Author<\/strong> – R.A. Salvatore<\/a><\/p>\n Hardcover<\/strong> It’s funny how perspectives change. Back in high school, when I first discovered R.A. Salvatore’s DemonWars<\/strong> series, I was an instant fan. I loved his personal take on fantasy, drawing endearing characters through hard situations that really allowed the reader to get close. Layered on top of this were the interesting world of Corona and a unique gemstone-based magic system, both of which resonated with my younger self. Mortalis<\/strong>, the fourth novel in the cycle, still stands as one of the most emotionally powerful novels I’ve read.<\/p>\n Second to Mortalis<\/strong> is The Highwayman<\/strong>, a formerly standalone novel set in Corona, the world featured in the DemonWars<\/strong> cycle. It features Bransen Garibond, a young cripple who, through circumstances only available in a work of fantasy, gains full mastery over his formerly palsied body. Bransen’s struggles through the novel, as he faced a world full of rejection and misery, were a joy to watch.<\/p>\n Needless to say, when I first caught wind of The Ancient<\/strong>, the first in a new Corona based series called The Saga of the First King<\/strong>, I was excited. Any further explorations of Corona, a world where Salvatore was not confined by the rules of Dungeons and Dragons<\/strong>, were always welcome; doubly so when they featured one of my favourite characters written by the author. I eagerly dove into the novel when it arrived in my hands, will to be lost again in Corona, but almost immediately I knew something was different. Something was wrong. The Ancient<\/strong> is nowhere near the level of its predecessors; it fact it shares many of the pitfalls that plague Salvatore’s other<\/em> series, The Legend of Drizzt<\/strong>. Bransen himself is still and interesting character who struggles to escape from one crippled persona, The Stork, but must also be sure not to become overwhelmed by the cocky swagger of he ultra-capable Highwayman. Underneath this all, smothered by these two overbearing personas, is the true Bransen Garibond, and it’s truly a shame that he’s so deeply buried. Throughout The Highwayman<\/strong> we watched Bransen grow and struggle, but in The Ancient<\/strong> this side of his personality is basically relegated to the three interludes – first-person chapters, written as though diary entries, preluding the start of each Act of the novel – which had me wondering if perhaps the story wouldn’t have been better off narrated by Bransen in a first person point-of-view.<\/p>\n Many of the problems stem from the fact that this short novel (384 pages in hardcover) has a lot<\/em> of point-of-view (POV) characters, literally a dozen or so characters by my count. Now, even masters of POV (George Martin, for example) would have trouble juggling this many POVs in a novel twice as long, and Salvatore is no master of multiple POVs. To compound upon this problem, Salvatore has the tendency to skip between POVs mid-chapter with absolutely no context. For instance a block of text may begin with a few paragraphs from Bransen’s POV, switch to the POV of another character for a few paragraphs, and then switch back to Bransen, all in the span on a page or two. It’s often jarring and and held me back from giving myself over to believe in the secondary characters that share so much space with Bransen.<\/p>\n And this leads to the greatest flaw in the novel: a complete lack of consequence. Bransen’s overall quest to find his father and find a permanent solution to his ailed body is arbitrarily shuffled to the side early in the novel and instead replaced by a typical baddie-wants-to-wipe-out-the-world story, something we’ve seen dozens of times in Salvatore’s work alone. This plot admittedly moves at a great clip, never resting on its laurels, and is filled with terrific combat; but these are things that readers come to expect from Salvatore. The real problem is that none of it really seems to matter. The Highwayman is just too perfect – the reader never really<\/em> fears that he won’t succeed and save the day. On top of this, as I alluded to earlier, the other characters just aren’t interesting enough to care about.<\/p>\n It’s obvious that Tor is banking heavily on the success of The Ancient<\/strong> and further novels in The Saga of the First King<\/strong> (you should have seen the press kit they sent out….) The question is wether it will ever achieve a Drizzt-like level of success and serialization? I doubt it, The Legend of Drizzt<\/strong> is an anomaly that has the whole weight of Dungeons and Dragons<\/strong> behind it, and I honestly I hope it doesn’t happen. The Ancient<\/strong> looks distressingly like a attempt to strip the meat from the Corona novels in an attempt to position them as a novel-a-year serial, each novel akin to another season in an unending Soap Opera or another issue in a series of comic books.<\/p>\n As a fan of the DemonWar<\/strong> novels, it saddens me to see the new direction for this series and I can only hope that we see the return of the dense tales and strong world building from earlier volumes. If this isn’t the case, I regret that my interest in the series will be wane dramatically. Salvatore already has a strong, successful serialized series in The Legend of Drizzt<\/strong> and I’ll hate to see the Corona novels lose what made them special in the first place. Don’t let me down, SalvaTor<\/strong>e!<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" The Ancient Author – R.A. Salvatore Hardcover Page Count: 384 pages Publisher: Tor Books Release Date: March 4, 2008 ISBN-10: 0765317893 ISBN-13: 978-0765317896 It’s funny how perspectives change. Back in high school, when I first discovered R.A. Salvatore’s DemonWars series, I was an instant fan. I loved his personal take on fantasy, drawing endearing characters… Read more »<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":40,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"spay_email":"","footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":""},"categories":[11],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-149","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-reviews"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"yoast_head":"\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n
\nPage Count<\/strong>: 384 pages
\nPublisher<\/strong>: Tor Books
\nRelease Date<\/strong>: March 4, 2008
\nISBN-10<\/strong>: 0765317893
\nISBN-13<\/strong>: 978-0765317896<\/p>\n
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\nOne of the most frustrating\/disappointing things about The Ancient<\/strong> is the obvious serialization of The Highwayman character and the early world of Corona. It strongly looks as though Salvatore (and probably more importantly his publisher, Tor) are hoping to turn this into another instance of the Drizzt novels – an endless stream of stories, with only a vague overall initiative, centered around the travails of a particularly charismatic protagonist. Now, there’s nothing inherently wrong with this style of storytelling, but it’s distressing to see Salvatore take this series in such an unfulfilling direction.<\/p>\n