(++++) ALL OVER THE PLACE

The Way of the Drow, Book 1: Starlight Enclave. By R.A. Salvatore. Harper Voyager. $27.99.

     To see how amazingly multifaceted R.A. Salvatore’s tales of Drizzt Do’Urden have become since The Crystal Shard, Salvatore’s first published novel, in 1988, it is only necessary to read the cover of Starlight Enclave. Above the book’s title appear the words “The Legend of Drizzt.” Below the title are the words “Book 1 of The Way of the Drow.” And at the very bottom of the cover, beneath Salvatore’s name, are the words “Dungeons and Dragons.” So within the world of Dungeons and Dragons, there exists The Legend of Drizzt, and within that, there is a new trilogy, of which this book is the first volume. Thus, this single cover pretty much encapsulates the landscape and realms of some three-dozen predecessors. All that before even opening the book!

     And after opening the book, readers will discover that Salvatore here embarks on an expansion and, to some degree, redefinition of all those earlier realms and landscapes. He does so as part of a dual-focus narrative that moves simultaneously in two very different directions – not always elegantly, but always purposefully. The story starts in an ultra-rare time of peace, two years after a demon uprising has been put down. Peace means rumblings of unease, of course, and that is one story line here: Jarlaxle, the Salvatore character most adept at using words as weapons, has picked up a sense of enough dangerous discontent to know that a civil war among the major houses of the city of Menzobarranzan may be imminent. If that is to occur, Jarlaxle must ensure that his allies are as well-equipped as possible for the conflict. And that means that one ally in particular – Zaknafein, Drizzt’s father – should have access to a notorious magical sword called Khazid’hea. The problem is that the sword, colloquially and aptly referred to as “Cutter,” is nowhere to be found, and the last person to use it, Doum’wielle Armgo, is somewhere in the unexplored, frozen wastes of the north, a region without night where frost giants, polar worms and other dangers abound. This sounds like the recipe for yet another of the many quests that permeate Salvatore’s books – and so it is, with Jarlaxle and Zaknafein joined by adept assassin Artemis Entreri and by Drizzt’s wife, Cattie-brie.

     Cattie-brie’s presence is one thing that ties the conflict-oriented adventure to Drizzt’s own, which is an inward one – the sort of journey on which Drizzt has increasingly been embarking in recent Salvatore books. Cattie-brie and Drizzt now have a young daughter, known as Brienne or (a bit confusingly) Brie, and Drizzt decides that he needs to take the toddler on a spiritual quest to the Monastery of the Yellow Rose, where Drizzt himself long ago overcame the darker side of his nature and learned to transcend pretty much everything, mortality and physicality included. Drizzt’s plan leads to some conflict with Cattie-brie – unfortunately not explored as thoroughly as it could have been – and then to Drizzt and Brienne heading for Drizzt’s spiritual community after Drizzt promises that Cattie-brie will later have her own chance to influence Brienne in Cattie-brie’s preferred direction (presumably in another book). So Starlight Enclave is a book of dual travels, one for external, conflict-ridden and mystery-solving purposes, the other for internal, what-does-it-all-mean reasons. The two tales are only tenuously related, and transitions between them are matter-of-fact and sometimes less than smooth; but because the primary characters here (except for Brienne) are already well-established, the interactions among them are handled very effectively and with Salvatore’s usual sure hand. And this applies whether or not readers have thoroughly immersed themselves in Salvatore’s books – it is even possible, although a bit difficult, to read Starlight Enclave without ever having read any prior Drizzt novels, and still make sense of the story and those within it. Salvatore expertly introduces backstory here, as in many prior novels, and also focuses on a kind of philosophical underpinning to the Drizzt tales that, while scarcely as profound as he (or at least his ardent fans) believe it to be, does raise some interesting questions and even manages to answer a few here and there.

     One thing Salvatore tries to do in Starlight Enclave, with modest if not complete success, is to reposition the drow – the central elven characters of all the Forbidden Realms books – as being multifaceted rather than evil-with-exceptions (Drizzt being the most-notable exception). Salvatore has said he is doing this for racial reasons, because having “dark elves” be essentially bad is no longer societally acceptable. So now he is evolving the drow into three groups: Udadrow, the familiar evil ones, corrupted from what was presumably purity and goodness by the demon Lolth; Lorendrow, jungle dwellers perfectly attuned to earth and the environment and all that stuff; and Aevendrow, whose realm in the far north is the place to which Jarlaxle and his band travel in this novel. The division is clunkier than most of Salvatore’s plot lines, but, thank goodness, he has said he does not intend to rewrite earlier books to make them conform to the small, narrow, ugly, dark, joyless woke world championed by the loudest and dumbest voices on social media. Starlight Enclave is, as a whole, effective on its own terms – although its whet-the-readers’-appetite-for-the-next-installment conclusion is a touch on the irritating side. It has enough action and enough philosophy to keep existing fans of Salvatore’s novels engaged, and enough sense of fantasy-world history to intrigue people who happen upon the novel without previously having met Drizzt and explored the numerous characters and events that revolve around him.