Quick review on Christropher Paolini's Eragon that I wrote for school.

Christopher Paolini himself has called his utter travesty of a fantasy novel Eragon an “archetypal hero story,” but that doesn’t even begin to do it justice. To call it archetypal is a gross understatement; it’s more along the lines of nauseatingly generic, although even that barely scratches the surface. It may be true that there’s no such thing as a truly unique story and that all fantasy is derivative and so on and so forth, but Eragon doesn’t even try. It distills every last stereotype of the fantasy genre and jumbles them together into such a mind-numbingly formulaic product that Paolini must have written the book with a “Top 100 Fantasy Clichés” checklist at hand – but even that wouldn’t necessarily condemn it if it were in the hands of a skillful author. A special flair is required to take that sort of unoriginality and turn it into something readable, and Paolini just doesn’t have it. Never does he offer a refreshing take on the grossly overdone story elements he incorporates. Never does the book deviate from a straight, predictable, and ultimately very boring path.

Eragon is a simple orphan boy with a mysterious past who has been chosen by Destiny! When his small backwater village is tragically torched by random evil lackeys, he swears revenge and embarks on a noble and righteous quest to rid the world of its obligatory evil overlord. Accompanying him are his faithful pet dragon, Saphira, and the mysterious old man Brom, who despite knowing everything about the plot never tells Eragon anything, because he, um, doesn’t feel like it or something. Along the way, Eragon encounters elves, dwarves, orcs Urgals, and other members of Tolkien’s menagerie, as well as many bad guys to be slain and elf maidens to be rescued.

Everything in Eragon has been done before, and it’s been done much, much better. It’s been done in every other fantasy novel ever published, except without the clumsy, heavy-handed storytelling with its completely transparent plot twists, two-dimensional characters, and poor pacing. It’s been done without the amateurish writing, the constant stylistic mistakes, and the overabundance of linguistic clichés (single tears rolling down cheeks “like liquid diamonds,” etc.). Poor writing can be mitigated by good ideas, but since Paolini has neither, the experience is not merely dull: it’s painful, really, truly painful. If Paolini’s parents hadn’t owned the publishing house that first put Eragon into print, this putrid piece of trash would have been flat-out rejected by any sober editor, no questions asked. With the way the book doesn’t come anywhere close to meeting the standards of the publishing industry, it should come as no surprise that Paolini wrote it as a teenager. You can tell. You really can.

1/10

[Note: The review has been edited and about 100 words were added. I was originally trying to keep it brief because it was already far longer than my teacher wanted, but I decided I was going to fully develop my ideas and length be damned.]