Image Courtesy of Hooded Villain
“Prolonged, indiscriminate reviewing of books is a quite exceptionally thankless, irritating and exhausting job. It not only involves praising trash but constantly inventing reactions towards books about which one has no spontaneous feeling whatever.” – George Orwell
Not Another Book Review Blog
This blog is not an amateur book review site, if you want one of the many good reviews of this book look no further than here. I'm not out to try and make money by getting in bed with Amazon or whatever and the only reason Google AdSense is on this page is because I'm hosted on blog.co.uk, I don't make a penny (not that I would with no readership anyway). I'd like to move this blog onto my own site one day and remove all the ads, but let's see how this goes first. This blog is different, it is a place where I can record my reading life, a process that evolves and continues every day. I’ll be posting thoughts and ideas I get from the books I read, how they have influenced my own writing or simply how much I like or dislike a particular passage, chapter, character or plot-point and why. I’ll quite often mention books that are behind me in the trail, before this blog began, but I’ll never link out to one I haven’t read. So, without further ado, let the book trail begin.
Robin Hobb
I’ve never read a Robin Hobb book before but often noticed the name on the shelf. I didn’t realise until recently that Robin is a woman, real name Megan Lindholm. Both names evoke a sense of celtic myth, witchcraft and fantasy to me (great). So I finally decided to read my first Robin Hobb book: “Assassin’s Apprentice”, Book One of The Farseer trilogy (no link yet, I’m only a third of the way through). I actually went in to get Book One of The Liveship Traders trilogy, on a recommendation from a friend, but they only had Book Two in stock at my local library when I went there and Book One of Farseer was right there on the shelf next to it. Aren’t libraries great? I mean that non-sarcastically of course.
My Kind Of Fantasy
You gotta love Lord of the Rings (read three times, you don't need a link surely) and the classic trilogy now seems to be classed as “high fantasy”, which I take to mean anything with elves in. In fact LOTR no doubt defined high fantasy (although not fantasy itself - The King of Elfland's Daughter and Beowulf precede it by a long way, both are ahead on the trail). But I see the fantasy genre lying across a broad spectrum with high fantasy (magic, battles, elves, orcs) at one end and a book like Ursula LeGuin’s Voices (is it really magic or is it all psychological?) at the other. Assassin's Apprentice sits somewhere at the Voices end of that spectrum and I feel comfortable there at the moment. Don’t get me wrong, I love elves (especially if they’re a bit different as in Well of Darkness, Book One of The Sovereign Stone trilogy by Margaret Weis & Tracy Hickman) and dragons (Eragon, Eldest by Christopher Paolini – how does someone so young do it!?) but there is more of a tendency for that end of the spectrum to be very formulaic or worse, a Lord of the Rings wannabe, and nothing can beat LOTR on its own ground in my opinion. I must say that none of the books I’ve mentioned so far are either trope-ridden fantasy-bricks or pretenders to Tolkien’s throne.
A Skillful Weaver of Magic
Almost all fantasy books have some kind of magic system in there somewhere. The development of magic in Eldest is utterly fascinating and is scarily along similar lines to the system of magic I’m developing for my own novel (and I thought I was being original). Magic in Assassin’s Apprentice is there but it's in the background and so far it is being introduced into the story in a very subtle and understated way. A simple mention of “The Skill” and “The Wit” is all you get in the first couple of chapters followed soon after by unintentional demonstrations of each by the main protagonist, Fitz, a young boy with royal heritage. The real magic in any book is how the authour can bring a character to life and Hobb is skilled indeed at characterisation. I really felt strong emotion when the young Fitz’s magical connection with his best friend, a young puppy called Nosy, was savagely severed by Fitz’s guardian, Burrich, to save Fitz from going down the path of The Wit. To show such an animal lover as Burrich killing a young pup means that the Wit must be very dangerous, and I have expectations of a disaster to come as Fitz seems to still dabble in it now and then.
The Trope of Inheritance
Now one of the things I dislike in a fantasy plot is a main character, usually a farm-boy in a distant village, eventually finding out that he’s the long-lost son of the King. Done well this can be great (the original LOTR character, Aragorn, does not find out – he has always known, it is the reader who is in the dark initially but not for long). Used as a simple plot device it is shallow. Hobb tells you right off the bat that Fitz is the bastard child of the King-in-Waiting (Fitz – get it?), no mystery, no self-discovery near the climax, it’s an integral and intentional part of the story. It works well and is not a tired plot device. In fact, I can safely extend that to the whole book, which is refreshingly original throughout.
Brisingr
While finding the links for this blog post I only just found out the release date and title for the third Eragon book (Book Three of the Inheritance Trilogy), so excited! Guess I'll have to wait for it to appear in my library though. Maybe it's one of those rare books I'll buy.
knanshon
Actually, on second thoughts I must concede that Eragon is a bit if a trope-ridden fantasy-brick. When I was chomping my way through the first few chapters I despaired a little at the farm-boy-makes-good direction the story seemed to be taking. I also found that the large amounts of monologue from old men, especially Brom, jarred me out of the story as they were obviously there to explain the world's history and character backstories to the reader. The relationship between Eragon and his dragon Saphira is what kept me interested through this and I was hooked after the scene where he jumps on the young dragon's wings in a fierce storm to save her delicate wing membranes from being ripped apart by the wind.
I also found that Paolini's development of new 'evil' races (Urgals, Raz'ak) is must more interesing than his use of the stock-in-trade 'good' races; Elves and Dwarves. I remember groaning when Dwarves first popped their little stunted heads up but he does go on to show us their respective societies in quite an interesting way towards the ends and in more depth in the sequel Eldest.
But, that said, I still enjoyed Eragon and his second book, Eldest is much better, although not with out a spectacular deus ex machina involving 'dragon magic', which just breaks all the rules of normal magic that he has developed so well.
I'm much more interested in the world's ancient history, Eragon's elvish mentor told him a brief story about the early days of magic and the mysterious Grey Folk who laid down its laws, tying magic to the ancient language. I hope this was a foreshadowing of what's to come in Brisingr, and my hopes are bolstered by the new book's title, which is the word for fire in the ancient language.