The pile of read-but-unblogged books is growing precariously high and threatening to topple soon. Time to reduce it – by picking the thickest one.

I bought Eragon for two reasons: it had a beautiful and stylish cover design with an unusually intelligent-looking dragon. And it was everywhere: every bookshop seemed to have it either as a staff pick, or a special offer, and it was always on prominent display in airport bookshops (which is where I got it).

As the covers clearly indicate, it’s a story about “One boy… One dragon… A world full of adventure” – adventure fantasy, that is. Just the right stuff for a long flight to New York, I thought.

The book felt entertaining enough to begin with, but the more I read, the more unsatisfying I found it. The language, above all, felt stiff and clichéd and dull – there was no sparkle, no gratifying turns of phrase of the kind that good writers come up with. Sentences were simple and tended to follow a common template.

The plot felt quite single-threaded, to borrow a term from the software world. Eragon (the boy in question) is in point A and decides to go to point B. He does so, while meeting with adventures on the way. In point B he pauses to find someone, or do something, and then figure out where to go next. The process then repeats from B to C. Each stage appears somewhat cut off from the rest: when a stage is underway, previous and subsequent stages are ignored. Most of what happened between A and B does not have any real repercussions later. It’s as if the author (or the presumed audience) could only think this far ahead, and no further, and just took things a little piece at a time.

None of the events or characters are particularly inventive – it’s a pretty ordinary flow of wandering, interspersed with a few battles. Nothing particularly unconventional happens. There is the usual young hero who has lost his parents, his wise but mysterious teacher, and then a trusted companion. All straight and relatively likeable, but with no particular depth to them. All the components have been done before by other writers, and better.

The world, likewise, is pretty much a standard fantasy world. Some mountains, some forests, some deserts, some villages. Pretty standard monsters and non-human races. Except that the world as a whole didn’t quite add up… Perhaps it is harsh to require realism in a fantasy book, but if a world does not stand up to closer scrutiny, it loses a lot of its spellbinding power. Towns in the middle of a desert with no feasible means of growing food; an “empire” consisting of a few dozen small villages and towns many days’ travel apart – but somehow strongly cohesive and with a strong central power. Distances, geography, population and economy just don’t add up. Sometimes other things don’t, either, such as when Eragon, previously illiterate, learns to read fluently in a week. Yeah, right.

At first I thought that the author had intentionally kept both the story and the language simpler than average to appeal to young readers, and perhaps not put that much work into crafting a coherent world. (The book is generally categorised as “young adult” literature.) What I didn’t know until after I finished it was that the book’s main claim to fame is the age of its author, Christopher Paolini, who apparently began writing Eragon when he was 15. Looking back, that explained everything. His age really shows.

On the whole, I have to say this is a good effort for a teenager, and better than most people (teenagers or not) could achieve. In fact it is probably even better than the average fantasy book, given the amount of template-produced junk out there. It works well enough as light reading on a rainy day, but it’s not enough to qualify as a good book, in any sense. The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time is far better, and so is Harry Potter, to mention two other books aimed at “young adult” readers. Another 5 or 10 years, perhaps, will let Paolini grow into a more nuanced language, and acquire some more original ideas.

An entertaining critique of the book from an editor’s perspective puts a lot more energy into pointing out shortcomings in both language and plot that a good editor should have spotted and gotten fixed. I couldn’t find any particularly insightful positive reviews, as those mostly seemed to be on the “This book is very good! I enjoyed it a lot!” level.