Paolini, Christopher. Eragon

I guess there are good things about a book sufficiently bad that I would rather work on my schoolwork than read it.

This book has been accused of being unoriginal. Just slightly. I don't know of any other creative works in which a farm boy, raised by his aunt and uncle after the death of his mother (the mysterious father is absent), becomes the first new member of an elite mystical warrior sect that was destroyed when a promising and ambitious member of that elite mystical warrior sect went evil and destroyed all the rest of the elite mystical warriors and became the ruler of an Empire. ...Well, except for one of the most popular movies ever made.

And then there's the linguistics. The names mostly partake of a vague Tolkienian Scandinavian-Welsh-Anglo-Saxon mix, except without the slightest bit of consistency; mixed in with Beartooth and Therinsford and Reavstone are Alagaësia, Ellesméra, Dorú Areaba, Fläm, Gil'ead, Ra'zac, Urû'baen, Petrøvya, Farthen Dûr; there is a limit to the number of words you can spell this way before the Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Diacritics comes after you.

And there's the prose. You know, I'm not usually really uptight about insisting that books be well-written. I've mostly liked the Harry Potter books, for example, right up until the latest one--but don't get me started on that one. There are some unintentional hilarities (that are hilarious only if you're twelve years old, maybe; but still, a sixteen-year-old writer should have caught those, if anyone could)

There's the odd shifts between a "fantasy" style of semi-archaisms ("poor raiment for one so fair") and a modern style where people start sentences with "Anyway"; there's the overuse of five-dollar words, like a sunrise as a "glorious conflagration," and occasional misuse, like when "no Rider has set eyes upon this for nigh over a hundred years." More than that, the writing just seems stiff and uneasy, as if it's very unaware of the way that real people actually talk. The rhythm of the sentences is such that no one sentence is particularly awful, but if you read an entire page out loud, it fast becomes hilarious.

Also, there's this:

"No matter what happens, make sure that you're tongue doesn't loosen. We'll have to leave immediately if we're given away."

The inn's food was barely adequate, but its beer was excellent. By the time they stumbled back to the room, Eragon's head was buzzing pleasantly.

Yeah. Whenever someone tells me to make sure my tongue doesn't loosen, I go get drunk. (If this were portrayed as a mistake, that would be one thing, but the person who gave him the advice goes to get drunk with him, and there are no consequences whatsoever).

The pacing, at a sentence-level and story-level, is awful, with no sense of what to include and what to leave out. And women are just as invisible as they are in Tolkien, except that Tolkien was old enough that I can forgive him for thinking of women as mysterious and inexplicable creatures. (Then again, maybe women are that way when you're sixteen...)

It would be fair to say that I disliked this book very deeply. But I do understand why it's so popular. Most kids and teenagers don't care a bit about "good" writing--and neither do most adults, frankly--and neither did I, a couple years ago. The plot is bog-standard adventure-quest-fantasy, but that's typical comfort reading for guys, like the ones I knew in high school who thought Dragonlance was high art; not comfort-reading for me, but far be it from me to diss comfort reading. And there are a couple scenes that are genuinely interesting and exciting.

(Should I go easy on the author because he's so young? Well, lots of teenagers write bad novels. I wrote a bad novel as a teenager, and another when I was twenty, and another when I was twenty-one. If there's any blame, it goes to the editors--and it's clear from the acknowledgements that it was a worse book before the editors got their hands on it).