Eragon
So I finished this book, Eragon, over the weekend, a book recommended to me by a good friend, the Senior Executive Hag in Residence. She liked it, as you might imagine, considering she recommended it to me. I was unimpressed.
It's a fantasy novel in the tradition of Lord of the Rings (but then again, aren't they all?) about a young man who finds a mysterious rock on a hunting trip, loses his family, gets a dragon, a sword and a mentor, goes on an adventure, learns about life, death, and all that crap, and finds an amazing, mile-high city (ala Minas Tirith) under a five-mile-high dormant volcano. In other words, it was a reasonably well-crafted pastiche of every hero story Europeans have been telling for the last three thousand years. And it was very obviously written by a seventeen-year-old young man.
That is in itself something of an accomplishment. When I was seventeen I hadn't attempted anything so monumental as a novel trilogy, let alone sold the book to Knopf or optioned the story for a movie deal. Impressive accomplishments for one so young, but I don't see that the author, Christopher Paolini, has the chops, or the story has the depth, to maintain that sort of success. Maybe, given time, the author can develop into a great author, but he's got to demonstrate more creativity than giving the protagonist of a story about dragon riders a name one letter different than dragon (the pronunciation guide indicates that the name should be pronounced something like air-Uh-gone, but I think it's more fun to remind one's self of Paolini's relative immaturity and the silliness of it all by pronouncing it more like it really is, Rrrr-rag-un), and slapping a frankenstein's monster of a story together from the finer points of Lord of the Rings and Star Wars, themselves hodge-podges of Northern and Western European lore, with good doses of Christianity and Taoism, respectively, added for good measure.
I kept waiting for it to get good. I kept waiting for him to express his growing attraction to his male traveling companion as if it were the most natural thing in the world. I kept waiting for the elf warrior-maiden to turn out to be a guy. I kept waiting for something really cool to happen, but it never did.
Color me bland.
It's a fantasy novel in the tradition of Lord of the Rings (but then again, aren't they all?) about a young man who finds a mysterious rock on a hunting trip, loses his family, gets a dragon, a sword and a mentor, goes on an adventure, learns about life, death, and all that crap, and finds an amazing, mile-high city (ala Minas Tirith) under a five-mile-high dormant volcano. In other words, it was a reasonably well-crafted pastiche of every hero story Europeans have been telling for the last three thousand years. And it was very obviously written by a seventeen-year-old young man.
That is in itself something of an accomplishment. When I was seventeen I hadn't attempted anything so monumental as a novel trilogy, let alone sold the book to Knopf or optioned the story for a movie deal. Impressive accomplishments for one so young, but I don't see that the author, Christopher Paolini, has the chops, or the story has the depth, to maintain that sort of success. Maybe, given time, the author can develop into a great author, but he's got to demonstrate more creativity than giving the protagonist of a story about dragon riders a name one letter different than dragon (the pronunciation guide indicates that the name should be pronounced something like air-Uh-gone, but I think it's more fun to remind one's self of Paolini's relative immaturity and the silliness of it all by pronouncing it more like it really is, Rrrr-rag-un), and slapping a frankenstein's monster of a story together from the finer points of Lord of the Rings and Star Wars, themselves hodge-podges of Northern and Western European lore, with good doses of Christianity and Taoism, respectively, added for good measure.
I kept waiting for it to get good. I kept waiting for him to express his growing attraction to his male traveling companion as if it were the most natural thing in the world. I kept waiting for the elf warrior-maiden to turn out to be a guy. I kept waiting for something really cool to happen, but it never did.
Color me bland.
posted by Master of Disaster @ 6/13/2005 05:00:00 PM
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