Brisingr Review
Brisingr, or, The Seven Promises of Eragon Shadeslayer and Saphira Bjartskular is the third book in the Inheritance Cycle by Christopher Paolini. I would like to note that at his point, he is 25, and not 15, so he will be allowed no exceptions from the Age Card. Nor will he receive any exceptions from the War Veterans Card, since he is not a war veteran. It is interesting to note that this book took three years to publish. So you might expect that, given this amount of time, the book is pretty good.
Your expectations are always wrong, when it comes to the Inheritance Cycle, unless you were expecting an obvious plot twist. Spoilers ahoy: the only plot twist in the book is that Brom is Eragon’s father. Just about every fan who has ever posted on the Inheritance Forums predicted this, showing just how inventive the series is. But more than that the plot points are predictable, the book suffers from a far larger problem. The plot points are few and far-between. Wikipedia’s plot summary) deems a mere 5 events worthy of summary. Approximately 1 for every 155 pages of this colossal beast. Further, one of them involves the dwarves, who just aren’t very interesting.
Now, the book doesn’t contain a lot of plot, but it sure has a lot of scenes. The problem is, you get the feeling this book was just a collection of scenes cobbled together. For example, Eragon randomly meets a hermit magician in an abandoned keep… and then, nothing. After helping the hermit prepare a meal, and listening to a convoluted rant, Eragon runs away. It leaves the reader wondering what the point was. This is not the only instance of this. There are enough to fill 784 pages. Each page leads you to wonder whether the story will go anywhere.
I only comment on the need of plot, because Paolini’s characters still struggle to be sympathetic. In books by masters, such as Anna Karenina we can tolerate hundreds of pages of characters sitting around and talking. But since the Inheritance Cycle has always been about its Bildungsroman epic fantasy quest, when the book stops supplying this, it stops supplying at all. Perhaps the reason Eragon was the most tolerable book of the three is that it stuck to the formulaic but comfortable Star Wars plot. Eldest and Brisingr lack the eventfulness, and so they fall flat.
Actually, there aren’t even enough random events to fill 784 pages. Paolini’s signature purple prose and poor descriptors fill close to a third of the pages. This was an area I had really expected Paolini to make great headway in. Writing style is something you undoubtedly can improve with time, and Paolini has had ten years to do it. He also has a professional editor to help him. But the writing really hasn’t improved, and the book is still filled with guffaw inducing lines. Paragraph long descriptions of common place things in the environment still fail to breathe life into Paolini’s lifeless Middle Earth. The great novelist Chekhov once said, “In the particular is contained the universal.” Paolini’s descriptions are void of those little details of description that stick with us. Instead he uses his favored vague adjectives and cliches to describe things, sometimes forcing as many as five adjectives into a single terrified sentence, begging for mercy.
In addition, the dialogue is still contrived. Characters make use of such ridiculous anachronisms as “partook” and “forsooth.” Even as a realistic old English dialect, the dialogue falls short, as anyone who has read Shakespeare can probably tell you. This is ignoring the simple fact that the conversations are unrealistic to begin with. In particular, one Urgal is compelled to blurt out his entire life story, as the reader dozes.
Perhaps the reader would doze less if the most potentially exciting scene in the entire series hadn’t happened off screen. As we can all recall, the “epic showdown” between Eragon and Murtagh in the end of Eldest had been a huge anticlimax. Well, guess what? The fight between Murtagh and Oromis happens off screen. That’s right. What could have been the coolest scene in the series doesn’t happen at all, as far as we are concerned. All we get is a report that Oromis and Glaedr are dead. Truly a masterful story teller. Or perhaps, writing another action scene was too much work. Brisingr is crowned by another triumphant anti-climax.
If you were one of the people who gave Paolini the benefit of doubt, and hoped he would improve, I’ll say this: he did improve, but not by much. And considering how bad the initial quality is, a slight improvement still places you in the “Cliche Fantasy Paperback” category. It’s disappointing that after such a long wait, the book just doesn’t deliver.
For a chapter by chapter break down of the failures, check here.
By Lazarus
on Sep 21, 06:01 PM