Central Booking

Well, I did it. In an orgy of enthusiasm generated by my feverish desire for release from the smothering embrace of adolescent prose, I have finished Eragon. Man, am I glad I'm old enough to smoke.

To be honest, the sexual subtext never really went anywhere. I thought it was building up to something, but then it went all flaccid on me. The good news is that around page 300 the author finally breaks free from George Lucas' Jedi death grip and starts to tell a semi-interesting story. Paolini had the good sense to borrow the elements of his climax equally from Tolkien, Star Wars and the last of the Matrix movies, so that while originality remains beyond him, at least the narrative no longer felt like it was going to collapse from the weight of its own redundancy. Eragon remained utterly predictable throughout, of course. About 5 pages into meeting a particular character I turned to my 12 year old nephew (Everybody's 12 year old nephew has read Eragon) and said, "_____ is Eragon's brother, isn't he?" My nephew, who has read the sequel as well (in which this "secret" is evidently revealed), replied, "Yeah." Shocker!

The movie opens this Friday, and if I end up seeing it, no one will ever doubt my deep abiding love for my 12-year old nephew again. I have every reason to believe the movie will be absolutely godawful:

• It is based on a fairly lousy book.
• The previews look lousy.
• I have only been able to find two reviews for it, which means the filmmakers probably aren't releasing it to most critics to review. Always a vote of confidence.
• The two reviews I've found said that it sucked.
• It has Jeremy Irons in it, who didn't have the good sense to stay away from the Dungeons & Dragons movie either.

By the way, if you don't believe me about the derivative nature of the book, read this review or this review of the movie.

Here's a quote from the first review:

While I can certainly appreciate the difficulty of making a distinctive sword-and-sorcery fantasy film in the huge wake of the Lord of the Rings trilogy, the fact is that Eragon doesn’t really try very hard. And so we get cut-rate versions of the Nazgul and the Orcs, with lots of sweeping helicopter shots of gorgeous mountain ranges, odd-sounding faux-Celtic names, and a poor farmboy whose uncle gets killed while the bad guys are looking for him, and who then seeks out the last member of an ancient order that was able to command magical forces. Oh, wait, that last part is Star Wars. And the boy shouts out one-word magical spells. Yeah, that’s Harry Potter. And he’s a dragon-rider… Anne McCaffrey, check… Well, at least Eragon is stealing from the best.

Upside: It's only an hour and 39 minutes long.

I've moved on to the next book on my list (I'm reading them in an order known only to me, so don't even try to guess which one is next). I'll post my first thoughts shortly.