts looking at the Avatar trilogy and its two follow-up novels. These books are extremely notable, not only for being primarily concerned with exploring the Dungeons & Dragons cosmology in some genuinely pretty interesting ways, but also for being the Forgotten Realms series' first-ever linewide crossover event that significantly changed the setting's status quo! Look forward to it!