Servant of the Shard
is meant to be the first book in a series of three books, which is why I was
perplexed that the very first word of the prologue is ‘he’ like it assumes some
kind of prior knowledge to something that has happened before the story has started. In fact, the
entire opening of the book reads like this. So much so that I did a little
research into the author and discovered that this trilogy is preceded by five
other series’, set in the same world, that follow on from each other.
My main issue with this is that if you are going to have
several series that follow on from each other, there should be a brief summary
in the beginning of the book to inform the uninformed reader of anything they
need to know to enjoy the story. Stephen King did this with his epic fantasy, The Dark Tower and it majorly helped me,
especially when I waited a few months before reading the next book in the
series.
Another issue with reading this as a first book is that there
are a lot of characters with weird fantastical names and they are all
introduced at the same time. This made life very confusing for me. I am only a
simple minded man and to accommodate lots of new names at the same time was
very challenging for me.
By page 6 of the 369 page fantasy extravaganza I had finally
established who everyone was and their place in the world (no easy task,) and
could move on to bashing the narrative. There is overdone dialogue description
where the author over emphasises the calmness of one character’s talking. Had
there been a preamble detailing the previous books and this character’s
specific traits, this might not have been necessary. However the phasing of, ‘he
asked calmly – too calmly,’ is a lazy way of describing the difference in
character.
Page 17 is littered with over written sentences, one such
example being, ‘taking no obvious note of her arrival at all.’ This style
carries on throughout the novel, so much that I stopped making note of anything
after page 24.
There were two other things that bugged me before this point
(bad things happen in twos in seems.) ‘Life in the Dark Lane’ is the title of
chapter two and while this is clichéd, it is also out of context in this
particular fantasy where cars do not exist.
On page 24, one paragraph is written from the perspective of
two different characters which again makes for confusing reading as well as
poor layout and sentence structure.
After this point I stopped making notes, put all my issues
with the story aside and discovered that the book actually gets better as it
goes along. Salvatore has got a lot of skill when it comes to writing complex
action sequences. Even though there is a lot going on, they are quite easy to
follow and he manages to build suspense without foreshadowing future events or
character death.
Also as a final note, I am pleased that the book actually
features a crystal shard which uses its holders as servants. Finally, we have a
book with an appropriate title!
Servant of the Shard by
R.A. Salvatore was published by Wizards of the Coast in 2000. RRP £5.99 (Amazon
Paperback)
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