“When I was a child, I spake as a child, I understood as a child, I thought as a child: but when I became a man, I put away childish things.” 1 Corinthians 13:11

I am postmodern enough to understand the pretentious ramifications of beginning with a Bible quotation, and also to use the word ‘ramifications’. And to point out the fact that I have just done this. I’ll stop now. Anyway, here is my review of Brisingr, by Christopher Paolini, and, I suppose, the whole Inheritance Cycle. Oh, spoilers, by the way.

To understand my perspective on this whole thing, I must begin about four or five years ago, when I read the first book in the Inheirtance Cycle, Eragon. For those of you who don’t know,it concerns a boy who finds a dragon egg and becomes a Jedi Dragon Rider. Anyway, I read this when I was much, much younger, and as a result, loved it. I forced my father to read it when he was ill, and he hated it. It took me some time to work out why that was. Children can forgive poor writing if there’s a good story. Hell, they’ll forgive a bad story, if it seems exciting enough and there are dragons. An example of a poorly written good story would be Harry Potter, at least until Harry turns into a twat. A badly written bad story would be the Inheiritance Cycle.

Maybe, though, it’s not bad. I’m not sure whether something so derivative can be considered ‘good’ or ‘bad’. The story concerns a boy of uncertain parentage, who lives with his aunt and uncle on a farm near a backwater town. He meets the local crazy old man, who turns out to have been a member of an ancient order of knights who guarded civilisation from evil. The old man gives the boy the sword that belongs to the boy’s father (one of the knights who, influenced by an evil guy who wants to reign supreme, kills all of the old knights but is defeated by the old man, who gives the boy to his uncle and retreats to a nearby village to watch him grow, until the point where the story picks up.

Now, admiteddly I ommitted a few details, like a dragon, and what transpired in the later books regarding the farmboy’s (Eragon is his name, I just didn’t use it for the purposes of the analogy) parentage, but even a moron can see the story has been lifted bodily from Star Wars. I realise that Star Wars had some quite distinct influences but really. Chris Paolini must have watched A New Hope before sitting down to plan it out or something.Oh, and by the way, the second part of the series invoves the farmboy going to a jungle planet to train with the old master of the order, but he has to leave abruptly, in order to save his friends…

He probably skim-read The Lord of the Rings too. Proud elves, stubborn dwarves, Orcs (inventively re-named Urgals). dragons, and a sprawling world replete with dwarf-filled mountains, elf-filled forests, Orc-filled plains and a plucky group of humans who triumph against the odds. Who did Paolini think he was fooling? He got a free ride because his parents own a printing agency, and now he has Tolkien-esque pretentions? He hasn’t grasped why Tolkein was so good- his universe was meticulously crafted, based on languages (he was a language scholar, after all) of his own invention. Elven, for example, was based on Finnish and Welsh. By comparison, Paolini’s Alageasia is something a seven year old scrawled on a bit of paper (same goes for the whole book really).

Now i’ve gotten that out of the way, I can return to the novel at hand. The plot picks up where the last book, Eldest, left off – Roran (Eragon’s cousin) has had his wife kidnapped by RingwraithsRa’Zac, and he and Eragon set off and find them, kill them, save Wifey, and …urghhh. I can’t go on. The plot is about as well thought out as the plot to 50 Cent: Blood on the Sand, and Paolini’s smugness seems to have seeped into the paper somehow. That little shit has the unmitigated temerity to reference Doctor Who in this book. Watch this and you may begin to understand. I also have a problem with the fact that he’s slipped into a habit of fantasy writers. This is to crowbar in a device that wasn’t mentioned at all previously, either because it was a ‘secret’ or because no-one knew about it, but really because the writer needs a quick and dirty solution to whatever corner they’ve painted themselves into this time. In this case, a hitherto unknown fact is revealed: Dragons can sic up their souls and give them to people, and the Big Bad has found a way to use this energy for himself, ahahahaha. No, really. This is actually what happened.

Anyway, this has been going on for quite long enough, so I’ll wrap it up. Brisingr is a poorly written mess, thick enough to use in a smash and grab raid because of all the “protagonists” loudly soliliquise their every motivation in a stilted, irritating manner, and then laugh at their own unfunny jokes. The story is bromidic and tiresome, and the author consumes pages of the book with story-irrelavant material that only serve to cement this book in my mind and boring, mindless, self-indulgant twaddle (like this review).