This is my ABRIDGED VERSION of my essay/review about Inheritance by Christopher Paolini. Read the really long version here.
So let's break ...moreThis is my ABRIDGED VERSION of my essay/review about Inheritance by Christopher Paolini. Read the really long version here.
So let's break format and start with what I liked.
This was my favorite of the Inheritance series. It was enough less of a chore to read than Brisingr that I very nearly considered rating this two stars out of five. But then I realized I was thinking that way based on hating it less rather than liking it more, and figured that objectively I'm afraid it still deserves a bottom-of-the-barrel rating. Sorry, fans.
First off, Paolini corrected a number of things that he's had trouble with in previous volumes. He introduced horses that actually get tired. He introduced characters who dislike the protagonists and don't automatically get written as evil or get punished for it. He acknowledged that the elf Arya would be a better fighter than plucky farm boy Eragon owing to over a century of practice. He wrote a couple of conversations that felt like conversations. There was no Super Special explanation for why Cousin Roran was such a badass. Nobody got brought back to life in a cheesy touching resurrection. (view spoiler)[And Eragon didn't get married and live happily ever after (or turn out to be related to Princess Leia). (hide spoiler)]
But what I appreciated most about this book was that it managed to evoke real emotions sometimes--and what the characters went through wasn't always completely one-dimensional. I felt less like I was being fed lines and more like what the characters experienced was actually born from their situations combined with their mindsets. There was some decent human emotion describing Eragon's self-doubt, inner conflicts, sorrow, and crushing fear under his great responsibility. Roran's protectiveness and savagery as a man of war worked for me too (when it wasn't weird or over the top).
Paolini regularly tried way too hard and forced the emotions until they turned into cloying thesaurus poop, but sometimes he did okay. (There were also certain bits that I realized I felt the way I did because of my personal experiences; in other words, at times I brought my own emotions to the table instead of actually being affected by the words, much like a fanboy loves a dragon no matter how poorly it's written.) Eragon has a "This Used To Be My Playground" moment. I'm a sucker for that, because I'm a huge nostalgic hippie.
Eragon's philosophizing moments and contradictory feelings were sometimes organic and they worked. It mostly just made me sad that this happened so rarely in the book. This kinda made it seem like he has the capability to . . . maybe . . . evoke emotion in his writing, even though he almost never hits the bullseye. The thing he really needs to learn is how and when to back off. Emotional evocation is easy. Humans do it eagerly when they read. Just get out of the way, Paolini. Get out of the way of yourself.
But let's get on to why you guys actually want to read my essays. All the stuff I hate!
The biggest problem is still the obnoxious decoration. Sentences aren't Christmas trees. Stop decorating them.
Even at this late stage, Paolini hasn't improved his tone-deaf prose or his tendency to decorate awkward sentences instead of pruning them. We still constantly encounter overdescription--and not just of weapons and clothes and faces and courtyards, but unneeded comparisons of perfectly good images to other things in a ham-fisted attempt to enhance them. We can picture post-battle smoke as viewed from the sky just fine without being told that it "hung over Belatona like a blanket of hurt, anger, and sorrow," and it would actually be more poignant if he would stop forcing these associations onto every image. Let us feel it ourselves. Stop telling us what every cloud of smoke "means."
If just about every time an image pops up, the reader has to put up with comparisons and weird personification, and we get seasick. A little of this is okay. Weaving it into EVERY SENTENCE is not. Having no natural understanding of voice and tone and no knack for writing character cannot be amended or hidden through excessive adjective insertion. Whenever I read a Paolini book, I feel like I was promised a comfortable shirt and was given an ill-fitting, scratchy garment whose tailor elected to "fix" its flaws with a frigging Bedazzler.
Some particularly egregious examples:
* we would fall before him like dry leaves before a winter storm
* the dragons' blood rained from the sky like a summer downpour
* her small pink tongue was visible; it lay like a soft, moist slug
* musty aroma clung to the girl, like the smell of a forest floor on a warm summer day
* which seemed to press against Roran like a thick, heavy blanket made of the most unpleasant substance he could imagine
* the plume of dancing water, which glittered like handfuls of diamonds tossed into the air
* the bags under her eyes like small, sad smiles
* with eyes like chips of obsidian
* Blood trailed from the tip in long, twisting ribbons that slowly separated into glistening drops, like orbs of polished coral
* there emerged Thorn, red as blood and glittering like a million shifting stars
* The passageway smelled like damp straw and moth wings
* an overwhelming sense of dread clutched at Eragon, pressing down on him like a pile of sodden fleeces
* putting each morsel of food into her mouth as carefully as if it were a hollow orb of glass that might shatter at any sudden movement
* he thought the mountains looked like so many molars erupting from the brown gums of the earth
The description also occurs at very inappropriate times. It consistently interrupts the action, resulting in situations like having a man running toward Eragon urgently, only to pause for two paragraphs while the man, his family, their history, and philosophy surrounding these folks is imparted to us in indulgent narration. There's also an annoying pattern Paolini had in just under half the chapters: Some sort of action opens the chapter, and then we get at least a paragraph of description of the surroundings. If that didn't happen, more often than not we got a flashback that led up to whatever the current situation was. It got very repetitive.
And speaking of repetitive, Paolini has been doing this thing where he latches onto a certain phrase and keeps using it. For example:
* Relief and trepidation swept through Eragon.
* Relief swept through Eragon.
* As his hand closed around the hilt, a sense of relief swept through him.
* Relief swept through Eragon as he saw his cousin alive and well.
* An urge to strike the king swept through Roran.
* Dismay swept through Eragon.
* Eragon watched for a minute longer, then a sudden rush of emotion swept through him.
* Wonder swept through Eragon, wonder that such a thing had come to pass.
Add that to all the metaphors of leaves getting swept away in a storm of some sort, and this book just starts getting silly to read. Other overused words include "crimson" (nearly 50 times) and "growled" (regularly overused as a speech tag). At one point Eragon says "How is it you keep besting me?" and the speech tag is "he growled, far from pleased." Got that? He's growling. And far from pleased. Because Arya is beating him at sword-fighting. I'm sure you needed to know that this did not please him, in case the angry phrase itself and the GROWLING didn't tell you enough yet. And just in case you were wondering, we get a paragraph of detail on Eragon's thumbs. Is your life complete now?
Narrating the sacred
Paolini spends far too long on an irrelevant scene in which Saphira flies them through a storm for no real good reason, and we're treated to several "poetic" pages full of descriptions of the beautiful post-storm night sky. The serenity and power of his observations is yanked away immediately as Paolini begins to narrate to us what exactly this is supposed to "mean" to Eragon. He babbles on for a while and then hands down a trite little revelation about how people probably wouldn't fight each other anymore if they could see what he's seen. It cheapens it so much.
You know what would have driven home the majesty and beauty he was going for?
Some freakin' silence.
Don't narrate the sacred, okay? Just invoking an image and then leaving us to marinate in that would have actually been good storytelling--a good character-building lesson in perspective for Eragon. Instead, we get a litany of hollow platitudes yammered into our ears, rambling about how small he'd once thought the world was and how big it seemed now, and specific ways in which he "was once an ant is now an eagle" or some crap, and on and on about how he's reorienting his life because of this perspective shift.
Bad Dialogue:
"And to what do we owe the unexpected pleasure of this visit, Your Highness? Werecats have always been noted for their secrecy and their solitude, and for remaining apart from the conflicts of the age, especially since the fall of the Riders. One might even say that your kind has become more myth than fact over the past century. Why, then, do you now choose to reveal yourselves?"
Thank you, Ms. Exposition!
There's this thing called "As you know, Bob." This is bleedingly, horrifyingly terrible exposition. It is so written that it's insulting.
Silly dialogue is also frequently praised by other characters, proving once again that even Paolini's characters love Paolini.
Here are a few lines of dialogue I thought were ridiculous:
"These are customs older than time itself." [No they're not.]
"I fight to win, not to lose. . . . " [I can't imagine why.]
"Nor do I want to sit alone in my tent, watching mine beard grow." [What's wrong with thine English, Orik?]
"It doesn't rhyme, but then, you can't expect me to compose proper verse on the spur of the moment." [Yeah, who do you think I am, the great poet Paolini?]
Shameless thefts:
Lord of the Rings, of course: Elves are said to have come from across the silver sea. There is a line of Gollum dialogue.
Dune: I still think Elva is inspired by Alia. But the jig was up on Paolini cribbing from Herbert when he named a dragon "Bid'Daum." I'm not kidding; he really did that.
Monty Python: Seriously, the insults still sound like the French Taunter.
Predictable nonsense:
The red herrings were painful. (view spoiler)[Paolini names a place "the Vault of Souls," invents the concept of a dragon living on after death in its heart of hearts, suggests that these dragon hearts are what gives Galbatorix his power, and then denies that the Vault of Souls might contain dragon hearts to be tapped to combat the dark lord. It's glossed over, then denied outright, and then finally it of course turns out to be exactly what it seemed. It was also obvious, as soon as we found out that oaths can be broken if a true name changes, that Murtagh was going to escape Galbatorix's control by doing so. Even better: he did so through the power of looooove, like a Sailor Moon episode. (hide spoiler)]
Contradictions: Ugh. Brace yourselves.
During a cheeky "history" ramble at the beginning, Paolini retells the events of his previous three books and promptly makes several misleading explanations which suggest he hasn't read his own books.
Katrina's pregnant at the start of the book and was already showing in the previous book. The baby isn't born until well after a huge denouement, before which occurred the planning, attack, and defeat of the dark lord, followed by rebuilding and a few uprisings. Apparently all this happened in seven months.
A newborn baby "smiles" at Eragon. Sorry, dude. Babies that young can't smile. That was gas.
Post-baby-face-healing, the elves praise Eragon and say that his amazing feat in doing so was far beyond anything any of their spellcasters could have achieved.
Eragon starts eating meat again, displaying no recognition that he decided earlier that eating meat was excusable only if other food sources were unavailable or if he thought it'd be too rude to refuse.
Paolini has stated in interviews as well as in his ancient language rules that the suffix "ya" makes stuff plural. He proceeds to break that rule about 140 times in this book.
Elva gets shamed and manipulated by Eragon in a horribly offensive way. She refuses to come on a mission. Someone dies. Eragon blames her, threatens her, makes her cry, forces her to apologize, and shames her into helping him next time. When confronting Galbatorix, he points out how weak it is to bring a child in, and he claims she came of her own free will.
(view spoiler)[Galbatorix tells Eragon he didn't become king by fighting fair. He then proceeds to relent and let Eragon have a fair fight (albeit with Murtagh). This "distraction" leads to a revelation that allows Eragon to mess with Galbatorix's head and he ends up destroying himself. Splendid. (hide spoiler)]
(view spoiler)[The Good Guys decide to change the way magic works to let dwarves and Urgals become Riders. They leave out the werecats, even though werecats showed up as one of the forces to be reckoned with as a race in this book.
Eragon can control reality at the end of the book because he knows the name of the ancient language. He then proceeds to act as though he is powerless to change some things about his life and others' lives that really suck: Some aspects of Elva's situation (he can't leave her with power but still take her pain?), crappy sexism that's pointed out to him, the loss of a sentimentally important artifact, and some prophecy about how he has to leave Alagaësia forever. Oh please. (hide spoiler)]
Nonsense/Contrived events: Lots of this too.
A special spear that was thought lost to the ages is recovered in the first chapter when someone tries to kill Saphira with it. It's a lance designed specifically to kill dragons. And then, despite having struck home on both Saphira and Thorn, it doesn't actually kill any dragons until (view spoiler)[they try to use it on Galbatorix's dragon. Then it works fine! (hide spoiler)]
Roran creates a ruse that is so improbable that it was stupid. It depended on such dumb chance events that I couldn't swallow it. Especially when an enemy soldier who's suspicious of Roran is totally willing to just take a sip of his alcoholic beverage. Sounds totally like what military dudes would do before retreating!
Sometimes, using the ancient language makes something become true (like saying "fire" and suddenly there is fire). Other times, it's suggested you can't possibly say something in the ancient language unless it already is true, so it's a litmus test for lies. That doesn't make sense. Especially if you can bully someone into swearing loyalty to you which MAKES it true. Wouldn't a lie just BECOME true if you said it in the ancient language?
A cartoon villain scene occurs when Eragon and Arya are left chained up while a monster hatches from an egg. Once it hatches, it will eat them. Oh no! But of course, the culprits from a gore-obsessed religion don't stay to watch them get eaten alive. They stick around long enough to laugh at their plight, then leave the room. Which of course leads to them being able to escape in time. Why is the video game boss so surprised when they emerge alive? It knows it signed up to be a Bond villain.
When Eragon is directionless and doesn't know how to lead the Varden to victory, a prophecy is invoked, which leads him directly to a giant deus ex machina. He goes on the prophesied quest, finds exactly what he needs, and also finds out that (view spoiler)[deceased dragons have been watching over him since before he became a Rider. It was they who manipulated reality and his life to make everything improbable happen all along. Yes, Dragon Guardian Angels. Explains everything! Plus they find secret dragon eggs and therefore the dragons won't go extinct after all! (hide spoiler)] Happy happy.
Eragon seems fine (though sad) over leaving Alagaësia to go train dragons in the east. When people keep asking him why he has to go and "never return," he invokes a prophecy Angela made. Angela also prophesied that he would have an epic romance. (view spoiler)[He didn't.
That said, even though he and Arya do not have sex (or even kiss), they exchange true names, which is much more intimate and suggests handing over ultimate control of each other. It's suggested strongly that they decide not to get together because of conflicting circumstances, not because of lack of feeling. Eragon clearly won the girl over by the end, even if it didn't pan out for him. (His dragon got laid, though! Saphira lost her virginity to Arya's dragon!) (hide spoiler)]
And finally, a few author fails:
Paolini's how-to on removing suspense from your novels: Eragon's cousin Roran and several other members of the Varden get crushed under a crumbling wall. Roran is the only one who survives because he happened to be underneath some kind of support thing when it fell. Paolini, you see, you're trying to inject your story with reasonable doubt about who might die, but you're doing it really poorly if a wall collapses and EVERYONE DIES EXCEPT THE IMPORTANT GUY. It doesn't fool us into thinking your main characters are actually in mortal danger.
A character like Roran could only die in self-sacrifice because there was no other way, or in a prophesied scenario, or, I don't know, saving a disabled child who's holding a puppy or something.
Paolini doesn't trust his audience. He thinks we're kinda thick. (And I guess we are, if we're still reading these books expecting to get some kind of pleasure out of the experience.) I've noticed it's very common for him to say something that we can completely understand, but then just in case we're extraordinarily thick, he'll have an ignorant character show up and ask questions so he can explain stuff to us that was usually pretty obvious.
Roran acts sexist, especially when he's doing so while pretending to give the finger to gender roles. And Chris still hasn't figured out the difference between writing a strong hero and writing an antisocial bastard.
Paolini's narration also suggests disabled people would be better off born dead, repeatedly compares people bending over to "like a cripple" or "like an old man with rheumatism," and advocates animal cruelty by having no one object to the werecats compelling regular cats to kill themselves in battle. There is too much torture--with details that involve the famous geological comparisons--and sometimes he includes so many details that it sounds like he's trying to prove he did the research this time.
And finally. . . .
Are you sure Eragon isn't you, Paolini?
Quote:
Wherever he looked, he saw an overwhelming amount of detail, but he was convinced there was even more that he was not perceptive enough to notice.
I found this sentence kind of ironic. Eragon's been told that he's not actually SEEING what he's looking at, and therefore he's trying to see more. However, very much like his author, Eragon doesn't understand that detail is NOT what you need in order to fully and properly understand something. I'd like Paolini to stop fixating on details and understand essence.(less)
This one had a little less of the annoying factor compared to the first volume because it wasn't constantly smacking you over the head with exposition...moreThis one had a little less of the annoying factor compared to the first volume because it wasn't constantly smacking you over the head with exposition, but more information about the premise filtered in during this volume and it rubbed me the wrong way. It's insinuated that the Fables--people from alternate worlds who got chased from their fictional worlds to hide among the "mundanes" (ugh) in our world--have a definite understanding of themselves being story characters and that it matters to them how often the so-called mundanes tell their stories. (For instance, Rose Red is jealous of Snow White for being more well-known, and it's suggested that the better-known you are, the easier it is for you to survive, say, a gunshot wound to the head. Gee.) Yet, when the various Three Little Pigs die, it doesn't matter that they replaced them with three more little pigs for the normal people to believe in without knowing the originals got killed. I don't get it, especially since that whole switch-a-roo was played like the audience was gonna go "oooh, deep." (I felt the same about several "reveals" throughout the story.) The whole civil war plot and the way Snow White and Rose Red ended up at the Animal Farm seemed really contrived to me, too. Though I must say Goldilocks having a consummate relationship with one of the Three Bears made me chuckle.(less)
My friend Eric thought I'd like this because I guess it has some common threads with Sandman (which I adore), but so far it has yet to be anywhere nea...moreMy friend Eric thought I'd like this because I guess it has some common threads with Sandman (which I adore), but so far it has yet to be anywhere near as dramatic, innovative, and authentic as Neil Gaiman's masterpiece. So a bunch of fictional characters from the various stories we know and love have been exiled from their fairytale homelands (by a mysterious adversary, motives unknown), and now they live secretly among regular people, with their own place for people like them called Fabletown. (They refer to themselves as "Fables.") A detective story featuring the murder of Rose Red is the motivating force in the action, and various reinvented characters play suspects, victims, and sleuths. This graphic novel pushed about a dozen of my pet peeve buttons immediately.
1. Severe overuse of characters lighting a cigarette to show off how hard-boiled they are.
2. Cameo nonsense. Some people might find the repeated references to fairy tales enjoyable, but I definitely felt beaten over the head. "Hi Jack. Climbed any beanstalks lately?" You know, so we'll know which Jack this is. "Never mention the dwarves" being a warning about what you just don't say to Snow White. Etc.
3. Overuse of emphasis with bold lettering. I'm thinking this might be a comic thing that I'm just oversensitive to since I tend not to read a whole lot of American graphic novels, but anytime something was either stressed or significant, it was bolded. It got tiring.
4. For some reason I get really annoyed when regular people, whatever "regular" people are in some fantastical reality, are called "mundanes." In this series, not only are normal people called mundanes, but they're called "mundys" for short. Just something I'm tired of.
5. Critical levels of as-you-know-Bob. Characters' pasts are filled in with awkward dialogue. "You remember when you did such and such?" / "Shut up, you can't hold that against me, that was before the amnesty!" Or Snow White feels prompted to explain exactly how the balance of power works between the "actual" mayor of Fabletown (King Cole) and herself (second-in-command) because someone she's talking to points out that she's not the mayor. Occasionally this is lampshaded ("Your sister, Rose Red." "I'm not entirely an idiot. I actually know my own sister's name."--that sort of thing), but I had shoehorned-in exposition squirting out my ears before the first chapter was over.
Add in the fact that I'm not a fan of detective stories anyway--especially "and this is how I figured it all out" endings--and you get to conclude I didn't care for this. The art itself was fine, though sometimes the emotion seemed detached from the dialogue. I'm still going to read the second one because a) sometimes comics get better as they relax into their world, and b) Eric lent me both, so I'll read both. (less)
There was so much that was good about this book. I appreciated that Melody, a girl with cerebral palsy who can't speak, had her own imperfections (bey...moreThere was so much that was good about this book. I appreciated that Melody, a girl with cerebral palsy who can't speak, had her own imperfections (beyond her disability) and wasn't written as a complete saint--that's a pitfall many authors can't seem to avoid when trying to write a book like this from the perspective of a disabled child. Melody is smart as a whip but needs help to communicate and has almost no control over her body, and yet many of the people responsible for her education weren't willing to accept her abilities for what they really are. I liked that there were so many varieties of reactions to her--that many of her classmates may have been outright rude and cruel to her, but many of them were in gray areas . . . meaning they said and did a lot of the right things but did so out of apparent feelings of obligation, not because they wanted to.
I liked how realistic the mainstreaming experience was for Melody, and I liked that her time in the disabled class was clearly just babysitting (because that totally happens in school all the time). And I liked that sometimes when bad things happened, the story didn't swoop in and pull out a miracle solution to make everything okay again. The author let disaster strike and then let the characters further show their colors by dealing with it.
There were a few things I didn't like, but most of it was just delivery. There were a couple places where I thought Melody made some insensitive comments about fat people (commenting mentally that someone's belly was "gross" or suggesting people's large size as automatically unflattering). The narration flipped from past tense to present tense pretty much arbitrarily, though it did it in chunks or between chapters so it wasn't particularly distracting. I thought the children sometimes spoke too maturely--for instance, a fifth grader is quoted as saying "It never occurred to me that Melody had thoughts in her head." I taught elementary school and even though obviously some of the children had advanced vocabulary, they didn't tend to talk like this; sometimes it just didn't sound natural. There was one bit that felt planted: when Melody's sister is pointed out to have a tendency to run out the door to try to get in the car, I knew it would be important and I knew however it would be important would be dangerous, so I just kept waiting for it to happen. But except for these small things, I found it an enjoyable read and I thought Melody was a fascinating character, and the storytelling style was innovative.
I cried a little when one of the first things Melody did when she got her talking machine was tell her parents she loved them.(less)
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