Mrs Butler's Blog Number 15

Number 15 November 2005

If you have read any of my blog you will know that I am normally positive about all the books I read. This is an exception. This book is a best-seller. It worries me that parents and children all over the world have been persuaded to spend a lot of money and a lot of their scarce reading time on this book because they have been assured that it is good. It worries me because I don’t think that a book this bad would survive in the adult market and I am angry that this inferior product should be palmed off on children simply because it was written by a child.

I am ploughing my way through Eldest at the moment. I’ve only reached page 100 of 668 and it feels like a penance. Eldest is the sequel to Eragon by Christopher Paolini.

When Eragon was published two years ago the hype was intense because of the extreme youth of the author and, presumably, its extreme length. I resisted buying it until it came out in paperback and several students persuaded me that it was brilliant.

I’m an addict of epic fantasies but I was desperately disappointed in Eragon. It combines all the worst excesses of American fantasy writers: it has a good basic plot but it is slavishly derivative (the obligatory dwarves, elves and orcs from Tolkien, dragon telepathy in italics from McCaffrey, etc.). There is no shame in following fantasy conventions but some spark of originality is required. It is tediously descriptive and completely lacking in any surprise. Every meal, every person, every journey is described in plodding detail as if it were written by a schoolboy, as indeed it was.

I had hoped that with the author’s increased years Eldest might be an improvement but, alas, I can only add illiteracy to his crimes. Consider this exchange on Page 24:
“Do not dishonor me.”
“Nor you I.”
or this sentence on Page11:
It felt like he had been sawed in half.

I’m afraid I laughed aloud at this bit:
Lathered over the remnants of his grief, anxiety now twisted his gut. He worried
about his own role in the upcoming events. Page 59
I don’t think he was talking about tummy trouble!

Like all fantasy writers he loves technical terms; there are loads of hauberks, brigandines and gambesons, but he has a talent for using a flat word or a grand one at inappropriate moments, and it seems to me that he does not always understand the meaning of his words (or am I failing to allow for American usage here?). I can’t decide whether he has absorbed too many fantasy novels without attention or if he uses a thesaurus rather badly.
Upon his head was a helm strewn with precious jewels. Page 55 [studded, set or even encrusted with – but strewn suggests that they might fall off at any moment!]
Deep in Tronjheim, a drum gonged. Boom. Page 56 [gonged? A drum?]
In the center, on a raised platform, was a great crypt open to waiting darkness.
Page 57 [a crypt is an underground chapel or burial place – tricky on a platform. Does he mean a tomb or a sarcophagus?]
Turning to the podium, Nasuada gripped it on either side and looked up...Page 62 [Imagine the Olympic winners’ podium. It is a platform – no sides. He must mean a lectern.]

As you can see I have taken most of these examples from a few consecutive pages but it is all like this. I find the constant jarring of misused words and the constant need for translation such an effort that it destroys all my pleasure in reading. I doubt if I shall persevere through the next 568 pages and the threatened third volume.

I’m a reader not a writer and I don’t usually worry too much about style as long as the story is good enough to carry me along. I’ve read Terry Brooks, whose dull prose only comes to life when he describes a battle; David Eddings, whose coy American humour makes me cringe; and Robert Jordan whose overblown writing has filled eleven volumes of The Wheel of Time (so far - and that excludes the prequel) but I’ve never read anything which made me want to give up so early. Sorry, Jess! I tried.