Book Review: Eragon

by Tristan

Christopher Paolini is the teen author behind 'Eragon', the first book in a new fantasy series that is flying off the shelves around the country.

Paolini, 19, started writing the book when he was 15 and with the help of his family's small publishing company got the attention of Knopf, who brought 'Eragon' to the masses.

A friend suggested the book to me, and, being a lover of fantasy and sci-fi, I decided to give it a shot, wondering what this industry-proclaimed "young master" could really do.

The story is mediocre. Nothing makes it stand out in a genre that is dominated by Tolkien rip-offs, all striving to capture the scale and grace of Lord of the Rings without putting forth the effort. The world of the story, called 'Alagaesia', is threatened by a dark lord who is using his armies of monsters to hunt down the last of his freedom-loving enemies, including elves, dwarves, and men. Wow, how original. Enter Eragon, the farm boy from the boring backwaters of Alagaesia who longs for adventure and wonders what the dragons of old, and the brave men who rode them, would have done in these dark times. He's given the chance when one day, whilst hunting, poof! A dragon eggs falls out of the sky and he takes it home. What a useful coincidence. Paolini's inventiveness and creativity only gets worse, sending Eragon off to explore the world with his new dragon friend where he meets cardboard character after cardboard character (wise old man who knows magic, mysterious fighter afraid of his destiny, mindless soldiers of a dark lord, a creepy little man who wants his ring back… oh wait. Forget that last one). The world is filled with magic similar to that found in Ursula K. LeGuin's 'Earthsea' books, where everything has a name in an ancient language, and knowledge of that name gives power over that thing to the magic user – in LeGuin’s books, the idea works well, but here it just falls flat.

What Paolini and so many fantasy writers today have missed in their attempts at becoming the next Tolkien is that they create their fantasy worlds on the surface, writing only what back story is needed. They're ready to jump right in and get writing, but they forget that Tolkien spent a large portion of his life developing the mythology and languages of his world. He went to the trouble of adding meaning to the names of people and places, even those briefly mentioned in the main trilogy, or not at all. He deeply understood the world that he had created, and sought to know every little detail about its history and how it worked. I strongly doubt that Paolini took the time to do that for Alagaesia.

The style of writing is not very impressive either. It has a monotony to its sentence structure, and a repetition of certain words and phrases (I felt like throwing the book across the room if I read one more 'pensively') that made it sound like someone who had just discovered a new word and was now attempting to fit it in wherever they could. Perhaps all the simplicity is because of Paolini's age, in a genre where the accomplished writers (who have had the time to fully develop their worlds) are much older, but I'm not expecting that much of a change when the next two books of the trilogy are published.

The only good thing about Eragon is that it shows teens that with a little bit of determination and patience, they actually can get their work published. Paolini has my respect for the effort he put into writing and promoting Eragon as a teenager, but he still has a long way to go before anybody should even think about placing him among the masters of fantasy.