Murtagh (Part 1)
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INTRO
The Inheritance Cycle was a big part of my high school years. I read the full series multiple times, though it has been many years since I read any of them except the first book, Eragon. As indicated in my series summary on October 11th, I believe that all of the books of this series are incredibly strong. The series may be incredibly derivative, and I feel that most of the criticisms directed towards it are valid, yet on the whole, the strengths far outweigh the weaknesses. Perhaps my opinion might change if I reread the series, but for now, I feel quite secure in rating it as an 8/10.
Despite this, I didn’t have any real interest in reading Murtagh when it first came out. I was planning to wait until Paolini released “Book V” (as he calls it), maybe doubling back to Murtagh if I felt I was missing out of something. However, at the same time that I bought Caraval, I decided to give it a shot. If nothing else, it would help to refamiliarize me with the YA sphere.
Up front, I will say that I enjoyed returning to Alagaësia. Paolini’s prose is as accessible as always, and he still loves this world enough to remain consistent with what he wrote more than a decade ago (though there are some needless contradictions, as we will touch upon later). Murtagh is also a character who’s very easy to get invested in.
However … it became evident early on that Murtagh is an inferior work to any book in the Inheritance Cycle. Even at its absolute best, it feels like Paolini, for as much as he loves the world, has forgotten why the original series worked. This book tugged at my nostalgia, but it fails as both a book on its own and an addition to the wider mythos.
Let’s explore why.
STATS
Title: Murtagh
Series: N/A
Author(s): Christopher Paolini
Genre: Young Adult Fantasy (Epic)
First Printing: November 2023
Publisher: Alfred A. Knopf
SPOILERS
Mild spoilers for Murtagh will be included throughout this review, through I will keep the first paragraph of each section as spoiler-free as possible. Heavy spoilers will be confined to clearly labelled sections.
Heavy spoilers for the Inheritance Cycle will be included throughout the review. These shall not be marked.
BACKGROUND
Paolini was helpful enough to detail a timeline for this book in the Afterward, which aligns with the version of events he gave to Publisher’s Weekly in October 2023 and to Paste Magazine in November 2023.
The short version: this book was not part of his original plans for Alagaësia. It was spawned from the same tweet that led to the “Fork” in The Fork, the Witch, and the Worm. He spent a few years planning the book out and then wrote the first draft from October 2021 to January 30th, 2022. (Note that more than 18 months passed between the completion of the first draft and the publication, almost as if 7 months would be far too short a time to properly redraft and edit a behemoth Fantasy novel.)
Paolni has described this book as a bridge between the Inheritance Cycle and “Book V”, the book he did plan as his next full-length novel in Alagaësia. While it is meant to function as a standalone story, he deliberately did not tie up all loose ends. This was a time for exploring Murtagh’s character, laying additional groundwork within the world, and setting up plot elements for the future.
PREMISE
From the product page for Murtagh on the Barnes & Noble website, we get:
The world is no longer safe for the Dragon Rider Murtagh and his dragon, Thorn. An evil king has been toppled, and they are left to face the consequences of the reluctant role they played in his reign of terror. Now they are hated and alone, exiled to the outskirts of society.
Throughout the land, hushed voices whisper of brittle ground and a faint scent of brimstone in the air—and Murtagh senses that something wicked lurks in the shadows of Alagaësia. So begins an epic journey into lands both familiar and untraveled, where Murtagh and Thorn must use every weapon in their arsenal, from brains to brawn, to find and outwit a mysterious witch. A witch who is much more than she seems.
In this gripping novel starring one of the most popular characters from Christopher Paolini’s blockbuster Inheritance Cycle, a Dragon Rider must discover what he stands for in a world that has abandoned him. Murtagh is the perfect book to enter the World of Eragon for the first time . . . or to joyfully return.
The store also recommends this book for the age range of 12 to 15 years.
Reaction
This is one of those premises that is correct in only the broadest sense.
The first paragraph is accurate enough, though given that this was all preestablished information from the Inheritance Cycle, getting that wrong would have caused some confusion in potential readers. The last paragraph is marketing fluff, and as we’ll get into throughout this review, I disagree with that last sentence. As for the second paragraph, it only works if you squint at the book really, really hard.
This book is not an epic journey. Murtagh visits and grand total of four locations, nearly all of which are clustered in to the northern reaches of Alagaësia, with the sole exception being the setting of just the book’s epilogue.
The interaction with the “witch” (whose name is Bachel, so I’ll just refer to her by that name for the rest of the review) is not a manhunt or cat-and-mouse game. Murtagh learns Bachel exists in Location A, goes to Location B to learn that she is in Location C, and then spends the rest of the book with Bachel in Location C.
The book neglects to mention the cult the Bachel leads, known as the Dreamers, despite the fact that the entire plot hinges (in more ways than one) on their beliefs and the object of their worship.
Who Is This For?
Something that occurred to me as I was reading Murtagh was … is this book really written for YA audiences?
This isn’t a question of the content. There’s nothing in this book that wasn’t in the Inheritance Cycle, so if those books are YA, this one is, too. Paolini’s writing style also continues to be optimal for a YA audience.
It’s just that, as I was reading this book and becoming intimately reacquainted with Paolini’s lack of subtlety, I wondered how many readers would actually be in the YA demographic. The Inheritance Cycle ended over a decade ago, and it’s not like Paolini is this big name in YA who has been putting out a steady stream of content. Most of the people with an interest in reading this book would have been in the YA demographic when the Inheritance Cycle was published, but the youngest of those readers would be well into their 20s by now. Most of us are in our 30s.
I’m not necessarily saying that this book needed to be more “mature'“. We didn’t need a New Adult monstrosity or a knockoff of A Song of Ice and Fire; frankly, I’m grateful that Paolini didn’t bumble into the wonky inconsistency of Digimon Adventure Tri. However, as Digimon Adventure: Last Evolution - Kizuna (yes, that really is the full title) showed, you can take a series originally conceived for young audiences and write a story within that series that remains accessible to the young while offering something of substance for the adults who previously enjoyed it as children. By exclusively targeting the same demographic as the original series, it feels like Paolini passed up an opportunity to appeal to his old fanbase.
Maybe I’m overthinking this. Well-written YA stories can be enjoyed by adults, and I don’t think the target demographic negatively impacts this book. It was just something that nagged at me.
RATING: 5 / 10
This is not “the perfect book to enter the World of Eragon for the first time”. It does not provide an opportunity to “joyfully return”. At the absolute best, it is a mediocre book feeding off nostalgia for good books.
I often hear people throw around the phrase, “This was probably written by AI.” At no previous point have I felt the urge to use it myself. However, as I read Murtagh, I finally appreciated the meaning of that phrase. This book reads as though it was churned out by someone without any genuine understanding of why the Inheritance Cycle worked, someone who merely copied the plot structure of Eragon, the worldbuilding of Alagaësia, and Paolini’s prose while trying to hit a minimum word count.
(To be clear, I don’t think Paolini used AI to write this book. I fully believe he wrote every word himself. That’s part of what makes this book so frustrating. It’s as if Paolini's ability to write has atrophied over the past decade.)
Believe me, we are going to get into the many problems with this book as we proceed. For now, I’ll simply add that this book may deserve an even lower rating than what I’ve given it. My nostalgia for Alagaësia carried me a good way into the text before I finally admitted to myself how bad the problems were. I ultimately settled on a 5/10 because I didn’t want to overcompensate. A 5/10 means that a book, while not horrible or self-devouring, is not worth your time if you are reading for leisure. That is the kindest thing I could possibly say for Murtagh.
CONTENT WARNING
Murtagh features violence and gore of both human(oid) and animal varieties, torture, human(oid) trafficking, scenes of human(oid) sacrifice, and explorations of trauma from war and abuse. There’s also some cursing of the non-gritty fantasy variety. Despite this extensive list of potential triggers, all of it is packaged in a manner that fits is solidly into the YA bracket. All of these things except the sacrifice was in the Inheritance Cycle, so anyone able to read that series will probably be fine with reading this one.
PROSE
Accessibility
One aspect of the previous books that does successfully translate into Murtagh is Paolini’s writing style. His prose flows easily, isn't too abstract, and does a good job of maintaining the vibe of a fantastical world while being something that people grounded in our own world can easily connect with. The bar is low enough for preteens to enjoy the story while still being high enough that adult readers won't feel talked down to. When people talk about wanting “accessible” fantasy, this is the sort of thing that should be held up as the gold standard.
Voice
I didn't talk about narrative voice in the summary of the Inheritance Cycle because, with as long as it’s been since I read the series, I can’t actually remember how different the POVs of Eragon, Roran, Nasuada, and Saphira sounded from each other (outside the animalistic descriptions thing for Saphira, which does make a reappearance in this book for the glimpses into Thorn’s POV). However, upon reading Murtagh, I did pick up on something different between Murtagh’s voice and the voice used for Eragon.
In the Inheritance Cycle, Eragon was a teenager who was constantly receiving the education needed to grow into his responsibilities. He was constantly learning and constantly making observations about the world around his as he became privy to new information. As mentioned back in the Inheritance Cycle summary, the delivery of commentary leads me to think Eragon is Paolini’s self-insert, so Eragon’s voice is probably just Paolini’s voice, but that’s not a problem in and of itself. If anything, given Paolini’s age at the time, that ensured that Eragon actually read like a teenager.
Murtagh is more brusque and direct. Unlike Eragon, who let his education go to his head and blossom into arrogance at a few points, Murtagh is aware of his limits (especially in regards to magic) and doesn’t model himself as an intellectual, though he does make several stabs at composing poetry. He also is better at guile than Eragon, at least at the beginning of the book, where he adopts a couple of false identities to achieve his goals.
This difference between voices is not enormous, yet it is a nice touch. Paolini clearly made an effort to get into Murtagh’s headspace and write him as a character unique from Eragon. That effort mostly pays off.
… mostly.
Something we’ll get to in Characters is that Paolini seems to be uncomfortable with the fact that Murtagh is not Eragon. He establishes limits on Murtagh's abilities early on, telling the audience up-front to not expect the same feats that Eragon might pull off, but then he swiftly finds ways to negate those limits. In a similar way, there are many moments when Murtagh's voice fizzles into that of Eragon (and, therefore, Paolini himself). This manifests in a small way in the book’s minimalistic commentary and in a far larger way whenever Murtagh needs to overcome his limitations, especially in Murtagh's efforts to self-educate himself about magic.
What’s strange about this is that Murtagh has always been an educated person with the ability to solve problems with his intellect. His backstory, as told to us since Eragon, is that he was groomed by Galbatorix to be Morzan’s replacement, and that included a royal education. His established mannerisms exist alongside his knowledge and problem-solving skills; he should continue to think and act the same way even when he is studying magic, experimenting with the Ancient Language, trying to solve puzzles, or simply making observations about the world around him. Every time that he starts thinking like Eragon / Paolini therefore feels like a break in character.
Unsubtlety / Repetition
Now, I know I criticized Paolini for unsubtle messaging, but that was the only unsubtlety issue I could remember from the Inheritance Cycle. I don’t recall him treating the audience like they had no capability to recall basic facts, spelling out things that were obvious within the context of the scene, or both.
Murtagh is a very different beast. Paolini seemingly has zero faith in his audience’s ability to retain basic information. We are repeatedly told - sometimes shown, but even then, told - that Murtagh has trauma, that Murtagh feels guilt for his past actions, and that Murtagh can’t use this spell or that spell to instantly eliminate a problem. The example of this that stands out to me the most is Paolini constantly reminding us how mental detection works. At least three times, including one point halfway through the book, Paolini spells out for the audience that Murtagh can’t talk to Thorn or search for people with his mind because doing so would announce his presence and expose his mind to attack, actually taking the time to remind us of the mechanics when simply saying that Murtagh didn't want to take the risk would have sufficed.
I can’t tell if Paolini doesn't respect the YA audience or if this is just a casualty of bad editing. Either way, this trait makes the book feel shoddier than its predecessors.
Manufacturing Cliffhangers
Paolini seems to have developed Yarros’s penchant for manufacturing cliffhangers by arbitrarily ending a chapter mid-scene. He does it twice (that I could identify). Both times, it takes what could have been a decent scene and snaps it into two weak ones.
THEMES
While there are a handful of themes that could be drawn out of Murtagh, the one that takes front and center is the one Paolini himself acknowledges.
As I fleshed out the plot and delved ever deeper into Murtagh’s and Thorn’s characters, I found rich earth to work with. Indeed, the richness surprised me. My first conception of Murtagh was more in line with the sort of old-fashioned adventure novel that Edgar Rice Burroughs might have produced (and which I still very much enjoy).
But the more I thought, plotted, and wrote, the more I felt for Murtagh and Thorn, and the more I realized that this book provided a perfect opportunity to explore the issues they were dealing with following the events of the Inheritance Cycle, as well as those of Murtagh’s own tragic childhood.
Murtagh is, in short, a book about the lingering effects of trauma. Emphasis is put on the physical and psychological abuse that Murtagh and Thorn suffered at Galbatorix’s hands, with Murtagh’s childhood trauma feeling more like a footnote, though Paolini does at least attempt to acknowledge Murtagh’s PTSD from fighting battles at Galbatorix’s behest.
Paolini was right - there was “rich earth to work with”. To take his metaphor a bit farther, he tilled this earth and sowed seeds. However, while he took time to water the garden that is Thorn's trauma, Murtagh's trauma was unevenly fertilized and sporadically watered, producing a field that could charitably be described as patchy.
Thorn
Paolini had a lot of catching up to do for Thorn. We were unable to connect with him as a character until the very end of the Inheritance Cycle, and while we were aware that his growth had been magically accelerated by Galbatorix, we had no conception of what else he might have suffered. Paolini does not go overboard playing catch-up. Instead, he keeps things simple.
Thorn suffers from claustrophobia so crippling that he can't even pass between trees if it means his wings will be touched by them. This is a result of Galbatorix chaining him down within suffocatingly small room while he was growing. It is made clear form early in the book that he cannot even overcome this for Murtagh’s sake, meaning that Murtagh has no hope of rescue when he goes into confined environments.
I will leave the question of whether Paolini handles the claustrophobia respectfully to people with more experience in such things. Narratively, I think it is handled effectively (outside of some redundancy in the setup). That is a sense of palpable and earned emotion whenever Thorn’s claustrophobia is brought up. It also serves as an adequate reason to justify why Murtagh goes into dangerous situations without Thorn.
Murtagh
I want to like the handling of Murtagh’s trauma in this book. If I were to outline the beats that Paolini used to explore this idea, that outline would describe a very compelling story. It’s the execution of that outline that is the problem.
For the bulk of the book, Murtagh’s trauma simply isn’t narratively relevant. The ways in which it pops up make some amount of sense for his character, but Paolini doesn’t set up or pay off these moments. They always feel like random encounters that force Paolini to swerve the story, resulting in moments that sap momentum from the story and don’t deliver the emotional payoffs he’s going for. I can’t help but wonder if, much like was speculated for Yarros and her supposed outline for Iron Flame, Paolini wrote these moments of exploring Murtagh’s trauma into his outline, only to have his story wander in another direction, causing whiplash whenever he tried to steer back to his outline to hit a specific trauma beat.
Part of the problem is that, unlike with Thorn’s claustrophobia, Murtaugh’s trauma isn’t distilled down into a single thing. It manifests through multiple aspects, and Paolini tries to pack all of them into this one book. If Murtagh’s trauma were indeed what drove the narrative, this could have worked, but since finding and engaging with the Dreamers is the actual focus, this different aspects end of feeling like a series of unrelated and ultimately unsatisfying beats.
Child Abuse / Bullying
As early as Eragon, we learned that Murtagh was abused by his father. Morzan’s abusive behaviors culminated in him throwing the sword Zar’roc at a young Murtagh, slashing open his back and leaving a horrendous scar. Additionally, we learn in Murtagh that he was ruthlessly bullied by the noble sons in court after his father’s death, something that wasn’t previously mentioned but does make sense in context.
At first, Paolini explores and uses this in a natural way. Murtagh empathizes with a girl who’s been bullied by the other children in her village and feels outrage on her behalf when he thinks she’s being abused by her parents. (Paolini reveals later that the girl wasn’t abused, so this latter point ends up feeling like outrage bait, but it is at least consistent with Murtagh’s character.) Murtagh is later convinced to interfere in a child trafficking operation and rescue an abducted child because his past suffering makes him feel a sense of personal investment beyond merely the rewards he’ll receive for helping out. Furthermore, there’s a minor antagonist in this book who is very quickly characterized by the fact that he was one of Murtagh’s former bullies.
However, when Murtagh finally reaches the Dreamers around the halfway mark, this element starts to fall apart. Murtagh is suddenly very worried about protecting “the children” in the village, despite having no reason to believe that any of them are in danger. Maybe this is tied back to the child trafficking - he knows by this point that the Dreamers were behind that operation - but given how Murtagh treats their survival as an obstacle to be accommodated rather than an objective to be fulfilled, it reads more like he’s expecting them to be in the line of fire if he and Thorn need to fight their way out, which simply doesn’t make sense. The possibility that these children were even abducted, rather than being born of the cultists, is also forgotten for most of the time he’s with the Dreamers.
The wrap-up to this element comes near the end of the book, and it’s tied to Murtagh’s feelings about Zar’roc. I save my thoughts on that until we get to his trauma from Zar’roc. For now, I’ll just conclude this part by saying that Paolini set something up and did not pay it off. Murtagh’s childhood trauma is presented as something that defines his character, but Paolini seems to forget about it and then rushes it a conclusion.
Kingkiller and General
From Eldest onward, Murtagh served as an officer for Galbatorix’s military, leading multiple battles where encounters with Saphira or Glaedr were anticipated. It was in this position that he murdered King Hrothgar of the dwarves in Eldest, an action that he hadn’t been ordered to do and did purely to slake his own bloodlust. In the battles he led, many soldiers died. He was also responsible, albeit indirectly, for the deaths of both Oromis and of Glaedr’s body.
Paolini merely toys with these ideas. There’s a scene where Murtagh visits Glaedr’s grave, which does have an appropriate sense of weight, but it’s relatively brief. The murder Horthgar is referenced in how the Dreamers refer to him as, “Kingkiller,” but Murtagh doesn’t seem particularly disturbed by the title, to the point that I forgot for most of the book which king he’d killed and assumed that the Dreamers were crediting him with Glabatorix’s death. The deaths of soldiers under his commend is limited to a single scene where Murtagh finds a mass grave. Paolini tells us that Murtagh feels so disturbed by this that, between this and the scene of Glaedr’s grave, his True Name changes, but that’s no emotional weight to this supposed change.
Oathbreaker
There’s a sequence of overwrought scenes in which Murtagh feels bad about breaking oaths. Him making a false oath to deal with the child trafficking operation is hammered upon as something he feels awful about. We’re supposed to feel something later when another man who swore the same oath calls him out as a traitor.
This aspect feels completely hollow and is every bit as annoying as the vegetarianism manifesto back in the Inheritance Cycle. Yes, at a conceptual level, it makes sense that a man who betrayed his friends in the past would not want to break any more oaths, but this is a world where oaths in the Ancient Language can be used to shackle people’s free will. Most of what Murtagh did under Galbatorix’s command was compelled by such oaths. Set alongside oaths like that, promises sworn purely upon one’s honor feel about as substantial as a pinky-promise between five-year-olds.
Galbatorix (Heavy Spoilers)
This one is handled so poorly that is made me angry, in no small part because Paolini wastes about 10% of the book on screwing it up.
Throughout the book, we learn through backstory, flashbacks, and dreams of the various horrors Galbatorix inflicted upon Murtagh, both in his youth and after Thorn hatched. There is no denying that Murtagh has suffered immense trauma from this. A very powerful and violent man robbed him and Thorn of their agency and forced them to do violent things to others. This is all find. What is not fine is how Paolini applies this.
Shortly after the 70% mark, Murtagh gets caught snooping around a sacred place of the Dreamers and is imprisoned. He’s subjected to magical vapors that rob him of his willpower and then tortured by Bachel for several days. We are explicitly told that his mind snaps under the strain and that he submits to Bachel’s will. This happens at the 74% mark. Murtagh then wanders around as Bachel’s slave until the 83% mark, killing at her behest.
At first, I thought that Murtagh submitting to Bachel would be a reprise of his imprisonment under Galbatorix. I thought we’d relive what he went through when he and Thorn were first enslaved and thus see him find catharsis by overcoming this trial a second time. I thought that Murtagh’s numbness throughout this part of the book was a function of the harm inflicted on his psyche and that we would journey with him through the healing process. Maybe Paolini intended that.
Just one tiny problem: Bachel continues to use the vapors (which I will refer to as both “mind control gas” and “the Breath” throughout this review, since the former is what it does and the latter is its name in the book) on him. Murtagh appears to come out of his traumatized haze about halfway through this period of imprisonment. The objective from that point onward is finding a way to magically erase the influence of the Breath.
I’ll leave the full explanation of why this is catastrophic to the narrative until we discuss Plot. Thematically, it’s a problem because it’s never clear exactly where Murtagh’s agency begins and ends, how severe his trauma is, how this relates to his time under Galbatorix, and how much he’s actually healed from or overcome. It’s not even like Murtagh recognizes the parallels and resolves to fight back as he couldn’t against Galbatorix. He just wanders around as Bachel’s puppet for far too long until a magical MacGuffin washes the mind control gas out of his system.
There is nothing of substance here. It is just time wasted.
Zar’roc (Heavy Spoilers)
Murtagh has always had a love-hate relationship with his father’s sword. Yes, it left the scar on his back, and yes, it is associated with his father and his father’s bloody legacy, but it is also a Dragon Rider’s sword, which is an incredible weapon to have at one’s disposal. Often times Murtagh has to deprive himself of it, even when he knows he needs a weapon, because he knows everyone will immediately recognize it and come after him.
Outside of the issue of when Murtagh can or can’t take the sword with him, Paolini does almost nothing with Zar’roc. Bachel takes it away when she makes Murtagh her slave, and reclaiming it is presented as a reestablishment of his agency, but the whole thing with the mind control gas neutered that entire aspect of the story so thoroughly that him having Zar’roc doesn’t mean much in the grand scheme of things.
Then, in the climax, as Murtagh is grinding his way through an underground cave complex like he’s Doomguy, he suddenly stops and decides, “I need to improve my attitude. Why don’t I use the Name of Names to rename my sword to something happier? Heneforth, thou shalt no longer be known as ‘Misery.’ Thou art ‘Freedom.’”
That’s not a direct quote. This is, though.
His mother, he thought, would have been proud of him for it.
“Ithring.”
The word felt strange upon his tongue, yet fitting also. The sword itself seemed different: an ineffable change that left the blade brighter and cleaner.
This is a profoundly dumb moment on multiple levels, but let’s focus on the context in which is occurs. Murtagh is speed-running through these caverns of death to keep Bachel from killing someone. He has no real idea of where he’s going. He has good reason to believe that Bachel may be about to unleash some magical horror on the world. For him to stop and obsess over the name of his sword, when the name of the sword has not been a big deal at any previous point, doesn’t feel like a payoff in this context. Paolini killed the momentum of his climax just to make a big deal out of something that has not mattered.
Final Thoughts on the Theme of Trauma
Paolini had a good idea when he decided to make the story about Murtagh and Thorn’s trauma. A standalone novel focused on Murtagh was the ideal time to focus on that sort of character development. What’s more, this trauma was effectively a loose end left over from the Inheritance Cycle. Of course being freedom from Galbatorix’s influence would not automatically bring the pair closure.
The problem was that Paolini should have either made telling this story the priority, thereby moving the Dreamers out of focus, or else simplified Murtagh’s trauma. He did okay with Thorn because he kept things simple. If he really wanted Murtagh to grapple with all of his hurts at the same time as dealing with the cult, then he needed to rework things so that there was one cohesive through line that the audience could follow.
COMMENTARY
I went into Murtagh expecting to be bludgeoned about the head with shallow commentary, per the precedent set by the Inheritance Cycle. I’m happy to say that this fear was misplaced. While I’m not going to say that there is no commentary in this book, Paolini does not indulge in the distracting, shallow soapboxing of the previous series. There also wasn’t any virtue signaling that I could identify, at least not on a first read.
You may remember that I said that Paolini seems unable or unwilling to empathize with or understand the perspective for religious people. He can't actually write religion, only stereotype it, analyze it superficially as an outsider, or demonize it. This manifests in Murtagh through his portrayal of the Dreamers. They are very openly presented as a strange religious group of questionable sanity that Murtagh has no interest in understanding; he only visits them to question Bachel about the cult’s intentions. Paolini steers away from exploring the cult’s perspective by having Bachel refuse to explain their theology to outsiders. The cult is therefore maintained as something alien that cannot be reasoned with, only undermined and challenged.
However, I don't think that this is commentary in and of itself. It makes narrative sense to portray the Dreamers this way. By the time Murtagh encounters them, he knows of them as a shadowy group involved in sinister activities for an unknown objective that could affect all of Alagaësia. Portraying them as an Other that cannot be comprehended serves to help ramp up the tension and gives Murtagh a reason to play nice with them by day while snooping around their village at night. What’s more, as we will cover in Plot, Bachel has an in-character reason to evade Murtagh’s questions: she wants him to stay among the Dreamers as long as possible so that he will be open to their beliefs before she shares the details. Paolini’s biases may be playing a factor here, but only in the sense that he is tailoring a story around what he is able to write.
This is why I rolled my eyes during the sparse moments when Paolini turned to the audience to make commentary. He was doing so well, but he just couldn't help himself, and in doing so, he caused his POV character to break character.
There were a couple examples of this sort of character-breaking commentary, but the most obvious one was this:
Murtagh frowned. Just because court intrigues had accustomed him to evasion didn’t mean he liked it. “My Lady…if an oracle you are, might you provide us with a demonstration of your powers, that we may marvel at your gift?”
For the first time, Bachel did appear offended. She said, “What visions I have are granted to me for sacred purpose, and I would risk the wrath of the Dreamer were I so presumptuous as to demand them merely to satisfy my own selfish desires. It would be a desecration of my role as Speaker.”
How convenient, Murtagh thought, but before he could voice his doubt, the witch continued:
“However, I will tell you this much, Rider, and I speak the truth, for I have seen what is to come. Ere long, you and Thorn shall fly forth, and you shall redden blade and claw in service of this cause. This I promise you.”
I loathe when authors do this, “Character was going to offer Commentary Comment X, but oh no! The scene went in another direction,” thing. I’ll spare you all the full rant. Let’s just say that it is a failure of writing in the same vein as Yarros telling her audience that no one can muster an intelligent response to her argument. This version is less hostile to the audience, yet it is also lazier. At least Yarros went through the trouble of having a character say the commentary and acknowledged that people would have a response to it, rather than avoiding that possibility entirely.
Now, to the issue of character and voice. I could see Eragon thinking, “How convenient,” in response to what Bachel said. Eragon stylizes himself as an intellectual; a running commentary on groups to which he does not belong is fitting to his character. We saw that in Eldest when, after studying the Ancient Language with the elves, Eragon snickers to himself about the ignorance of the Varden’s magicians, whose name is grammatically incorrect. (Remember, by this point in the story, he knows his grammatical mistake damned an infant girl to a life of torment, so he does not have anything resembling the high ground when he does this.) I could absolutely see him going, “Tee-hee, Bachel’s making excuses. I totally would call her out on it if she didn’t change the subject first.”
Murtagh, though? It really doesn’t fit him. If Murtagh feels strongly enough about something that it will show up in his internal monologue, he will act on it. That was made very clear in Eragon, when he executed a defeated slaver rather than run that action plan by Eragon first.
The long and short of it is, Paolini once again overplayed his hand in his desperation to deliver his shallow arguments. In this passage, as well as the entire portrayal of the Dreamers as a whole, he set up the audience to draw conclusions based upon the actions of the characters within the context of the world. He should have left it there. It would have worked if he’d left it there. However, that would require a measure of subtlety. It’s a skill he lacks.
FAMILIAR PLACES AND FACES
On November 8th, we return to Alagaësia by … returning to Alagaësia.
Worldbuilding is the strongest aspect of this book. Paolini still cares about this world, and even as he brings in new elements, he appears to have done his best to ensure that they don’t undermine the previous worldbuilding. It’s not perfect, but on the whole, I feel like the problems with the worldbuilding have more to do with how it interacts with the narrative, rather than with the worldbuilding in and of itself.
We will also take this opportunity to explore character. This is where problems start to arise. Murtagh and Thorn are character who are easy to empathize with and follow on their journeys, and none of the secondary and tertiary they encounter are inherently broken from a writing perspective. However, it’s in the characters that Paolini exhibits an unwillingness to step outside of his comfort zone, one that ultimately contributes to the fundamental issues with the plot. Murtagh turns into discount Eragon whenever a challenge arises, which makes his successes feel less fulfilling. What’s more, Paolini’s inability or unwillingness to empathize with religious people results in religious characters who are mere stereotypes, and judging by how he botches the plot, it doesn’t seem like he even understands the stereotypes he’s working with.
It’s coming your way in two weeks. I hope to see you all then. Have a good week.
