Review: Scott Fitzgerald Gray's Clearwater Dawn
Rating: 4 out of 5
Date: 09 18, 2011
Clearwater Dawn is a book I really wanted to love. It has lovely cover art, the description sounds exciting, and the prose is fluid and almost poetic in places. There was just so much potential here, but I feel that on the whole this first book in a projected series failed to live up to it all.The story follows one Chriani, an apprentice bodyguard of sorts. There is a fairly complex military structure going on here, so it is difficult to place him exactly on the scale, but he's near the bottom and serving directly under a man near the very top. Anyhow, his master is killed, which opens the doorway to an entire conspiracy that threatens to claim not only Chriani's life but the life of the Princess Lauresa and the High Prince Chanist-or does it? There are a lot of twists and turns in the plot here, and Chriani spends more than half the book either defying the orders of authority or nearly dead as a result of his defiance.Despite how that sounds, this is not a book that trips from action-packed moment to action-packed moment. One of the biggest drawbacks I felt was the amount of exposition that slows the story down continually. This is most notable in the first ten to twenty percent of the novel, and is a reason why I almost did not pick this one up after sampling. While it does not necessarily take very long for anything to start happening, it seems like forever because of the amount of back story the reader is constantly forced to slog through. That is the chief of my complaints here, though.The plot itself is straightforward and could have been almost too linear were it not for some good twists that come later on. Mr. Gray does a fine job of throwing out red herrings, and does so convincingly enough that one is easily drawn into Chriani's way of thinking, missing the truth because believing the lie is so much easier. The astute reader-or the reader familiar with mystery novels-may be able to figure out the truth of things before Chriani does, as the clues are there, but again I think Mr. Gray has done a fine job in shielding the truth and holding revelations nicely in reserve for the climax.After the enormous amount of exposition, the greatest issue I had with the reading of this novel is the names. Many of them are just too familiar, and after the first chapter it all sort of blurred together. The result was that I ultimately could not follow much of the back story, being constantly confused as to who was who and which nation was which. This does not affect the plot so much, however, as the only primary characters with similar names are Chriani (the hero) and Chanist (the aforementioned High Prince). Still, even though the primary plot was not weighed down by similar-sounding names, it would have been nice to follow the back story more easily, especially since there is just so much of it.Lastly, the characters themselves are all mostly believable, and they all have their secrets. While the back story is difficult to grab hold of, I think it's very clear that there is a whole host of history that is influencing the present. Rare are the fantasy novels that do so good a job at showing the present as a result of the past. The characters bear their burdens, shielding secrets from each other, even from those they trust the most, and this creates some wonderful tension and dramatic irony throughout. It can get a bit frustrating, and I sometimes wanted to shout at Chriani for one reason or another, but I was always reminded that his behaviour is a result of his past and not simply random. The third-person narrative is told exclusively from Chriani's perspective, which is an aid to the mystery-type nature of the plot, but does also leave me feeling I'd like to have known more about a few of the other characters who, as a result, were not so fully fleshed out as he.At the end of the day, Clearwater Dawn is a decent distraction. The writing is consistently crisp and evocative, and the plot should keep you on the edge of your seat throughout. The novel is hampered by some almost unforgivable issues (in my opinion), and so it is with great difficulty that I arrive at a value judgement out of five stars. Some of the problems could irreparably cripple a lesser book, but the climax redeems in this case. It is a true saying that we remember endings more clearly than beginnings, and in this case the tight conclusion of Clearwater Dawn makes up nicely for any shortfalls that precede it.