Second Breakfast

My husband bought this for me for Christmas (”something not on your list”), so I felt compelled to want to like this book. I had of course seen it in the bookstores, and heard the story of the precocious teenage author Paolini. For that reason alone (yes I’m that petty) I avoided it (excess precociousness gives me a headache).

And of course recently the movie version of the book was produced, and the reviews have been mostly awful (as one child viewer reportedly asked his father in tears “Daddy, why did they do that to my book? I liked the book!”).
Within the first few pages what struck me most was the terrible quality of the prose (almost as bad as Terry Brooks, for whom every noun must be matched with an adjective) and the dialog. There’s a reason that good writers 1) read a lot of literature, 2) write a lot, and 3) tend to be old. It takes time and lots of practice to develop the ability to generate good prose, much less beautiful prose. Genre authors have to be doubly careful, and should read outside of their genre. It feels to me like Paolini has had none of those benefits so far.

The other problem he has is that he’s struggling with the “Tolkien problem” in the large. How do you write heroic fantasy without being too derivative of the wonderful (and not-so-wonderful) exemplars that have likely inspired you? Of course its seemingly-impossible to write anything new under the sun, so you need a double measure of skill to make the material your own, and inform it with your own ideas. I don’t see a lot of that going on in Paolini’s books.

So in Eragon we find a lot of George Lucas, a measure of Anne McCaffrey, a heaping helping of Tolkien, and a good bit of LeGuin. Stir well and there you go.  While this would have made a very impressive high school creative writing project, as a piece of commercial fiction its pretty bad.
So I just read some of the Amazon review before finishing this review. I swear I didn’t read them before I wrote this.