After three collections of books from Salvatore (The Dark Elf Trilogy, The Icewind Dale Trilogy and the Legacy Of The Drow collection) I borrowed The Cleric Quintet from a friend. My hopes weren't exactly soaring. After all, I liked the previous books, but they weren't brilliant. Salvatore writes gaming fiction: fun gaming fiction, but still gaming fiction. On the other hand, Drizzt Do'Urden, the main character of the aforementioned books wouldn't star in this quintet. So maybe the books would deliver something new?
The author explains in his foreword why Drizzt was (temporarily) set aside. He began writing on the quintet soon after The Icewind Dale Trilogy and The Dark Elf Trilogy. He and his editors decided that "[they] had seen enough of the drow ranger." He first proposed a series about a monk, which was rejected because "we had entered Second Edition, in which monks had gone the way of demons and devils." After that, he was told to write a series about a cleric.
Salvatore then wrote the five books constituting The Cleric Quintet: Canticle, In Sylvan Shadows, Night Masks, The Fallen Fortress and The Chaos Curse.
Note: As always, I did try to avoid spoilers, but I wasn't entirely successful in this regard. Most importantly, you may want to skip the section "Plot".
Production
The edition I'm reviewing here is a one-volume, paperback edition. Let me tell you: try to get the hardcover version, as the book is far too thick for a softcover and gets damaged easily. The cover (featuring a red dragon carrying four characters across the Snowflake Mountains) is by David Horne. It's a bit awkwardly drawn (I miss a sense of motion) but at least it features an actual scene from the book.
The editing could have been tighter. I spotted quite a few typos, and a lot of missing opening quotes.
A nice thing is that each book has a map of the environment in which it takes place. Four times this is the surroundings of the Snowflake Mountains, once (in Night Masks) it's a city map of Carradoon. Unfortunately, the maps are not on the first and / or last page, so finding them requires a lot of page-turning.
Setting
The tales take place in the Forgotten Realms, a high-magic setting. That's all you need to know to be able to read the story. (And if you didn't pick up the "high magic" part before reading, it gets plenty obvious in a short while.) Almost no references are made to Realms-specific events or people, and they are adequately explained. For example, there are some references to the "Time of Troubles" but an explanation follows shortly.
Overall, I found the surroundings in which the stories take place bland. Where I previously was treated with a magical college, vast tundras and, best of all, the Underdark, I now get a forest, an ill-defined mountain range and a monastery. Never does it spark my interest, and this adventure could easily have taken place anywhere in the Realms, or in most fantasy settings for that matter.
Characters
The author again creates some interesting characters, and again, the main character isn't one of them. He tries to make the cleric Cadderly the centre of the story. Of course, in a technical way he is, for it's his spiritual quest that drives the series. Unfortunately, I never "connected" with Cadderly, and his motivations are not described very well. The biggest problem here is that Cadderly quickly gets very powerful. At first, he is a rather weak character that has to rely on his wits and his friends to survive. However, he is soon a very competent person.
More intriguing are his companions. First we have the dwarven brothers Ivan and Pikel Bouldershoulder, the cooks-made-warriors. However, why does Salvatore always make his dwarves stupid? They barrel through the story like so many doors, providing comic relief in a fake Scottish dialect. Bah. I know, the "stupid Scottish dwarven warrior" is a strong stereotype, but Salvatore can do more. It's a pity, for one of the brothers, Pikel, actually has a nice hook: he wants to be a druid. Now, why would a dwarf want to become a druid and how would he go about it? Good questions to which we never learn the answers. It doesn't help that Pikel is almost mute and only makes R2-D2-like noises such as "Oo oo!" and "Oi!"
The token female this time around is Danica, a fierce monk. She loves Cadderly, and she always will. Period. She's got cool powers, but her main role is to provide a counterpoint to Cadderly. Unfortunately, she gets as much character development as the rock through which she smashes her head at one point: that is, not an awful lot.
The villains, on the whole, are more interesting. I'm not talking about the eeeevil wizard Aballister, a run-of-the-mill control-the-world mastermind. No, I mean the "second tier" villains. Aballister's familiar Druzil, for example, is a sneaky and conniving behind-the-scenes devil and more interesting than his master. The wizard's lieutenant Dorigen goes through more (believable) changes than almost any other character. My favourite, however, is the mercenary killer Ghost, who's the most inventive use of magical items I've seen. Rounding out the roster is the morally weak cleric Kierkan Rufo, who is ensnared by Druzil and his own lack of convictions.
Plot
The five books tell five different plots that are connected. The main character (and most of his adventuring party) stays the same, and most of the villains appear in more books. In book two till five, there are some paragraphs somewhere in the first few chapters that recall the events of the previous book.
The overarching plot is okay, but the separate stories are a bit ho-hum, if not to say "predictable." Let me try to give you the basics:
In Canticle, we meet Cadderly and his friends in the Edificant Library, a monastery devoted to Deneir and Oghma. The Library gets attacked by evil forces that use a potent potion to create chaos in the orderly realm. This is properly my favourite book in the series.
In Sylvan Shadows tells about the attack of a large force of goblinoids on the elves in Shilmista. Big battle in which Cadderly and company help, not much more on the surface. However, the events in this book have profound impact on Cadderly, and lay a firm base for the three remaining books.
The tale picks up in Night Masks. After the trials in Shilmista, Cadderly is now residing in Carradoon and tries to make sense of the Tome of Universal Harmony. He is attacked by, duh, the Night Masks, a group of highly trained assassins.
The cleric, of course, survives, and decides to take the fight to the villains' stronghold, the titular Fallen Fortress. But first Cadderly takes a detour via a red wyrm's lair. Huh what? (The cover illustrates a scene from this book.)
The final book closes the circle when a remainder of The Chaos Curse, used in book 1, causes a great undead army to assault the Edificant Library. It's a fun book and nicely ties up the remaining threads.
Writing Style
Salvatore is known for his descriptions of battle scenes and he doesn't disappoint in that regard here. A large, large amount of the word count is devoted to combat in various sizes — from man-to-man to battlefields. Fortunately, the author made the fights more diverse. Instead of endless bouts of swordplay, we here see a variety of combat styles. The unarmed style of Danica, for example, is alternated with the brute-force rage of the Bouldershoulders and the bow-and-arrows-extravaganza of elvish archers.
The remainder of the book is left to flowery descriptions of the environment and some of the inner thoughts of the main characters.
Conclusion
When I finished reading The Cleric Quintet I was a bit disappointed with it. Somehow it was missing something. It wasn't the writing style. I was already quite familiar with it, and Salvatore strays little and even improves on it. Nor were it the characters — most of Salvatore's casts are unremarkable, and this collection actually delivers some great villains. It's probably a combination of several things: an uninspiring main character that never really connects, bland surroundings, episodic plotting, and a bunch of missed opportunities. On the other hand, the book is still fun to read and has some great scenes. All in all: a 3 out of 5 for both Style and Substance.
