The Inheritance Cycle is often noted for its good descriptive language. As such, I’ve decided to compile a bunch of quotes that I consider to be absolutely horrendous descriptive language or bouts of silliness. I’m not attacking thesaurus abuse too heavily, because that’s been bashed enough already. This is more about insane tangents and weird similes, though, if I can attack serious plot problems and language at the same time, I will.

Chapter 1: The Gates of Death

which loomed over the surrounding land like a black dagger thrust out from the bowels of the earth. (p.1)

He’s trying to convey the extent to which Helgrind looms over the area by comparing it to a dagger from the bowels of the earth. Having never seen nor heard of a black dagger thrust from the bowels of the Earth looming over things, I’m not sure what to make of this.

when they stepped forward with their right foot, producing a dolorous cacophony of notes (p.2)

…thus raising the question of what kind of footwear these people are using to create sad noises when they stomp.

while the other half shook their frames when they advanced upon the left foot, causing iron tongues to crash against iron throats (p.2)

Oo?

throbbing of the bells (p.2)

Hopefully this isn’t taken any further.

moaning of the bells (p.2)

NOOOOOOOOOOOO!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

whipping the congregation into such a frenzy, they jumped and yelled as if they had taken leave of their senses. (p.4)

‘As if’ they had taken leave of their senses? Doesn’t the first part imply that they had already done so, more or less? Or at least were in the process of doing so?

It was a tool designed for but one purpose: to hack through armor and bones and sinew as easily as through a bulging waterskin. (p.5)

That is quite an all-encompassing one purpose.

Insects and animals alike (p.6)

In Alagaesia, insects are actually robots.

Roran was watching him with the expression of a starving wolf. His grey eyes burned with a mixture of anger, hope, and despair that was so great, it seemed as if his emotions might burst forth and incinerate everything in sight in a blaze of unimaginable intensity, melting the very rocks themselves. (p.7)

This is a great example of a spot where all but the first sentence could have been cut off, reducing this excerpt to 1/5th its length, and have it express the point more effectively. Also, Roran’s facial expressions must be pretty weird.

They seemed cold and sharp, like bright shards of ice. (p.9)

This is describing constellations.
Yeah.

Chapter 2: Around the Campfire

coals throbbed (p.10)

Those are some strange coals.

Normally, he never had to tell her what he had been doing, as thoughts, feelings, and other sensations flowed between them as easily as water from one side of a lake to another. (p.10)

So, in other words, the thoughts flow really slowly and aimlessly. Unless Inheritance uses a different definition of what a lake is than I do…

The name alone generated a welter of confused emotions in Eragon. (p.12)

A welter is a confused mass. The name generated a confused mass of confused emotions. This calls on people to open up their dictionaries only to find redundancy. This sentence essentially whips anyone who looks up the word welter while reading it. It’s cruel.

She flew nonstop until the sun had traversed the dome of the sky and extinguished itself behind the horizon and then burst forth again with a glorious conflagration of reds and yellows (p.15)

In addition to being the weirdest description of the daily sun cycle ever (extinguished?), this is an obscenely long description for something very mundane.

You must learn to think without thinking (p.24)

Impossibilities for the win!

The branch Roran had added to the fire burst asunder with a muted pop as the coals underneath heated the gnarled length of wood to the point where a small cache of water or sap that had somehow evaded the rays of the sun for untold decades exploded into steam. (p.27)

The fire crackled.

A riotous combination of colors mottled his skin, as if Eragon were an exotic fruit that was ripening in uneven patches from crabapple green to putrefied purple. (p.30)

In addition to that not making any sense for an impact injury (I’m not sure why exactly a bruise would be crabapple green), the bruise also terribly inconsistent as far as the plot goes. Let us back up 56 pages:

Careful not to impale himself on one of her spikes, Eragon maneuvered himself back into the saddle, welcoming the return of gravity as she pulled out of the dive. (Eldest, p.642)

This does not sound like he got destroyed in the, uh, fork of his legs. He also shows no sort of pain in this scene, so the whole bruise thing seems to not have been made up until Brisingr was being written. There’s bad prose and inconsistency in the same words.

Chapter 3: Assault on Helgrind

A fan of golden light flared into existence as the top of the sun crested the horizon. In an instant, the full spectrum of colors enlivened the previously drab world: (p.38)

It would have to be quite a fast sunrise for the light coloration to be described as instant by a human observer. Does Alagaësia have 10-minute days or something?

The jagged buttress magnified the boom produced by each stroke of her wings until it was as loud as a thunderclap. Eragon’s eyes watered as the air pulsed against his skin. (p.39)

This makes it sound like Saphira is a massive hummingbird.

nor shrubs, grass, or lichen, nor did eagles dare nest upon the tower’s broken ledges. True to its name, Helgrind was a place of death, (p.39)

In Alagaësia, lack of life is the same as death.

Eragon grimaced. It had never occurred to him that Galbatorix might have hidden the Ra’zac’s lair with magic (p.40)

Does he grimace every time that he’s humbled?

Like mysterious keyholes, five low tunnels pierced the sides of the cave (p.41)

As opposed to understood keyholes.

His blind flight ended as abruptly as it began when something hard and flat rammed against the back of him (p.41)

It can’t ram against his back. No, it has to ram against the back of him.

resembled the sort of overpowering stench one would get from tossing a half-dozen pounds of rancid meat into a barrel of sewage and allowing the mixture to ferment for a week in summer. (p.42)

I can totally relate to that.

Perhaps the Ra’zac could conceal themselves from the minds of humans, their prey, just as spiders conceal themselves from flies. (p.43)

That comparison doesn’t make any sense. Spiders conceal themselves by using subtle traps, not by having innate total invisibility to specific kinds of detection. This is the difference between good tactics and god mode.

was a metallic blue-green, not unlike the verdigris that forms on aged copper (p.44)

One of the cool things about that verdigris is that isn’t very metallic.

Each sentence he uttered, and they were legion (p.45)

NOOOOOOOOOOOO!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

In a rather detached way, Eragon noticed that the Ra’zac’s tongue was barbed and purple and writhed like a headless snake. (p.46)

Yes, that is quite detached. Not just for Eragon, but for the fight sequence in general. Especially since said enemy is all over him at this point in time. At least the book is admitting that it’s full of random comments, though.

Tagged as: ,

Comment

  1. SlyShy on 9 March 2009, 01:21 said:

    Christopher seems very much a fan of the word “throbbing”. Guess where else I see this word used a lot… cough

  2. Kitty on 9 March 2009, 01:36 said:

    Let’s play a game with this and a bottle of vodka. One shot for every freakish simile, two shots for anything that could be taken as innuendo (and add an “if ya know what I mean”), and three shots for every simple action described in ridiculous detail.

  3. SlyShy on 9 March 2009, 01:39 said:

    That’s the most unfair drinking game I’ve ever heard of. Your blood alcohol level would be hovering at around .5 by the time you finished.

  4. scary_viking on 9 March 2009, 01:44 said:

    Let’s play a game with this and a bottle of vodka. One shot for every freakish simile, two shots for anything that could be taken as innuendo (and add an “if ya know what I mean”), and three shots for every simple action described in ridiculous detail.

    This would be dangerous even with water, your electrolites would deplete and you’d die. Propel might be survivable though.

    :)

  5. Kitty on 9 March 2009, 01:44 said:

    That alleviates the pain of reading it, of course.

  6. SubStandardDeviation on 9 March 2009, 01:44 said:

    …and all this in the first fifty pages. Seriously, is he trying to bore the reader to death?

    It was a tool designed for but one purpose: to hack through armor and bones and sinew as easily as through a bulging waterskin. (p.5)

    I could imagine it hacking through armor, bones, sinew, and wood if it were an axe, but…

    She flew nonstop until the sun had traversed the dome of the sky and extinguished itself behind the horizon and then burst forth again with a glorious conflagration of reds and yellows (p.15)

    “She flew nonstop for a whole day and night.”

    A fan of golden light flared into existence as the top of the sun crested the horizon. In an instant, the full spectrum of colors enlivened the previously drab world: (p.38)

    “The sun cast Prismatic Spray.”

    In a rather detached way, Eragon noticed that the Ra’zac’s tongue was barbed and purple and writhed like a headless snake. (p.46)

    “Purple” and “writhing” and “OH GOD don’t eat me!” would have sufficed, imho.

    @ Drinking Game: kippurbird has one here:
    http://eragon-sporkings.wikispaces.com/Brisinger_Drink

    • Use of the word Throbbing or Throb
    • the word meat.
    • Every time his prose gets utterly ridiculous.
    • Every time there is a weird metaphor or simile
    • Every time Paolini uses a food metaphor. Or something is described and it sounds like it should be food.
  7. SlyShy on 9 March 2009, 01:49 said:

    She flew nonstop until the sun had traversed the dome of the sky and extinguished itself behind the horizon and then burst forth again with a glorious conflagration of reds and yellows (p.15)

    I did a double take here, because I thought this was Eragon. Here is the sun described in Eragon.

    “The sun rose the next morning with a glorious conflagration of pink and yellow.” – (p.9)

    Paolini just reused the worst description of the sun that I had ever read—if you ignore some of his other descriptions, that is.

  8. Kevin on 9 March 2009, 01:57 said:

    Who the bloody hell has ever praised Inheritance for its good descriptive language? That’s what I want to know.

  9. Kevin on 9 March 2009, 01:59 said:

    Oh, and Kitty: ‘A’ bottle? As in one?

  10. scary_viking on 9 March 2009, 02:08 said:

    Who the bloody hell has ever praised Inheritance for its good descriptive language? That’s what I want to know.

    Most fans and various critics consider his prose to be absolutely fantastic.

  11. SlyShy on 9 March 2009, 02:15 said:

    Various critics need to take off their crazy glasses.

    Also, after witnessing that particular instance of description reuse, I wonder if he does that other times.

  12. scary_viking on 9 March 2009, 02:32 said:

    If you really need evidence of fans wanting more of that prose, there’s a thread right now on the Shurtugal forums where a bunch of people are arguing that Paolini should split book 4 up.

    I stated my opinion there but let the issue drop. These people say that 700 pages is too few for Paolini to tie up the loose ends and finish the plot properly, and they want it to be done with the proper length of writing.

  13. falconempress on 9 March 2009, 03:33 said:

    Nice points made:) I enjoyed this article a lot:)

    But only because you were sporking. The prose is nothing short of nauseating (I made the mistake of reading this while eating my breakfast). And there is only one explanation for why people thing Paolinis prose is brilliant – they all read a different book by mistake and never laid an eye on any of Paolinis description.

  14. SubStandardDeviation on 9 March 2009, 04:11 said:

    Paolini just reused the worst description of the sun that I had ever read—if you ignore some of his other descriptions, that is.

    Wow. I just realized that too.

    Good news and bad news:
    The Good – ImpishIdea is the first Google hit for “glorious conflagration”.
    The Bad – the phrase “glorious conflagration” is by no means confined to Inheritance.

  15. Kevin on 9 March 2009, 06:38 said:

    The phrase is so bad it ought to be banned. The hell with freedom of speech, if that’s what we’re going to do with it.

  16. SlyShy on 9 March 2009, 06:51 said:

    The branch Roran had added to the fire burst asunder with a muted pop as the coals underneath heated the gnarled length of wood to the point where a small cache of water or sap that had somehow evaded the rays of the sun for untold decades exploded into steam. (p.27)

    This… just slays me.

  17. CGilga on 9 March 2009, 07:20 said:

    I honestly thought that this was Eragon until you mentioned Brisingr. This is really how far he has come as an author? Really? Really?

  18. Kevin on 9 March 2009, 07:32 said:

    “What is this ‘self-satire’ of which you speak? I am not cognizant of these expressions, and my brow throbs with inglorious shame.” – CP

  19. Dan Locke on 9 March 2009, 10:09 said:

    Part 1? How long will this series last? Are you going to go through the entire book?

  20. SlyShy on 9 March 2009, 10:12 said:

    Part 1? How long will this series last? Are you going to go through the entire book?

    That would be epic.

  21. Diamonte on 9 March 2009, 10:26 said:

    You know, Christopher Paolini seems to be growing worse as a writer instead of better. Eragon wasn’t that bad – it was highly derivative and never should have been published, but still a decent attempt. Eldest and Brisingr [or whatever the hell it’s called] are so much worse than his first book. Ugh. I wish Stephen King would come out and say something about HIM as well.

    At least the innuendos in here are * gigglesnort * …. interesting.

  22. WiseWillow on 9 March 2009, 15:48 said:

    The purple prose, it burns my eyes! Ow, ow, ow!

    Honestly, since when do the bowels of the earth sprout black daggers?

  23. Juniper on 9 March 2009, 19:52 said:

    In Alagaesia, insects are actually robots.

    This made me lol. Because everything must be described in a very detailed manner, and even detached thoughts have paragraph-long descriptions. Wow.

  24. scary_viking on 9 March 2009, 20:08 said:

    Part 1? How long will this series last? Are you going to go through the entire book?

    I’m considering giving the whole thing a shot, but don’t hold your breath.

  25. Snow White Queen on 11 March 2009, 20:34 said:

    This is how I’m supposed to be writing for English class, I think. ‘Show, don’t tell’. Blech.

    But the whole ‘it was a tool made for but one purpose’ reminded me of the whole ‘it is an army bred for a single purpose- to destroy the world of men’ quote from LotR.

    Yes, I am crazy.

  26. Corey on 1 April 2009, 01:21 said:

    No, Snow White Queen, I immediately thought of that LotR quote too! Gee, I wonder why that could be?

  27. Snow White Queen on 1 April 2009, 01:25 said:

    Mwahaha.

    >:)

    Perhaps it’s because CP is a total Tolkien/ George Lucas plagiarist.

  28. firinne on 26 May 2009, 20:44 said:

    Eh, sometimes I read through these lists and go, “Wait, what’s wrong with that?” Like the constellations one. I agree that its repetitiveness is its downfall, but the subsequent comment “This is describing constellations. Yeah.” implies that attributing non-literal properties (cold) to an object is bad writing. Which, obviously, I disagree with.

    (And “disagree with” is a verb phrase, so any lurking preposition-Nazis can go do something unpleasant to themselves.)

    But since I have seen repeated occurrences of this kind of criticism, maybe someone can enlighten me. What am I missing here?

  29. scary_viking on 31 May 2009, 23:26 said:

    A few of them up there are definitely a stretch, of which the constellation one is a decent example.

    The reason I picked it was more or less because relating constellations and shards of ice seems silly to me; the phrase stuck out badly.

  30. lawzard on 1 June 2009, 10:21 said:

    An article like this really needed to be written. I was trying to explain to a friend why Inheritance’s prose is not a Good Thing just the other day, and now I can point him to this article.

    “The reason I picked it was more or less because relating constellations and shards of ice seems silly to me; the phrase stuck out badly.” (By the way, what do you use to get a block quote on this website?)

    Yeah, I’d agree with that. It’s not so much the description of a constellation as cold and sharp that’s strange; it’s the fact that he compared to them to “bright shards of ice” that doesn’t make sense.

    For one, when was the last time you saw shard of ice giving off light? As for the sharp part, I assumed in the first half of the sentence that “sharp” referred to their clarity, but since it’s compared to a shard of ice, it suggests that the constellation is physically sharp, as in it can cut things.

    But then again, Paolini’s blatant thesaurus rape makes it perfectly clear that he doesn’t understand there are subtle nuances to word usage.