Paolini, Christopher: Eragon (Inheritance, Book 1)
Eragon (Inheritance, Book 1)
Author: Christopher Paolini
Genre: Young Adult/ Fantasy
Pages: 497
Final Thought: Disappointing, but not worth burning.
I'll freely admit that I've been more or less avoiding Eragon for the last few years. At first it was for no more compelling reason than that I had other things to read and I reasoned that I'd get to it sooner or later. Then I heard all the hype about Christopher Paolini having written it as a teenager, and talked with various people about their opinions of it, which actually gave me less reason to want to read it, but I'll explain that a bit later as I get into details. At any rate the facts that the movie was coming out, that I am visiting my parents (with whom a trip to the movies isn't something I'd think of as out of the ordinary), and that I'm a person who much prefers reading the book before seeing the movie have combined to induce me to seek out a copy.
I'll warn you now that there's quite a bit behind this cut. I don't anticipate that this will be the norm, but I do get wordy on occasion, and there is a lot to say about this one...
I had heard several reports about the story. My niece (who is eleven, I think) and her mother both think it's great, but several of my other friends have said that they weren't really impressed. Yes, it's a significant accomplishment in the context of having been written by a 16-year-old boy, but in the end I felt like it was just a big blend of some of the more well-known fantasy stories on the market - namely, Lord of the Rings, Anne McCaffrey's Pern series, and a touch of Star Wars.
Lord of the Rings. Well there's the elves, dwarves, and imposing mountain fortresses, for one. Also, we have a wise older man as guide and teacher for part of the trip and then the unknown companion with a shady background and incredible fighting skills. And perhaps most obviously, the large-scale tromping around the entire mapped world with various encounters with nasty henchmen and bits and pieces of the evil emperor's army along the way. Now I'll grant that many of these are also staples of the high fantasy genre's "world", which Paolini is obviously trying to create here, but I couldn't get past the impression that he was merely imitating the masters, and not doing a fabulous job of the imitation.
Pern. I'll grant you that his dragon has scales and doesn't have to chew rocks in order to breathe fire, but come on - a terrific flying fighting machine telepathically connected only to a rider it chooses from within the egg for a lifelong association? I half expected Thread to start falling. Not that the dragon wasn't done well- she actually had more lines that made me laugh than anyone else, I think, but just as many that made me cringe.
Star Wars. Okay, this might be a little bit of a leap, but I would lay money that Paolini is a big fan. I pick this in part because it gives the basis of Eragon's (the character's) plot line - orphaned boy of more or less unknown lineage raised by an uncle in the remote back woods of a vast country, excelling at hunting and other rural things until the day his world is radically changed by the acquisition of powers he has no idea how to control or use, sought by the forces of an evil empire to draw him to their side in the conflict against the poor, helpless commoners. Luke Skywalker, anyone? All we need is a Wookie, folks. Honestly, I'm waiting to learn that King Galbatorix, the evilest of evils, is actually Eragon's father. It's one of the only reasons I'll pick up the second book, in fact, because I want to know if I'm right and I'm too stubborn to just ask my niece.
But on a more serious note, since I tried to pay attention to the mechanics of what put me off of the story. To be honest, the actual plot wasn't so bad that I couldn't bear to go on, but it read to me like something you might see in a somewhat refined draft - there were too many places where characters who had no reason to divulge information spouted off two pages of quest-pertinent information to Eragon, whom they had just met more or less off the street. I felt like Brom, the mentor-figure, all too often treated Eragon as an equal when he was training or teaching him (which was out of what I think of as a trainer character, especially when dealing with magic or sword work) but then turned around and suddenly refused to disclose one last kernel of information when he'd been loose-lipped for the entire evening. To me, that's an amateur way of giving just enough information to string a reader along, and would have been done much more subtly by a more experienced writer. I use Brom as an example, but it happened in many places - even between Eragon and his dragon, Saphira.
There were also a few points when a key piece of information was revealed or a clue found, an accurate conclusion reached, and a plan of action formed in the span of about three paragraphs/two minutes within the story timeline. To me, these seem like places where Paolini needed to move his plot along but didn't want to take the time to really flesh it out, so it happens more or less by writers' magic.
He also used very clipped sentences whenever he described what I think of as a "set" - the surroundings, especially as the characters enter them for the first time. I much prefer my independent descriptive clauses to be strung together with things like punctuation and conjunctions. Separating them makes my mental eye "jump" from one thing to the next rather dizzyingly, as if I had a zoom lens on a camera that suddenly focused on one thing and then zoomed in on another thing as the camera was supposed to be panning smoothly across a landscape. It was very distracting to me, especially combined with the fact that I felt that he front-loaded his scenes with descriptors rather than sprinkling them throughout. Again, it vividly reminded me of Paolini's youth.
I felt like all too often, he managed to have one or another of the characters explain their current dilemma, to spell things out very clearly verbally. Now sometimes this can be effective, but I really felt like the points could have been made very clearly through much more subtle methods in these cases.
And the end was very disappointing. Even though it was leading to a sequel, in my mind that's not the right place to end a book, but then I've always been fond of a nice denouement.
Most of my dissatisfaction rests in the fact that Paolini's youth comes through in so many facets of the story - from the crafting of the tale to the characters, I see the evidence that a relatively untraveled, home-schooled boy from Wyoming with lots of time to read great stories put this together. It is admirable in the context of its accomplishment, but doesn't stand out as a beacon of excellence within the world of literature, or even the fantasy genre.
All in all, I think this has a lot of potential. The plot is engaging (except where it seems to skip steps) and although the characters are certainly sketched through the lens of a 16-year-old boy, they're not entirely without merits. There were times when I found myself turning pages without realizing how quickly things were going, but there were other times when my willing suspension of disbelief was stretched to its ultimate limits and I had to force myself to continue. I'll likely read the second book at some point, though it's not on my priority list, in part to see whether I'm right about Galbatorix and in part because I have to believe the storytelling skills will get better.