Central Booking

Things have been a little crazy lately, but I did steal away for a few hours over the past few days to get some reading done. I started with Eragon by Christopher Paolini, which was suggested by Kat from Kat's Random Thoughts. I started with this book for the simple reason that I already owned a copy.

I'm about 100 pages in, and my reactions are mixed. Apparently Paolini started writing this book when he was fifteen, which is frankly amazing. I never wrote anything this good when I was fifteen. On the other hand, to say that this book is the best novel by a fifteen-year-old that I've read is to damn it with the faintest of praise. Assuming that Paolini is not content to be thought of as a teenage prodigy, but rather aspires to be taken seriously as an author, I'm going to show him the respect accorded to any serious author by a serious reviewer by being brutally honest in my remarks.

Were it not for my contractual obligations vis-a-vis the lamest contest ever and the assurances by my wife that "it does get better," I never would have made it past page 50 of this book. The prose is hackneyed and tiresome. Paolini seems unaware that phrases like "for what seemed like hours" are both cliched and unhelpful for communicating anything to the reader. At one point a character speaks "in a language known only to him," which probably sounds ominous to a middle-schooler, but only made me laugh. His parents must be kicking themselves for paying for those lessons. Do we find out later in the book why no one else speaks this language? I'll bet not, because whereas a master like Tolkien could footnote his footnotes with every last detail of the events and individuals surrounding his narrative so that the reader gets a sense that he is viewing one small aspect of a great tapestry, Paolini is pretty clearly just throwing stuff together that sounds cool.

That's not to say that there is no context for the action outside the narrative. In fact, I feel right at home in the world of Analgesia or whatever it's called, because frankly I've been there before. The ingredients for Eragon are simple: Start with the quasi-medieval world of Middle Earth, populated with the standard denizens of humans, elves, dwarves and orcs -- I mean, "urgals". Add the Dragonriders from Anne McCaffrey's Pern series, complete with telepathic link between dragon and rider. All we need now is a story. Something simple and mythical, that a young boy could relate to. How about Star Wars? Yeah, we'll have a simple farmboy on the verge of manhood, living on the outskirts of a great empire, who was raised by his uncle because his parents -- who seem to have been involved in something a little more exotic than farming -- are both dead. This boy seems to be destined for something greater than the simple life of a farmer, a fact which is confirmed when he happens to come upon a mysterious item that narrowly avoided falling into the hands of the imperial minions. But who will guide the boy to his destiny? Hmm... How about a wise old man living nearby who turns out to be more than he seems? In fact, maybe he's the last remnant of an order of warriors sworn to defend the old regime. Perfect!

"Wait," you say. "How do you know that you-know-who is you-know-what if you've only read the first 100 pages?" Because, you see, at about page 60 I turned to my wife and said, "--- turns out to be the last of the Dragonriders, doesn't he?" And she said, "Yep." And I groaned and continued reading.

Did I mention that it's really good writing for a teenager? And I can't wait until Eragon leads a ragtag troop of Dragonriders into the heart of Mordor to blow up the Death Star.