In my eternal pursuit of the ideal fantasy stories, I frequently need to stop and address what fantasy should not be. Unfortunately, this is synonymous with what most modern fantasy is.
Starless Night fits the bill.
Starless Night is the second in the Legacy of the Drow series, which itself is lost somewhere in a long series of glorified Dungeons and Dragons fan-fiction by R.A. Salvatore, Wizards of the Coast's most lucrative writer. For those not in the know, a "drow" is a dark elf in the universe of D&D, who inhabits an underground realm and who is generally a crafty and evil son of a gun. Most of Salvatore's books center around Drizzt, a drow who resents his heritage and embodies all things virtuous as he fights for the good of pretty much anyone who comes his way and wants to kill "bad guys." Oh, and he's also the best swordsman on earth.
These tiny tidbits are basically all you need to know to read Starless Night, even though it's the second in a series. My excuses for reading it are weak: I own a copy, and I try my darndest to read anything that falls onto my bookshelf. I'll probably finish the whole box set of four, griping all the way.
In Starless Night, Drizzt makes his way back to the Underdark, the home of the drow, to confront his past and to put himself in danger so that his friends (an elf, a man, and a dwarf! (and a hobbit rip-off)) are spared the ire of his distant relatives. Now, in spite of everything I hated about this book, the Underdark is pretty cool. It's a series of maze-like catacombs that are so expansive that they house entire civilizations. While nearly every fantasy book employs some such device (I'm no exception), Salvatore devotes a lot of well-spent time to establishing the complex ecosystem that has evolved in a place without light. All of his creepy-crawlies, bigger monsters, and sentient humanoids have adapted some form of infrared vision, acute hearing, or way of moving silently. Realistic natural selection aside, it's pretty well fleshed out.
And that's about the only aspect I admired. The rest of it falls under canned fantasy tropes that do worse than simply clog up the story. They actively make it worse. For example:
-Friendship. In some form or another, friendship has been passed on through legend as an indicator of loyalty. Just think of the bonds formed around King Arthur's Round Table. One reason it survives as a trope of fantasy is that fiction concerned with realism often also shuns ideas that espouse value judgments. Postmodernism loves deconstruction. However, another reason is that friendship can be a really cheap motivator, especially when it isn't supported, as in this case. Drizzt and his friends are almost as big of jackasses as their enemies, and he rarely spends time thinking about why he's chosen the side that he has. He hates the dark elves for their cruelty, but even Cattie-brie, the other main protagonist of this story, kills dozens of people in this book alone. Yet Drizzt wants to protect her innocence.
-Drizzt is the best fighter in the world, but his fight scenes are ridiculous. Salvatore loves describing sword fights. This means that Drizzt takes an average of two or three pages, and sometimes many more, to defeat any enemy he comes across. I have two problems with this. First, if he's so incredible, wouldn't it be easy for him to beat most of these Storm Trooper-esque characters? I could understand a prolonged fight with someone who's close to his level, but not with the nameless soldiers added only for action sequences. That kind of trope doesn't work in book format. Second, and this takes it a bit beyond what I originally said, why is everyone in this story defined by the way they fight each other? I'd prefer if they had, well, personalities, or perhaps at least interests other than death. This problem wouldn't bother me so much if it were limited to D&D fan-fiction like this book, but it's so pervasive that people tend to think that violence is an exclusive staple of fantasy.
-The magic makes no contextual sense. Writers like G.K. Chesterton and C.S. Lewis have understood that magic in a story needs to indicate a cosmic pattern beyond what the individual characters can understand. In Starless Night, magic indicates a pattern of "this character wants a fancy new way to kill people." Most of their magic indicates something of human design; the writer creates it as a plot device in the same way a factory creates a part to increase production, but which means nothing on its own. It's flashy but empty.
There are many more things wrong with this book, but these are the main issues that pervade modern fantasy and diminish its teaching value. It bothers me also because I remember The Highwayman, also written by Salvatore, to be quite good. All in all, I would not recommend this book or any of the Dark Elf series.
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