Reading roundup (Eragon) and some links
Not much of a roundup, as it's just one book, but it got long enough on its own:
15. Christopher Paolini, Eragon -- heh heh. Well. It's a badly written book that reads like bad fanfic and is full of cliches. The rest of it is actually not as bad as the prologue, so after my initial reaction of horror I kind of even got into it -- not out of any desire to find out what happens next (that is pretty easy to predict on one's own), but out of curiosity as to whether it ever got any better. . The plot is not exactly startlingly original, and the character development is decidedly meh (but Eragon is not *quite* as much of a Gary-Stu as he could've been from the beginning -- that comes towards the end of the book; small favors and all that), but it's actually the writing that has the worst negative impact.
My two biggest problems -- or, rather, most omnipresent ones -- are pacing and narrative voice consistency. The pacing is... really weird. It's like Paolini hasn't yet figured out that you can *skip* over things that aren't important -- you don't have to spend a sentence on supper if nothing happens at supper. Sure, it's better than spending a paragraph on supper, but it does not need to be there at all. Possibly, it's not trusting the reader enough to fill in the blanks? (Or maybe these pointless bits are supposed to be doing something, presumably subtle, but fail so utterly that I can't even discern what it might be?) At the same time, actions scenes don't feel long enough -- the "so he noticed he had been flying for hours" just totally came out of nowhere and made me go "bzuh?". I could see him blacking out or slipping into some kind of almost-trance state, but a boy terrified for his family flying on his dragon for the first time does not just tune out for a few hours -- and the text does. The end result is that the actual *action* is overwhelmed by the Infodumps o' Doom.
Combined with the unimportant stuff being left it and the important stuff being sort of skimmed over, there's also the weird placement of dialogue, which totally disrupts what pacing there is. I suspect that the insertion of little bits of every-day dialogue is supposed to ground the novel, make it feel homely or something, or possibly give a respite from the sense of danger/destiny/etc. (which, incidentally, is never actually there, so the reader does not *require* such a respite). But it's just *weird*. There Eragon is thinking about his injured uncle, and then you get, "Would you like some pie?" "Yes, thank you." Just like that, and then back to angsting. And the surrounding writing doesn't set the dialogue appropriately -- you don't get the sense that Eragon is startled by the question, or feels some kind of, I don't know, irony, guilt, detachment, sense of the surreal -- anything -- when he hears and speaks those words. Similarly, extended dialogue exchanges end incredibly abruptly and totally unnaturally:
Brom: Dragons, Elves, riders, blah blah blah.
Eragon: So, how do you know so much?
Brom: [mysterious and/or ominous and/or deliberately shifty remarks.]
Eragon: Jerk. OK, let's go to sleep now.
So, that's the pacing. The narrative voice is just as bad. That was actually what so put me off the prologue. Who is narrating the damn thing? It is omniscient, I suppose, but it's too vague even for that -- who is observing the scene? We get some internal monologue from the Shade -- but we are told that he looked almost human -- whose point of reference is that? Who is it that thinks of the Urgals as "monsters", as the prologue calls them ("monsters" is not a transparent kind of word, so *somebody* must be there in the narrator's head). It reads as if the intent was to narrate the prlogue from the Shade's point of view, but it was badly done, because the references used seem at odds with the implied narrator. Instead, you get the feel that you're hearing somebody recount something they saw in the movies.
Narration in the rest of the thing is slightly better, but still not very good. It's omniscient, but presumably tight omniscient, with Eragon as focus -- so who is describing him as he first appears? And words keep popping up that don't seem to belong in the subcreated world -- "friar" (what Brom looks like) -- do they even have religion? monks?; "cadaver" -- would a village kid know a technical word like that?; "dervish"; others.
There's also the combination of these two things, pacing and voice, because the language changes all the time, from high-flown faux-Tolkien fantasy-speak to fairly normal (and often awkward) speech. And it does this in both narrative and dialogue (of a single character) for no. frickin'. reason. You can't sustain writing in Tolkien mode? Probably for the best. But pick your battles. Make sure it's the right bits that have high-flown language, not random descriptions of the hunt...
Also, I'm definitely not a prescriptivist, and pretty tolerant when it comes to "breaking" certain stylistic rules, but, god, this thing was so full of passive voice it was almost unreadable! And I normally don't notice things like that.
Of course, there are huge problems with logic. This doesn't bother me as much as it probably should because I can readily understand and excuse them. If you don't have a very good feeling for how the world works -- especially things like how much weight a person can carry, how an evil tyrant actually worth his salt is likely to behave, etc. etc., then you write things as they occur to you and often, in retrospect, those things will be stupid. I've certainly had that happen with things I had written when I was 15, or even 17, so it's no surprise. But then, there are also internal contradictions, sometimes in the space of just a couple of pages, and I find that a bit harder to understand. Could this have really been missed on a re-read / editing? Or did he just hope no-one would notice???
The thing that bothers me most out of the logic/plot holes is Brom's stupid insistence on secrecy. There is *no* reason for him not to tell Eragon who he really is -- it accomplishes *nothing*. And it's used to maintain artificial tension between them at first, then create angst for Eragon as he tries to eavesdrop on Brom's conversations, and then makes Eragon look like even more of an idiot than previously when he confesses that he never suspected that Brom (the guy who knew way more about dragons than a storyteller had any business knowing, including how to make a dragon saddle, and how they impacted their rider, and knew all kinds of magic and swordfighting, and had all kinds of mysterious underground contacts -- that Brom) was actually a Rider. It's just stupid, Stupid, STUPID!
So, yeah... the characters. Eragon the one fated to resurrect a noble order though he doesn't know it yet. Brom the Walking Infodump / Dragon Encyclopaedia. Eragon, as I briefly mentioned above, is certainly a Gary-Stu, but not as bad as he could have been, at least at first. Sure, there's a bit of wish-fulfillment going on there -- contact with the dragon makes him stronger, faster, smarter than mere mortals, with everyone else being oh-so-impressed by his talents and leaps of logic (like tracking Ra'zac through the oil trail (and speaking of the oil -- did someone just learn about Hydrofluoric Acid in chemistry class? Because that's what it made me think of, immediately, but I'm a touch obsessed with HF and, when *I* first learned about it in chemistry class, immediately put it in the Magnum Opus as a deadly poison) and amazing future and everything. But for all that he's not infallible -- I like that he does stupid things and gets called on them by Brom and especially Saphira. It's refreshing, while it's happening. But then he gets to the hidden city thing and is bathed in universal admiration (I was going "WTF!" through the entirety of the "Bless the Child, Argetlam" chapter) and starts annoying me considerably more. A few things I liked, pre-total Stuification -- Eragon's legs getting rubbed raw in his first flight, the sword not matching the dragon's colour -- basically, all the things that went counter to the Mary-Sueness. Um, yeah, those two were about it.
I did like Murtagh OK -- he appears to be the closest thing to an actual character this book has, though sadly that's not saying much. I called the "Morzan's son" thing fairly early on (and, certainly, the deus ex machina interruptions every time he got as far as "My father--" in his attempts to explain this to Eragon, are highly cringeworthy). The thing that disappointed me the most though was that having a good character be the son of a bad character is an opportunity for subtlety and conflict and shades of gray -- but that opportunity was totally ignored. Of course Morzan was shown as a monster through and through. Well, yes, he is the first of the Forsworn and a savage killer -- but he also has to nearly kill his toddler son in a drunken rage and also never loved Murtagh's mother. (Who, I'm assuming, is also Eragon's mother and the love of Brom's life, yes?) It would've been considerably more interesting if Morzan the monster was actually a devoted husband or a well-meaning, if rough, father.
But, alas. That wouldn't be black and white enough, clearly. (And, on the subject of Murtagh, I must note that, yeah, that out-of-the-blue fight scene between him and Our Hero was quite slashy. In a very flat cardboard way, just like everything else.)
Many, many people have written about the derivative nature of Eragon. And, yeah, the Star Wars and Tolkien fannishness is definitely showing. I'm guessing there's a bit of LeGuin there, too, in the "true names" concept, although it's used pretty crudely here. And then there are things that are maybe ripoffs and maybe homages. I'm pretty sure the mention of a "sorcerer's stone" is intentional homage/reference. The Weathertop/Argonath moment, with the ruined castle? Could go either way. And then we get the Elven song about a pair of lovers separated by the sea, and the fact that their names start with A and N don't have anything to do with Amroth and Nimrodel, I'm sure. (The song itself is atrocious, but at least it has the excuse of pretending to be an on-the-fly translation, and those things are damn hard, so I'm willing to cut it quite a bit of slack.) But actually, I'm actually perfectly willing to be forgiving in a lot of the broader rip-offs homages as well. Not just because I've wanted to play around in Middle-Earth and Earthsea too, or lift cool things from there for my own worldbuilding, but also because I've read fantasies that were not much less derivative than Eragon but still enjoyable nevertheless. The thing is, if you're going to rip off something, at least do it *well*. And Paolini totally doesn't...
There were several "I'm writing a novel!" moments -- scenes that are kind of neat but don't actually *do* anything -- neither reveal/develop character nor advance plot in any way. They're harmless, in the grander scheme of things, but probably should've been excised in editing. The whole thing with the witch (Angela) and trying to prove that toads are really frogs and therefore don't exist -- it's the kind of thing that would have seemed awfully clever and downright hilarious to my friend and me back when we were fifteen and cracking ourselves up by writing chapters with titles like "Stolen Salad Party," involving, if I recall, an Elven king's birthday party gone awry (don't ask...). There were some amusing lines stuck in just for cleverness's sake, like, "Always the scholar, aren't you?" "Not anymore. I'm afraid I've degenerated into a bibliophile." Of course, it is then overexplained. And I have to wonder whether that actually came from somewhere else, because I remember wanting to stick slightly adusted Wilde quotes into my own writing at around the same time.
Names and language (the two are connected) bothered me quite a lot. I don't expect a 19-year-old kid to be a Tolkien, with several fully made up languages to base the story on. But, come on! A little more effort. The "Ancient Language" and good chunks of Dwarvish and Urgals' language all sound too much alike -- and not in a derived-from-each-other way, in a lazy-writer way. The "Ancient Language" is largely pseudo-Germanic (or, I guess, Norse, according to Paolini, but I'm quite positive he's wrong -- not that I speak Norse, but I've heard and seen Icelandic written, which is pretty close, and -- no.) Er... why? The other bits look like random vowel insertions liberally scattered with umlauts and apostrophes. The words don't look like they go together in a single language.
Names are similarly disjointed. The villagers who are Eragon's family and neighbours are named: Garrow, Brom, Roran, Horst, Sloan, Alberich, Baldor, Gertrude. Now, Horst, Alberich, Baldor, Gertrude sound like Norse/Germanic names -- do they have a different background from the more English-sounding Garrow, Brom, and Sloan? Roran sounds like a generic fantasy name, like Eragon. And then there's Galbatorix, who sounds like a friend of Asterix and Obelix. Are these characters supposed to share a common culture? Have different backgrouns? It's not explained. Same with the dragon names -- none of the other names Brom mentions sound the least bit like they come from the same morpheme pool as "Saphira". Which just happens to sound like "sapphire", which just happens to be the colour of her scales. Look, I know how tough it is to change a character's name once you've settled on it, and maybe there's no need to -- though I haven't seen any other indication that in any other word there occurs the combination of "ph" pronounced as "f" -- but, hey, at least you could've thrown a few other loosely-gem-based names into the list. What about names like Angela (in a world that doesn't appear to include angels) or Solembum, whose name, in addition to making me giggle, seems to come from yet another totally different culture. And maybe those two are intentional, even -- the problem is, in the total mish-mash of names in the rest of the book, you can't tell.
And some of it's just *lazy*. The words "Ra'zac" (the Nazgul wannabees) and "Zar'roc" (the Rider sword) appear for the first time about a page apart. Do you notice how... they sound almost the same, only jumbled slightly? There are only that many sounds that you can make into names, but, dude, that's not even trying! That's just putting down on paper the first thing that pops into your mind -- because it's virtually the same as the last thing that popped into it -- and then never changing/noticing/caring.
Speaking of names, I'm quite convinced that "Eragon" originated as a typo for "dragon" that Paolini thought was cute. I know people have said they think it's too similar to "Aragorn", but that would have never occurred to me -- I pronounce "Aragorn" with an initial A as in "father", so perhaps that's why. Instead, every time I see that name I almost-read it as Estragon (from Waiting for Godot). Probably not a common worry for the target audience of Eragon, but damn distracting. And Alagaesia makes me think of "analgesic".
Another thing that bugged me -- not that this is at all uncommon in fantasy novels, but it was more crudely done here -- the bad guys all look nasty. Sloan the butcher is the first example of that; the Empire-loving traders in the tavern; the guy taking toll at the entrance to the first city Brom and Eragon visit looks like a troll. I was kind of impressed that the Twins were not outright hideous and just somewhat weird-looking -- but I suppose that's a functin of them being *clandestine* bad guys, at least somewhat.
One of the things I've seen Eragon praised for is that it tried to develop/make up for things that are common in fantasy that don't quite work / don't make sense. Given how shoddy and derivative most of it is, I assume this refers to things like the lengthy dumped-in explanations on how scrying works or doesn't work, magic duels, etc. And thing is, I kind of applaud the effort. But actually the "more explained" versions are equally flawed, and because they are a) "new" and b) draw your attention to it and make you think about it, the flaws actually stand out a lot more. Like, with the scrying. So, OK, it kinda sorta makes sense that you need to have seen before what you're scrying for, because you need to find it *somehow*. But if you don't know where they are, it seems counterintuitive that you would recognize their surroundings if you've seen them before if you're not expecting them to be there. What, each object has its own unique magical emission spectrum and having witnessed it once you can then "receive" it whenever you come into contact with that object by scrying? I suppose it's possible... but seems needlessly complicated. (My view of "scrying" is that you do need something you recognize to serve as the "focus", but once you've zoomed in on whatever it is, you see whatever's there, by -- if you wish to get technical -- light scatter around your object of focus, say. That doesn't matter, though.) My point is that Paolini's scrying is both odd and needlessly complicated, which doesn't make it better. And it leads me to ponder such questions as, if the person you're scrying for is wearing new clothes, does he appear naked? What if it's a woman who's gotten pregnant since you've seen her last, or just a landscape that's changed a lot due to flooding or an earthquake -- does the "seen it once" logic still work? Anyway...
Similarly, the magic duel thing. Supposedly, in this magic system, you need to enter your opponent's mind before you fight the magic duel, because otherwise you don't know what he is going to throw at you and it's mutually assured destruction. Eh? If you're already in his mind, why would you even bother with the flashy magic? That seems to be a fairly invasive and debilitating process for the victim, even when the victum is *not* resisting -- should just the fact that you've broken into someone's mind be enough to give you victory? Not to mention that if you can *fight* with magic, you can probably *shield* with magic, too. The system is not well enough developed to explain how, but raising walls of stone around yourself -- which seemingly you can do with a two word phrase -- would probably stop most things, eh?
It is a rather bad book. An understandably bad book, because, first time writer with nothing original to say. All the acknowledgement of people who helped him with the plot, streamline the pacing, and so forth are kind of disturbing -- if this is the final result, I'd hate to see what his original draft looked like. But actually nothing in the book is as bad as the self-satisfaction that comes through in Paolini's acknowledgement and excerpts from essays and interviews that I've seen. I could forgive the book -- but I have a much harder time forgiving him for thinking himself an Author of Literature.
A good deal more enjoyable than the actual book were kippurbird's sporking of Eragon, chapter-by-chapter, which can be found here. In fact, I think I only got through the last four chapters or so thanks to the lure of the sporkings.
After finishing the book, I had to go and check it against my list of things I don't want to see/wouldn't put in a fantasy novel (as gacked from limyaael).
1) Mary-Sue = check, in spades
2) Cardboard villains = check. We haven't even seen any of the main villaines except in third hand (flashback and as described by a non-POV character), but even Durza, who we do see first-hand, is pretty cardboard. There's some attempt at backstory, but it doesn't actually integrate with him being a villain, and it comes WAY too late.
3) Smart people who suddenly become total idiots because they're in love. Uh... there are no smart people here to begin with.
4) Puns that shouldn't work in non-English -- no attempt at puns, thank god.
5) Characters with very long names who don't get nicknames -- no long names, except for Galbatorix, who, OK, probably wouldn't have a nickname.
6) "Alien" societies that are essentially identical to human ones -- yeah, the dwarves seem extremely similar, and I'm guessing the Elves will be as well. Dragons not too alien either. So, check.
7) Communities with hive mind -- oh, YEAH! Check, check, check.
8) King-in-exile knowing how to rule without training -- Eragon is not a king-in-exile, but the suggestion that having a dragon makes him somehow a qualified leader of people is essentially the same thing. So, check.
9) One race recognized as clearly superior -- uh, yeah. The Elf-worship. Check.
10) Extended sequences of character learning to master magic -- there are actually no extended sequences of anything in Eragon, but, comparatively speaking, Eragon does spend a lot of time learning magic, including magic he doesn't actually need to use. So, check.
11) Sudden gods -- not so far, thank god.
So, tally = 7 of 11 present. Yeah...
**
Some ASOIAF art, found the same way I've found most of my favorite pieces/artists, actually -- by seeing details in icons and going in search of the artist credited. So:
By ~nejna on DeviantArt, two pictures showing the Red Wedding (uh... kind of bloody, as can be expected): here and here.
By *Gold-Seven, also on DeviantArt:
This might be my favorite Jaime, pity that he is not in colour.
She also has some very lovely LotR/Sil art, like Feanor's family, a very shiny Glorfindel (and this other guy), and some HP art as well. I found the whole gallery worth browsing.
**
Via discworld: Why can't gay Dwarves get married in Middle-Earth?
I have no firm opinion on whether gay Dwarves should be allowed to marry in an online RPG, but the article was a fun read. Actually my favorite quote from the whole articles is (from p.3, describing how the new Middle-Earth game strives for authenticity): "When fans complained on the message board about an erroneous squirrel color, Turbine promptly corrected the mistake." It's just so... LotR fans.
15. Christopher Paolini, Eragon -- heh heh. Well. It's a badly written book that reads like bad fanfic and is full of cliches. The rest of it is actually not as bad as the prologue, so after my initial reaction of horror I kind of even got into it -- not out of any desire to find out what happens next (that is pretty easy to predict on one's own), but out of curiosity as to whether it ever got any better. . The plot is not exactly startlingly original, and the character development is decidedly meh (but Eragon is not *quite* as much of a Gary-Stu as he could've been from the beginning -- that comes towards the end of the book; small favors and all that), but it's actually the writing that has the worst negative impact.
My two biggest problems -- or, rather, most omnipresent ones -- are pacing and narrative voice consistency. The pacing is... really weird. It's like Paolini hasn't yet figured out that you can *skip* over things that aren't important -- you don't have to spend a sentence on supper if nothing happens at supper. Sure, it's better than spending a paragraph on supper, but it does not need to be there at all. Possibly, it's not trusting the reader enough to fill in the blanks? (Or maybe these pointless bits are supposed to be doing something, presumably subtle, but fail so utterly that I can't even discern what it might be?) At the same time, actions scenes don't feel long enough -- the "so he noticed he had been flying for hours" just totally came out of nowhere and made me go "bzuh?". I could see him blacking out or slipping into some kind of almost-trance state, but a boy terrified for his family flying on his dragon for the first time does not just tune out for a few hours -- and the text does. The end result is that the actual *action* is overwhelmed by the Infodumps o' Doom.
Combined with the unimportant stuff being left it and the important stuff being sort of skimmed over, there's also the weird placement of dialogue, which totally disrupts what pacing there is. I suspect that the insertion of little bits of every-day dialogue is supposed to ground the novel, make it feel homely or something, or possibly give a respite from the sense of danger/destiny/etc. (which, incidentally, is never actually there, so the reader does not *require* such a respite). But it's just *weird*. There Eragon is thinking about his injured uncle, and then you get, "Would you like some pie?" "Yes, thank you." Just like that, and then back to angsting. And the surrounding writing doesn't set the dialogue appropriately -- you don't get the sense that Eragon is startled by the question, or feels some kind of, I don't know, irony, guilt, detachment, sense of the surreal -- anything -- when he hears and speaks those words. Similarly, extended dialogue exchanges end incredibly abruptly and totally unnaturally:
Brom: Dragons, Elves, riders, blah blah blah.
Eragon: So, how do you know so much?
Brom: [mysterious and/or ominous and/or deliberately shifty remarks.]
Eragon: Jerk. OK, let's go to sleep now.
So, that's the pacing. The narrative voice is just as bad. That was actually what so put me off the prologue. Who is narrating the damn thing? It is omniscient, I suppose, but it's too vague even for that -- who is observing the scene? We get some internal monologue from the Shade -- but we are told that he looked almost human -- whose point of reference is that? Who is it that thinks of the Urgals as "monsters", as the prologue calls them ("monsters" is not a transparent kind of word, so *somebody* must be there in the narrator's head). It reads as if the intent was to narrate the prlogue from the Shade's point of view, but it was badly done, because the references used seem at odds with the implied narrator. Instead, you get the feel that you're hearing somebody recount something they saw in the movies.
Narration in the rest of the thing is slightly better, but still not very good. It's omniscient, but presumably tight omniscient, with Eragon as focus -- so who is describing him as he first appears? And words keep popping up that don't seem to belong in the subcreated world -- "friar" (what Brom looks like) -- do they even have religion? monks?; "cadaver" -- would a village kid know a technical word like that?; "dervish"; others.
There's also the combination of these two things, pacing and voice, because the language changes all the time, from high-flown faux-Tolkien fantasy-speak to fairly normal (and often awkward) speech. And it does this in both narrative and dialogue (of a single character) for no. frickin'. reason. You can't sustain writing in Tolkien mode? Probably for the best. But pick your battles. Make sure it's the right bits that have high-flown language, not random descriptions of the hunt...
Also, I'm definitely not a prescriptivist, and pretty tolerant when it comes to "breaking" certain stylistic rules, but, god, this thing was so full of passive voice it was almost unreadable! And I normally don't notice things like that.
Of course, there are huge problems with logic. This doesn't bother me as much as it probably should because I can readily understand and excuse them. If you don't have a very good feeling for how the world works -- especially things like how much weight a person can carry, how an evil tyrant actually worth his salt is likely to behave, etc. etc., then you write things as they occur to you and often, in retrospect, those things will be stupid. I've certainly had that happen with things I had written when I was 15, or even 17, so it's no surprise. But then, there are also internal contradictions, sometimes in the space of just a couple of pages, and I find that a bit harder to understand. Could this have really been missed on a re-read / editing? Or did he just hope no-one would notice???
The thing that bothers me most out of the logic/plot holes is Brom's stupid insistence on secrecy. There is *no* reason for him not to tell Eragon who he really is -- it accomplishes *nothing*. And it's used to maintain artificial tension between them at first, then create angst for Eragon as he tries to eavesdrop on Brom's conversations, and then makes Eragon look like even more of an idiot than previously when he confesses that he never suspected that Brom (the guy who knew way more about dragons than a storyteller had any business knowing, including how to make a dragon saddle, and how they impacted their rider, and knew all kinds of magic and swordfighting, and had all kinds of mysterious underground contacts -- that Brom) was actually a Rider. It's just stupid, Stupid, STUPID!
So, yeah... the characters. Eragon the one fated to resurrect a noble order though he doesn't know it yet. Brom the Walking Infodump / Dragon Encyclopaedia. Eragon, as I briefly mentioned above, is certainly a Gary-Stu, but not as bad as he could have been, at least at first. Sure, there's a bit of wish-fulfillment going on there -- contact with the dragon makes him stronger, faster, smarter than mere mortals, with everyone else being oh-so-impressed by his talents and leaps of logic (like tracking Ra'zac through the oil trail (and speaking of the oil -- did someone just learn about Hydrofluoric Acid in chemistry class? Because that's what it made me think of, immediately, but I'm a touch obsessed with HF and, when *I* first learned about it in chemistry class, immediately put it in the Magnum Opus as a deadly poison) and amazing future and everything. But for all that he's not infallible -- I like that he does stupid things and gets called on them by Brom and especially Saphira. It's refreshing, while it's happening. But then he gets to the hidden city thing and is bathed in universal admiration (I was going "WTF!" through the entirety of the "Bless the Child, Argetlam" chapter) and starts annoying me considerably more. A few things I liked, pre-total Stuification -- Eragon's legs getting rubbed raw in his first flight, the sword not matching the dragon's colour -- basically, all the things that went counter to the Mary-Sueness. Um, yeah, those two were about it.
I did like Murtagh OK -- he appears to be the closest thing to an actual character this book has, though sadly that's not saying much. I called the "Morzan's son" thing fairly early on (and, certainly, the deus ex machina interruptions every time he got as far as "My father--" in his attempts to explain this to Eragon, are highly cringeworthy). The thing that disappointed me the most though was that having a good character be the son of a bad character is an opportunity for subtlety and conflict and shades of gray -- but that opportunity was totally ignored. Of course Morzan was shown as a monster through and through. Well, yes, he is the first of the Forsworn and a savage killer -- but he also has to nearly kill his toddler son in a drunken rage and also never loved Murtagh's mother. (Who, I'm assuming, is also Eragon's mother and the love of Brom's life, yes?) It would've been considerably more interesting if Morzan the monster was actually a devoted husband or a well-meaning, if rough, father.
But, alas. That wouldn't be black and white enough, clearly. (And, on the subject of Murtagh, I must note that, yeah, that out-of-the-blue fight scene between him and Our Hero was quite slashy. In a very flat cardboard way, just like everything else.)
Many, many people have written about the derivative nature of Eragon. And, yeah, the Star Wars and Tolkien fannishness is definitely showing. I'm guessing there's a bit of LeGuin there, too, in the "true names" concept, although it's used pretty crudely here. And then there are things that are maybe ripoffs and maybe homages. I'm pretty sure the mention of a "sorcerer's stone" is intentional homage/reference. The Weathertop/Argonath moment, with the ruined castle? Could go either way. And then we get the Elven song about a pair of lovers separated by the sea, and the fact that their names start with A and N don't have anything to do with Amroth and Nimrodel, I'm sure. (The song itself is atrocious, but at least it has the excuse of pretending to be an on-the-fly translation, and those things are damn hard, so I'm willing to cut it quite a bit of slack.) But actually, I'm actually perfectly willing to be forgiving in a lot of the broader rip-offs homages as well. Not just because I've wanted to play around in Middle-Earth and Earthsea too, or lift cool things from there for my own worldbuilding, but also because I've read fantasies that were not much less derivative than Eragon but still enjoyable nevertheless. The thing is, if you're going to rip off something, at least do it *well*. And Paolini totally doesn't...
There were several "I'm writing a novel!" moments -- scenes that are kind of neat but don't actually *do* anything -- neither reveal/develop character nor advance plot in any way. They're harmless, in the grander scheme of things, but probably should've been excised in editing. The whole thing with the witch (Angela) and trying to prove that toads are really frogs and therefore don't exist -- it's the kind of thing that would have seemed awfully clever and downright hilarious to my friend and me back when we were fifteen and cracking ourselves up by writing chapters with titles like "Stolen Salad Party," involving, if I recall, an Elven king's birthday party gone awry (don't ask...). There were some amusing lines stuck in just for cleverness's sake, like, "Always the scholar, aren't you?" "Not anymore. I'm afraid I've degenerated into a bibliophile." Of course, it is then overexplained. And I have to wonder whether that actually came from somewhere else, because I remember wanting to stick slightly adusted Wilde quotes into my own writing at around the same time.
Names and language (the two are connected) bothered me quite a lot. I don't expect a 19-year-old kid to be a Tolkien, with several fully made up languages to base the story on. But, come on! A little more effort. The "Ancient Language" and good chunks of Dwarvish and Urgals' language all sound too much alike -- and not in a derived-from-each-other way, in a lazy-writer way. The "Ancient Language" is largely pseudo-Germanic (or, I guess, Norse, according to Paolini, but I'm quite positive he's wrong -- not that I speak Norse, but I've heard and seen Icelandic written, which is pretty close, and -- no.) Er... why? The other bits look like random vowel insertions liberally scattered with umlauts and apostrophes. The words don't look like they go together in a single language.
Names are similarly disjointed. The villagers who are Eragon's family and neighbours are named: Garrow, Brom, Roran, Horst, Sloan, Alberich, Baldor, Gertrude. Now, Horst, Alberich, Baldor, Gertrude sound like Norse/Germanic names -- do they have a different background from the more English-sounding Garrow, Brom, and Sloan? Roran sounds like a generic fantasy name, like Eragon. And then there's Galbatorix, who sounds like a friend of Asterix and Obelix. Are these characters supposed to share a common culture? Have different backgrouns? It's not explained. Same with the dragon names -- none of the other names Brom mentions sound the least bit like they come from the same morpheme pool as "Saphira". Which just happens to sound like "sapphire", which just happens to be the colour of her scales. Look, I know how tough it is to change a character's name once you've settled on it, and maybe there's no need to -- though I haven't seen any other indication that in any other word there occurs the combination of "ph" pronounced as "f" -- but, hey, at least you could've thrown a few other loosely-gem-based names into the list. What about names like Angela (in a world that doesn't appear to include angels) or Solembum, whose name, in addition to making me giggle, seems to come from yet another totally different culture. And maybe those two are intentional, even -- the problem is, in the total mish-mash of names in the rest of the book, you can't tell.
And some of it's just *lazy*. The words "Ra'zac" (the Nazgul wannabees) and "Zar'roc" (the Rider sword) appear for the first time about a page apart. Do you notice how... they sound almost the same, only jumbled slightly? There are only that many sounds that you can make into names, but, dude, that's not even trying! That's just putting down on paper the first thing that pops into your mind -- because it's virtually the same as the last thing that popped into it -- and then never changing/noticing/caring.
Speaking of names, I'm quite convinced that "Eragon" originated as a typo for "dragon" that Paolini thought was cute. I know people have said they think it's too similar to "Aragorn", but that would have never occurred to me -- I pronounce "Aragorn" with an initial A as in "father", so perhaps that's why. Instead, every time I see that name I almost-read it as Estragon (from Waiting for Godot). Probably not a common worry for the target audience of Eragon, but damn distracting. And Alagaesia makes me think of "analgesic".
Another thing that bugged me -- not that this is at all uncommon in fantasy novels, but it was more crudely done here -- the bad guys all look nasty. Sloan the butcher is the first example of that; the Empire-loving traders in the tavern; the guy taking toll at the entrance to the first city Brom and Eragon visit looks like a troll. I was kind of impressed that the Twins were not outright hideous and just somewhat weird-looking -- but I suppose that's a functin of them being *clandestine* bad guys, at least somewhat.
One of the things I've seen Eragon praised for is that it tried to develop/make up for things that are common in fantasy that don't quite work / don't make sense. Given how shoddy and derivative most of it is, I assume this refers to things like the lengthy dumped-in explanations on how scrying works or doesn't work, magic duels, etc. And thing is, I kind of applaud the effort. But actually the "more explained" versions are equally flawed, and because they are a) "new" and b) draw your attention to it and make you think about it, the flaws actually stand out a lot more. Like, with the scrying. So, OK, it kinda sorta makes sense that you need to have seen before what you're scrying for, because you need to find it *somehow*. But if you don't know where they are, it seems counterintuitive that you would recognize their surroundings if you've seen them before if you're not expecting them to be there. What, each object has its own unique magical emission spectrum and having witnessed it once you can then "receive" it whenever you come into contact with that object by scrying? I suppose it's possible... but seems needlessly complicated. (My view of "scrying" is that you do need something you recognize to serve as the "focus", but once you've zoomed in on whatever it is, you see whatever's there, by -- if you wish to get technical -- light scatter around your object of focus, say. That doesn't matter, though.) My point is that Paolini's scrying is both odd and needlessly complicated, which doesn't make it better. And it leads me to ponder such questions as, if the person you're scrying for is wearing new clothes, does he appear naked? What if it's a woman who's gotten pregnant since you've seen her last, or just a landscape that's changed a lot due to flooding or an earthquake -- does the "seen it once" logic still work? Anyway...
Similarly, the magic duel thing. Supposedly, in this magic system, you need to enter your opponent's mind before you fight the magic duel, because otherwise you don't know what he is going to throw at you and it's mutually assured destruction. Eh? If you're already in his mind, why would you even bother with the flashy magic? That seems to be a fairly invasive and debilitating process for the victim, even when the victum is *not* resisting -- should just the fact that you've broken into someone's mind be enough to give you victory? Not to mention that if you can *fight* with magic, you can probably *shield* with magic, too. The system is not well enough developed to explain how, but raising walls of stone around yourself -- which seemingly you can do with a two word phrase -- would probably stop most things, eh?
It is a rather bad book. An understandably bad book, because, first time writer with nothing original to say. All the acknowledgement of people who helped him with the plot, streamline the pacing, and so forth are kind of disturbing -- if this is the final result, I'd hate to see what his original draft looked like. But actually nothing in the book is as bad as the self-satisfaction that comes through in Paolini's acknowledgement and excerpts from essays and interviews that I've seen. I could forgive the book -- but I have a much harder time forgiving him for thinking himself an Author of Literature.
A good deal more enjoyable than the actual book were kippurbird's sporking of Eragon, chapter-by-chapter, which can be found here. In fact, I think I only got through the last four chapters or so thanks to the lure of the sporkings.
After finishing the book, I had to go and check it against my list of things I don't want to see/wouldn't put in a fantasy novel (as gacked from limyaael).
1) Mary-Sue = check, in spades
2) Cardboard villains = check. We haven't even seen any of the main villaines except in third hand (flashback and as described by a non-POV character), but even Durza, who we do see first-hand, is pretty cardboard. There's some attempt at backstory, but it doesn't actually integrate with him being a villain, and it comes WAY too late.
3) Smart people who suddenly become total idiots because they're in love. Uh... there are no smart people here to begin with.
4) Puns that shouldn't work in non-English -- no attempt at puns, thank god.
5) Characters with very long names who don't get nicknames -- no long names, except for Galbatorix, who, OK, probably wouldn't have a nickname.
6) "Alien" societies that are essentially identical to human ones -- yeah, the dwarves seem extremely similar, and I'm guessing the Elves will be as well. Dragons not too alien either. So, check.
7) Communities with hive mind -- oh, YEAH! Check, check, check.
8) King-in-exile knowing how to rule without training -- Eragon is not a king-in-exile, but the suggestion that having a dragon makes him somehow a qualified leader of people is essentially the same thing. So, check.
9) One race recognized as clearly superior -- uh, yeah. The Elf-worship. Check.
10) Extended sequences of character learning to master magic -- there are actually no extended sequences of anything in Eragon, but, comparatively speaking, Eragon does spend a lot of time learning magic, including magic he doesn't actually need to use. So, check.
11) Sudden gods -- not so far, thank god.
So, tally = 7 of 11 present. Yeah...
**
Some ASOIAF art, found the same way I've found most of my favorite pieces/artists, actually -- by seeing details in icons and going in search of the artist credited. So:
By ~nejna on DeviantArt, two pictures showing the Red Wedding (uh... kind of bloody, as can be expected): here and here.
By *Gold-Seven, also on DeviantArt:
This might be my favorite Jaime, pity that he is not in colour.
She also has some very lovely LotR/Sil art, like Feanor's family, a very shiny Glorfindel (and this other guy), and some HP art as well. I found the whole gallery worth browsing.
**
Via discworld: Why can't gay Dwarves get married in Middle-Earth?
I have no firm opinion on whether gay Dwarves should be allowed to marry in an online RPG, but the article was a fun read. Actually my favorite quote from the whole articles is (from p.3, describing how the new Middle-Earth game strives for authenticity): "When fans complained on the message board about an erroneous squirrel color, Turbine promptly corrected the mistake." It's just so... LotR fans.