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May. 15th, 2009 09:58 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
damkiannaSo I went to the library, in preparation for hanging out with friends, and ... somehow managed to get there, like, half an hour before everybody else. \o/ Fortunately, it wasn't totally wasted, because I found a copy of Brisingr.
God, I hate those books. I will confess up front that I am probably not even a little bit impartial where they are concerned; they're like the Twilight books, I hate them so much I can't shut up about them, because it is so much fun to loathe them. The first one, I didn't mind too much; it was not so much genius as it was Star Wars transplanted into a world that was trying really hard to be Tolkienesque and failing miserably, but every now and then I kind of like a nice doorstop's-worth of brain fluff, some light and non-thinky fantasy to while away a rainy day with. And I actually sort of liked Murtagh.
Book 2 was essentially more of the same - still with the Star Wars plot shoved into the wishes-it-were-LotR 'verse, basically - except this time there was pretty much no Murtagh, and way less stuff actually happened. And then there was the whole I-am-your-father reveal at the end, which could have been handled well enough to make me handwave its ridiculous predictability, but ... wasn't. At all. Despite the fact that he was absent for nearly the entire book, and only showed up at the end as a bad guy, Murtagh was still a much more sympathetic and interesting character than Eragon, who by that point had become a superpowered and widely reknowned quasi-elf hero (there is an actual line about how he's prettier than any man, and yet also more rugged than any elf. I wish I were kidding). My mental Gary Stu alerts went WHOOP WHOOP, and it was just too much - yes, I like my brain fluff, but it has to be fun and tasty brain fluff, okay, this crap wasn't going to cut it.
I only got through, oh, forty or fifty pages of Brisingr before M found me and showed me where Q was sitting, and man, was that wretched. The prose was ridiculously purple - not the graceful kind of purple that makes Tolkien a pleasure, but a thickly-slathered purple that wavered between a more colloquial, modern tone, and badly-chosen antiquated language. For example, Eragon had a line that read something like, "I think [sic] she is held in that forsaken place", where the modern, italicized hypothetical stands at complete cross purposes with the phrase "that forsaken place", making the latter sound especially clumsy and pedantic.
The actual content of the text was similarly grating. Eragon and - well, the man he's grown up treating as his brother, let's say (his name is Roran) - have a relatively lengthy conversation over the fire. The first part concerns their guilt and distress over the fact that during the course of this ongoing war, they have both killed a fair number of people, including relatively innocent men whose only crime was living somewhere where they could get conscripted into the enemy's service. They both spend a minute or two feeling bad about it, with Eragon's dragon, Saphira, arguing that there is a fair amount of satisfaction to be had by seeing your enemies' bodies stacked up at your feet (that is fairly near verbatim, though not quite), and then move on.
The second part concerns the use of magic; Roran wants to maybe learn some. Eragon thinks to himself that he must be careful not to reveal one of the great and terrible secrets of magic, said secret being that you can use the life force of lesser creatures to fuel great acts of magic - a process which tends to kind of, you know, kill said lesser creatures, which is horrible and wrong and horrible and very bad.
The third part concerns an old wound of Roran's, a very bad cut along his shoulder which limits his movement, and which Eragon has somehow never noticed before. It went through the muscle of his arm, and never healed properly. Eragon opens up his mind to everything living in the area, and heals it - using up the lives of two nearby birds and a snake hiding in the bushes to do it.
This kind of scene construction is idiotic. If you're trying to portray Eragon as a man who is slowly learning that some things cannot be accomplished without costing innocent lives, you can't write something that induces the kind of moral whiplash it takes to talk about coming to grips with murdering dozens of people, and then get all verklempt about killing a few patches of grass and some bunnies - especially when Eragon is a country boy who originally lived on a farm and has no doubt butchered scores of animals, and now is the proud rider of an enormous carnivore. And, having gotten verklempt about grass and bunnies, you also cannot then turn around and have Eragon blithely kill a few birds just to get Roran's shoulder back up to snuff.
And that was just the first forty pages or so. FAILBOAT.
It was fun to sit there and snark at it mentally, though, and after that my afternoon was all Sequence and coffee ice cream and hanging out with people I missed like crazy. I also went with my mother to pick my dad up from the bus stop, and spent pretty much the whole ride listening to pop in French and Arabic and German. So, all in all, I'm going to mark today down as a win.
God, I hate those books. I will confess up front that I am probably not even a little bit impartial where they are concerned; they're like the Twilight books, I hate them so much I can't shut up about them, because it is so much fun to loathe them. The first one, I didn't mind too much; it was not so much genius as it was Star Wars transplanted into a world that was trying really hard to be Tolkienesque and failing miserably, but every now and then I kind of like a nice doorstop's-worth of brain fluff, some light and non-thinky fantasy to while away a rainy day with. And I actually sort of liked Murtagh.
Book 2 was essentially more of the same - still with the Star Wars plot shoved into the wishes-it-were-LotR 'verse, basically - except this time there was pretty much no Murtagh, and way less stuff actually happened. And then there was the whole I-am-your-father reveal at the end, which could have been handled well enough to make me handwave its ridiculous predictability, but ... wasn't. At all. Despite the fact that he was absent for nearly the entire book, and only showed up at the end as a bad guy, Murtagh was still a much more sympathetic and interesting character than Eragon, who by that point had become a superpowered and widely reknowned quasi-elf hero (there is an actual line about how he's prettier than any man, and yet also more rugged than any elf. I wish I were kidding). My mental Gary Stu alerts went WHOOP WHOOP, and it was just too much - yes, I like my brain fluff, but it has to be fun and tasty brain fluff, okay, this crap wasn't going to cut it.
I only got through, oh, forty or fifty pages of Brisingr before M found me and showed me where Q was sitting, and man, was that wretched. The prose was ridiculously purple - not the graceful kind of purple that makes Tolkien a pleasure, but a thickly-slathered purple that wavered between a more colloquial, modern tone, and badly-chosen antiquated language. For example, Eragon had a line that read something like, "I think [sic] she is held in that forsaken place", where the modern, italicized hypothetical stands at complete cross purposes with the phrase "that forsaken place", making the latter sound especially clumsy and pedantic.
The actual content of the text was similarly grating. Eragon and - well, the man he's grown up treating as his brother, let's say (his name is Roran) - have a relatively lengthy conversation over the fire. The first part concerns their guilt and distress over the fact that during the course of this ongoing war, they have both killed a fair number of people, including relatively innocent men whose only crime was living somewhere where they could get conscripted into the enemy's service. They both spend a minute or two feeling bad about it, with Eragon's dragon, Saphira, arguing that there is a fair amount of satisfaction to be had by seeing your enemies' bodies stacked up at your feet (that is fairly near verbatim, though not quite), and then move on.
The second part concerns the use of magic; Roran wants to maybe learn some. Eragon thinks to himself that he must be careful not to reveal one of the great and terrible secrets of magic, said secret being that you can use the life force of lesser creatures to fuel great acts of magic - a process which tends to kind of, you know, kill said lesser creatures, which is horrible and wrong and horrible and very bad.
The third part concerns an old wound of Roran's, a very bad cut along his shoulder which limits his movement, and which Eragon has somehow never noticed before. It went through the muscle of his arm, and never healed properly. Eragon opens up his mind to everything living in the area, and heals it - using up the lives of two nearby birds and a snake hiding in the bushes to do it.
This kind of scene construction is idiotic. If you're trying to portray Eragon as a man who is slowly learning that some things cannot be accomplished without costing innocent lives, you can't write something that induces the kind of moral whiplash it takes to talk about coming to grips with murdering dozens of people, and then get all verklempt about killing a few patches of grass and some bunnies - especially when Eragon is a country boy who originally lived on a farm and has no doubt butchered scores of animals, and now is the proud rider of an enormous carnivore. And, having gotten verklempt about grass and bunnies, you also cannot then turn around and have Eragon blithely kill a few birds just to get Roran's shoulder back up to snuff.
And that was just the first forty pages or so. FAILBOAT.
It was fun to sit there and snark at it mentally, though, and after that my afternoon was all Sequence and coffee ice cream and hanging out with people I missed like crazy. I also went with my mother to pick my dad up from the bus stop, and spent pretty much the whole ride listening to pop in French and Arabic and German. So, all in all, I'm going to mark today down as a win.
