Eragon is the first book in Chrstopher Paolini’s Inheritance series. It was officially published in 2003 (the first edition was published in 2002). It is based around a teenage boy, Eragon, and the dragon egg he finds in his small village in the fantasy land of Alagaësia. Warning that this post may contain spoilers.
I’m just going to get straight into the nitty-gritty of this review. This novel has a lot of flaws; and I really mean a lot. The first part of this review will 
probably be a half-review half-rant, but bear with me, because I will get to the positives of the novel eventually.
A lot of the time, it feels as though Paolini is trying so desperately to give the novel a Tolkien-like feel of epic fantasy and adventure, that it falls flat on its face. Location names like Urû’baen, Father Dûr and Gil’ead just feel, for want of better word, try-hard. You don’t need excessive punctuation to make a word sound like it’s not from the Earth we know. It wouldn’t bother me as much if it weren’t for the fact that almost every character, location, and even gates are given names like these. Put three or more into a sentence, which occurs more often than is needed, and the voice in my head just speaks gibberish for half the sentence because I can’t be bothered trying to pronounce words when I can’t even remember what they’re referring to. Yet the fact that I don’t remember what they’re referring to (and usually skim over them) doesn’t make the plot any more difficult t understand than it should.
This is another problem with the language, A large number of new names are difficult enough to remember as it is, but when these names don’t even have any vague resemblance to words in modern English, remembering their pronunciation and what they are the names of becomes a tiresome and difficult task. The unusual language in itself just seems so unnecessary and I honestly can’t take it seriously considering its whole point (I can only assume) is to make the adventure feel more grand and important.
One of the serious major flaws in the novel was almost the complete lack of distinguishable characters. Normally, I wouldn’t mind too much because women in fantasy novels are usually pretty scarce, but in Eragon it was startlingly obvious. I can remember only six female characters in the 500 page novel who were given a name and actually appeared (as opposed to being in a flashback). Of those, only three of them were given any discernible characterisation, and only one of these two was actually human (one was an elf and the other a dragon, who I don’t even know should be counted). Forget about the Bechdel Test, this novel didn’t even have a single conversation between two named women. I realise Paolini was only 15 when he wrote the novel, but this is no excuse for having such a complete lack of women in a novel that has no difficulty in creating a wide variety of male characters.
Then, there’s the actual writing. Most of the time it’s pretty good except in two situations; when there’s something exciting or emotional occurring, and when a new area is entered. I’ll talk about the latter first. Long story short, Paoilini sucks at descriptions. This wasn’t overly noticeable at first until late in the novel (mostly because there weren’t very intricate new locations) but when Paolini described a new location it is one of the most boring things I have ever read. Some of the time, I couldn’t even be bothered scanning the description, but instead skipped whole paragraphs in a desperate attempt to reach the plot. True, I’m not a fan of lengthy descriptions in novels, but even the page-long descriptors in classic novels like The Lord of the Rings and Sherlock Holmes held my interest to some extent. Yet the long descriptions of hallways and rooms that we only see once in dull a dull and monotonous manner really just made me want to put the book down and stop reading.
Now, the former; the writing in scenes when there’s something exciting or emotional occurring. The writing is pretty good when it come to the day-to-day activities (usually the more dull parts of a novel) but the moment there’s a big battle or something, I find that the novel reaches it’s most boring points. It’s almost as if I don’t care anymore. Although, this could be because in almost every major fight scene to date Eragon ends up being predictably knocked out partway through. Then there’s the emotional scenes. About halfway through, a character we’ve known from the very beginning and had grown on the reader to an extent, dies. This is the second major death in the novel and the first which involves a character we’ve known for a while.Can I just say, I cry extremely easily. Those 30 second Worksafe ads you see on TV make me cry every single time. Yet this novel? Nothing. Even less than that, I didn’t even feel remotely sad. During the pages of grief and mourning all I could think was “get over it”. Maybe I just wasn’t emotionally invested in the characters? But a good writer should make me emotionally invested. And Paolini just didn’t.
You’ve probably noticed by now that I keep using one word in particular; unnecessary. There is just so much unnecessary blabber hiding the actually interesting plot that I almost considered not reading to the end.
With all this negativity, it may seem as though the novel has no positive points at all, however it does. Although small moments in the plot may be overly cliché and predictable, overall I don’t have much of an idea where the story is going. I want to keep reading and I want to know what happens next. That’s one of the main things I look for in a novel.
The vocabulary throughout the Eragon is also extraordinary. I often found myself surprised that a book written by a 15-year-old could have such sophisticated language. Yet even though the language is quite complex at times, it doesn’t to any extent make the novel more difficult to read.
In the end, I’d like to say that although Eragon needs a large amount of improvement in the aspect of female characters and unnecessary bits and pieces, considering that Paolini is so young. Do I recommend it? Probably not, but I will have to finish the rest of the series before I give a definitive decision.
Rating; 2/5 stars
Picture Sources
Book cover: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eragon
Sea Shepherd Australia managing director Jeff Hansen said that they would be dumping the bodies of the dead sharks out to sea, which would only bring in more shark and make matters worse.
Once you remove the top predator from any ecosystem, things generally go bad. An example of when this was done was when wolves were removed from Yellowstone National Park. First the deer numbers started increasing, because there were nothing to hunt them, and they eventually became so highly numbered that they ate themselves out of house and home. This, of course, impacted on other animals too, the ones that needed that vegetation to eat and live in. The small mammals started to disappear as well, and eventually, so did the beavers. Once the beavers left the rivers in the park started moving much faster than they used to, and thus not depositing any nutrients in the park. It was at this point that it was decided that wolves needed to be introduced into the park to fix the problem. Now, imagine this but with sharks, on a much larger scale.
showed off the brilliant cinematography that was used in the episode. And I really loved the way they did that. The way they moulded smaller stories of cases and stag nights and conversations into the very essence of the wedding. The wedding was the main event, but that fact did not take away from all of the little stories that came together in The Sign of Three.
I feel like these last two episodes are leading up to something bad happening. No one has died, nothing bad has really happened. They’re been cheerful and funny and exciting, but what will the next episode be like? That’s pretty much what The Sign of Three has left me feeling; what’s going to happen next?
The technique I’m talking about is the way in which the background changes between what’s actually happening and what’s happening inside Sherlock Holmes’ head. I just think it’s incredible the way they did it, and I personally have never seen it done so flawlessly before. At first they used it to almost surprise us, but afterwards it was used so seamlessly that you barely even noticed, just enough to make it interesting.
was a bit different from what I expected but the multiple beatings that John gave Sherlock were more than enough to make me happy. I actually really like how they didn’t make John forgive Sherlock straight away. He was angry, and rightly so. I love how his character was written after seeing Sherlock was alive. It just gave him so much more depth. I’ve always thought that John was portrayed as a sort of one-dimensional character. Not to say that his character doesn’t have depth, more that we rarely saw it. In The Empty Hearse however, we definitely saw it and it was brilliant. Martin Freeman, of course, did a great job of showing this new character development. I especially loved his acting in the train scene when he thought that the bomb was going to go off.
Special mention of Amanda Abbington who did literally played the best Mary Morstan I have even seen. She made the character so likeable and I could genuinely see how Mary and John could get along together so well, and her friendship with Sherlock was one of the highlights of the episode.
would make a bit of a comeback with less stress for this episode, but I was disappointed. I’ve never really been a fan of Moffat as head writer. When he was a writer under Russell T. Davies he wrote some brilliant episodes; Blink, The Empty Child, The Doctor Dances and The Girl in the Fireplace, but when he took over the show his episodes started going downhill.
many monsters meant way too much time wasted which could have been used on giving 11 a proper farewell.
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