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<\/p>\n\nThe pile of read-but-unblogged books is growing precariously high and threatening to topple soon. Time to reduce it – by picking the thickest one.\n<\/p>\n
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\nI bought Eragon<\/i> 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).\n<\/p>\n
\nAs 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.\n<\/p>\n
\nThe 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.\n<\/p>\n
\nThe 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.\n<\/p>\n
\nNone 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.\n<\/p>\n
\nThe 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.\n<\/p>\n
\nAt 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<\/i> when he was 15. Looking back, that explained everything. His age really shows.\n<\/p>\n
\nOn 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<\/i> is far better, and so is Harry Potter<\/i>, 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.\n<\/p>\n